Grants

SK2’s grants program is primarily focused on supporting women’s entrepreneurship initiatives, with a secondary emphasis on sustainable agriculture and select conservation-related initiatives.

Women’s Entrepreneurship: Increasing the number, skills, rights, and resources of grassroots women entrepreneurs including but not limited to:

  • Grassroots recruitment of & training for women in basic entrepreneurship
  • Mentorship and technical assistance for women who are already small business entrepreneurs
  • Nonprofit finance funds increasing flows of affordable investment capital to women entrepreneurs
  • Community-driven, women-led initiatives enhancing the status, rights, and resources of women
  • Community-driven, women-led initiatives enhancing environmental sustainability

Gender inequality is an unfortunate reality worldwide. Reducing it is a core objective of all SK2 initiatives.  Our grants program complements these existing efforts by moving beyond only providing investment capital to supporting a wider range of efforts enhancing the skills, rights, and resources of women entrepreneurs at the grassroots level.

Sustainable Agriculture: We support regenerative and sustainable agriculture practices that prioritize an intentional balance between the ecological, economic, and social health of a community.

We prioritize regenerative and sustainable agriculture projects that:

  • Focus on small holder farms, women-led enterprise, and leadership of indigenous peoples and people of color.
  • Integrate opportunities for knowledge and skill sharing, technical assistance, mentorship, and education.
  • Support and improve ecosystem biodiversity and resilience.
  • Ensure production systems that are ecologically, economically and socially sound, throughout the supply chain.
  • Reduce off-farm inputs and improve land, soil, and water quality.
  • Strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change.
  • Increase secure and equal access to land and other resources.

Unlike conventional and industrialized agriculture, we support a bottom-up approach to ecological intention and practice, relying on the co-creation of knowledge and the combination of science with traditional, practical, and ecological knowledge of local producers. We have found that fostering autonomy and adaptive capacity on a local scale empowers producers and communities to better integrate agricultural practices that support ecological, social, and economic health and resilience.

Currently we are unable to accept unsolicited grant proposals, although this could change in the future as our grant program develops. Other criteria for our grants program includes:

  • Geographic focus is on our international ThriiveCapital communities, but we also consider domestic initiatives here in the U.S.
  • Focus is on the grassroots / micro / small business levels.
  • We also consider community-driven and women-led initiatives that foster a more conducive environment for women’s entrepreneurship.
  • Whenever possible, we focus on direct support of in-country groups rather than working through iNGO intermediaries.
  • We do not accept unsolicited requests, instead seeking out highly effective groups and providing them with unrestricted support. 
  • We avoid traditional foundation red tape and require only one very simple proposal and an equally simple annual impact report.