A new $1 million matching fund for social justice, “Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue”, was announced at the Jewish Funders Network Conference by the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

The fund, a project of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Jewish Funders Network, the Morton K. and Jane Blaustein Foundation, the Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation and other foundation partners, will target organizations that identify as Jewish or work with the Jewish community that support efforts to engage on important areas of social change.

The fund seeks to support the kind of Jewish social justice work that has helped define generations of social change – from the Jewish legal community’s partnership with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP in the 1950s that helped end segregation, to the student-led movement to free Soviet Jewry in the 1960s, to efforts by Jewish feminists in the 1970s to end restrictions on opportunity based on gender, to recent efforts by members of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable to work for immigration reform.

To be eligible for the fund, organizations must be 501(c)(3) organizations operating in the United States and self-articulate as a Jewish initiative and/or embody Jewish values including Jewish organizations launching social justice initiatives, Jewish social justice groups conducting their existing programs and secular groups engaging the Jewish community. Ideal projects would engage people across lines of difference such as race and faith and seek to make lasting systemic and cultural change. Applications will begin to be accepted in early Fall 2013.