Advancing Economic Opportunity and Building Community Resilience

We make grants and investments and build partnerships to advance an economy that works better for everyone. Our work is integrated across our two programs, the Phoenix Fund and the Quality Jobs Fund, in order to develop and scale broad community-led solutions.

The Phoenix Fund

Founded in 1996, the Phoenix Fund is a philanthropic collaborative of the New World Foundation dedicated to building worker and community power from the ground up. From its inception, the Fund has focused on supporting a new generation of organizers and leaders rooted in frontline communities, investing in organizing strategies that expand dignity, rights, and opportunity for working people. The Phoenix Fund was created to respond to changing economic conditions and continues to evolve alongside the shifting realities of work, power, and communities.

Building on the Foundation’s long history of advancing worker and community power, the Phoenix Fund invests in frontline organizations, labor unions, worker centers, and cross-sector coalitions working toward equitable economic development and fair-wage jobs. Our grantmaking prioritizes long-term organizing, leadership development, and infrastructure-building, particularly in regions with historically low union density.

Today, The Phoenix Fund invests at the intersection of worker power, community power, and the future of work. As economic transformation accelerates through a changing workforce, technological change, large-scale development, and shifting labor markets, we support strategies that ensure workers and communities are not left behind, but instead help shape what comes next.

The Quality Jobs Fund

Since 2017, The Quality Jobs Fund has invested over $100M to support the development of strong and sustainable working class communities.

As one of the largest philanthropic efforts of its kind, the Fund invests in job quality and not just job creation. The Quality Jobs Fund has created thousands of new quality jobs, enhanced and grown hundreds of small businesses, and trained and upskilled thousands of underserved workers. By catalyzing innovative solutions that address systemic drivers of local economic decline, we aim to build prosperous, vibrant, and strong communities.

As an impact-first investment initiative, we focus on a combination of grants, mission-related investments (MRIs) and program-related investments (PRIs), along with other philanthropic products and strategies. We put forth new and field-leading philanthropic investment innovations and tools to combat community deterioration in economically distressed areas nationwide.