The Youth Fund supports youth activists who want to change and challenge existing policies and/or organized structures that prevent their communities from achieving equality.
Donor Name: Crossroads Fund
State: Illinois and Indiana
City: Selected Cities
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 09/16/2025
Size of the Grant: $10,000 to $100,000
Grant Duration: Grant Duration Not Mentioned
Details:
The Youth Fund (YF) provides resources to young people working on social justice issues in their communities.
- Grant amounts are between $5,000 to $15,000 depending on the size of the project and what it will cover.
- Projects may cover many areas ranging from community, education and schools, health, environment, incarceration, media, racism, discrimination, voting, etc.
Examples of Projects
- Community: youth working to find solutions to overall issues of equality like access to education, healthcare, jobs and political power: working on alternatives to detention and incarceration.
- Education and schools: youth organizing for: restorative justice programs in schools; representation on school boards; alternatives to military recruitment on campus; or programs that address sexual harassment, homophobia, gender, or ability stereotypes/oppression.
- Health: youth organizing to expand reproductive health and comprehensive sex education.
- Environment: youth organizing around: lead clean up in their community; environmental pollution; or access to cleaner and better transit.
- Violence: youth working on: alternatives to the criminal justice system; peer to peer intervention; pursuit of strategies to reduce police harassment of youth; strategies to improve public safety in your neighborhood.
- Media: youth holding corporate media accountable by demanding that the public airwaves promote justice and peace rather than hate, violence and war.
Eligibility Criteria
- Open to organizations, groups, and coalitions.
- Organizations with budgets less than $1,000,000.
- Meets Crossroads Fund’s Funding Criteria
- Working for Social Change: Crossroads Fund supports organizations working to examine and challenge the underlying causes of injustice affecting their communities. They seek to change the conditions, institutions, and policies that create and maintain inequality and oppression.
- Cross-Issue Organizing: Our grantees work with an understanding of the connectedness among the various people and issues that make up the whole community.
- Grassroots Leadership: We support groups that involve the people who are directly affected by an issue at all levels of the organization – in planning, organizing and leading, and working to continue building leadership within the grassroots community.
- Solid Plan: We fund groups whose work is driven by the following
- a clear purpose with well-planned goals, objectives, activities and a tool to measure outcomes and impac
- a timeline and budget that reflects the proposed objectives and activitie
- a realistic fundraising plan.
- Work in the Chicago Metropolitan Area: Crossroads Fund supports organizations rooted in communities in the Chicago metropolitan area. Counties include: Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake and Will, along with Lake County, Indiana.
- Youth projects to be in the Chicago metropolitan area (City of Chicago and Suburbs) and Northwestern Indiana, which define as the area between the state border and Gary, IN.
- The projects to be connected to a nonprofit organization with a 501(c)(3) status, fiscal sponsor or have an organizational bank account. They cannot fund individuals.
- The project to be campaigns, ongoing or just getting started, with the hope that it will continue.
For more information, visit Crossroads Fund.
