What We Offer - Kindle Project

At Kindle Project, what we offer extends beyond grantmaking and into the relationships we cultivate with the projects and people we support. We engage with each part of our growing community in special ways. We tailor our offerings based on the unique needs, feedback, and input of our grantees, steering committee members, staff, and donors. To read more about how we work with our donors click here.

Funding

We direct our funding and support to people and projects taking meaningful risks and approaching their work with creativity, innovation, resiliency, collaboration, humor, and courage.

We promote integrated grant-making that breaks through silos and single-issue areas at critical moments of impact and transformation. We cross-pollinate across issue areas, movements and fields. We do this by approaching our grantmaking in some of the following ways:

Multi-year Commitments: We understand that big ideas can take longer than one grant cycle to gain traction. For this reason, Kindle Project invests in the long-term success and relationship with our grantees in order to best support the growth and sustainability of their work.

General Operating Support: Unlike most grant-giving organizations that don’t believe in providing general operating support, Kindle Project believes this is one of the most important investments in our grantees that we can make. Our grants for general operating support allow our grantees to focus on the success of their projects.

Seed Funding: We believe that the most critical stage for any start-up or emerging venture is in the very early stages, when funding is oftentimes most difficult to secure. We pride ourselves on providing critical seed funding to projects at the times when our funding makes the difference between success and failure.

Click here to read about all of our grantmaking programs.

Grantee Support

Bold organizations and projects often need much more than money. Many other resources, skills and types of assistance are necessary to translate ideas into action. Kindle Project believes in providing significant support to grantees that goes beyond our financial commitments.

Through ongoing communication with grantees, we discover and offer other opportunities to support their success, including:

Developing strategies and fundraising ideas
Facilitating visioning and brainstorming
Offering feedback on budgets and proposal development
Networking and relationship building in their fields
Assisting with communication and social media strategies

Communication and Connection Hubs

Creating connections among our community of grantees and projects is often the most important work we do. When people working for change are aware of emerging fields and complementary efforts, this can have dramatic impacts on development and success.

Storytelling and story sharing are a core part of our programming. The narrative threads that connect us to our grantees and our grantees to each other are some of the most powerful resources to effect change. That’s why Kindle Project offers our Nexus page, website and social media where people can meet, collaborate and learn about other opportunities for funding — plus gain valuable support that accelerates their results and increases their impact.

We invite you to experience our grantees’ stories and share your own. Connect with us here by reading these diverse and empowering stories, catching up with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or contacting us about getting involved.

Project Discovery

Experts at uncovering potent and compelling projects, we consult with other funders, donors, and organizations who are interested in creative approaches to finding hidden treasures.

Kindle Project has honed a variety of approaches to discovering and selecting people and projects to fund. Because we value reciprocal relationships with our partners and grantees in the field, we often turn to them for nominations for possible grantees. This process has not only helped to address the power structure innate in funder/grantee dynamics, but it has also proven to be a successful strategy in helping us find offbeat, underrepresented, cutting-edge projects that would otherwise go unnoticed.