About the St. Joseph Fund
The St. Joseph Fund (SJF) is a mission-driven grantmaking organization rooted in love. We collaborate with values-driven partners to build healing-centered capacity that advances community power building, equity, and systems change.
Our mission is to express Christ’s healing ministry through love, equity, and compassion. We work closely with our partners across Alaska, California, Montana, Oregon, and Washington to center healing and justice and build positive community impact together. From deepening community relationships to stewarding long-term impact, healing is a thread through all of our work.
Our partnerships are tailored to provide each group we work with capacity-building support specific to their needs. Together, we build relationships and foster ongoing dialogue that extends beyond a grant term. In each partnership, we encourage staff accessibility to generate ideas and innovations.
Our Core Pillars
Every initiative at SJF is evaluated by our core pillars, allowing us to channel our resources where love can truly make a difference:
These tenets are the pillars of our initiatives. By centering the experiences and wisdom of those most affected by injustice, SJF ensures its efforts are not only well-intentioned but also genuinely impactful. SJF’s work is a testament to the transformative power of love in action.
Our work centers on capacity building. By that, we mean infrastructure development, internal assessments, research, training, cohort learning, policy and procedure reviews, and more, encompassing the building blocks of organizational power to deliver direct community and social impact.
“SJF invests in long-term partnerships rooted in love.”
We partner with community members to go the distance with them toward wholeness. We don’t just fund initiatives – we remain partners long after the grant funds have been expended. Our leaders at SJF and those at our nonprofit partners each have lived experience and understand the needs of underserved communities.
We are all motivated by compassion, kindness, and the desire to benefit others, and we believe this leads to more positive outcomes and fosters a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.
Above all, we believe in the power of the community.
We celebrate and center community expertise and experience. We listen to their wisdom. We understand their needs. And we invest in their opportunities.
SJF’s History
Rooted in love, the St. Joseph Fund (SJF) has a deeply ingrained commitment to care for our dear neighbors without distinction, especially those furthest from justice. We work to create communities that are more whole, more healed, and more able to flourish, hope, love, and grow.
SJF was built on the legacy of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, who held similar beliefs. The Sisters, who established the Fund in 1986, knew that everyone must be healthy for a society to thrive.
The hope and vision for SJF’s future are to remain faithful to that original ethos, even as the needs of our communities change and priorities shift. Motivated by compassion, kindness, and the desire to benefit others, our beliefs tie directly back to the original vision of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange.
