Justice Funders is a US philanthropic network and field-building organisation that emerged in 2009 as the Bay Area Justice Funders Network. It works to change philanthropic practices that concentrate wealth and decision-making power, advocating instead for resources and control to move towards frontline communities. Its Choir Book: A Framework for Social Justice Philanthropy translates these values into practical changes across the grant making cycle, including how funders conduct due diligence.
Conventional due diligence places responsibility on applicants to demonstrate their financial health, organisational capacity, strategic fit and reputation among peers and communities. Justice Funders argues that this apparently neutral process can reproduce unequal access. An organisation’s ability to complete written applications, provide extensive documentation and respond quickly to follow-up requests is shaped by its staffing, language, internet access and familiarity with philanthropic institutions. These factors do not necessarily indicate the quality of its work, but they can determine whether it reaches a funder’s decision-making stage.
Justice Funders distinguishes between transitional and transformational responses. A transitional approach accommodates organisations with limited capacity while retaining the funder’s existing financial and programmatic assessment process. This might make an application more accessible, but the applicant remains responsible for satisfying requirements designed by the funder. The transformational approach goes further: it treats due diligence as the funder’s responsibility. The funder undertakes the work required to understand an organisation. This minimises the demands placed on applicants and recognises funders’ responsibility for managing the power imbalance throughout the process.
Under this model, due diligence becomes a form of solidarity and organisational support rather than an extractive test. Questions about areas that need strengthening are approached as opportunities to build capacity, while conversations with communities and movements help the funder understand the organisation’s relationships and legitimacy. The process also produces learning for the funder: weaknesses identified across multiple applicants may reveal not individual organisational failures, but wider patterns of underinvestment or gaps in the funding field. Applicants that are not taken forward should still receive clear communication and appropriate support rather than being left without an explanation after contributing time and knowledge to the process.
What practitioners can take from this
Make the funder responsible for overcoming barriers to understanding an applicant. If language, writing capacity, internet access or limited staffing prevents a funder from seeing the value of an organisation’s work, Justice Funders’ model treats that as an issue with the assessment process – not a weakness in the organisation being assessed.