The Fund for Belonging

The Community Foundation has long recognized that immigrant communities are central to the vitality and resilience of the region. Yet persistent systemic barriers—exacerbated by volatile political environments, public health crises, and climate-driven disasters—continue to threaten the wellbeing of many immigrants in Sonoma County.

CFSC’s Fund for Belonging aims to respond to these intersecting challenges by providing support for immigrant communities through targeted grantmaking, strategic collaboration, and responsive civic leadership. Our vision for the Fund for Belonging is to create an inclusive Sonoma County that welcomes immigrants and supports the conditions for them to thrive. By investing in the Fund for Belonging, we invest in the very fabric of our community.

We invite you to join us in building this powerful coalition. By pooling our resources and forging private-public partnerships through the Fund for Belonging, we can create a lasting impact and ensure that all immigrants have access to justice, opportunity, and a pathway to the American Dream, even in the face of unprecedented challenges. 

Many organizations are working tirelessly with and for local immigrant communities to provide critical services and community-building efforts that promote safety, stability, and empowerment. To strengthen this work, CFSC is opening the Fund for Belonging’s first round of grants. Read more about this program below. 

2025 Grant Program Overview

The 2025 Fund for Belonging grant program brings together aligned funds at CFSC to address the results of our 2025 community engagement process. Contingent on additional resources, we aim for the Fund for Belonging to remain responsive and collaborative as we grow to encompass new areas of focus and invest in even deeper community leadership in 2026 and beyond.

The experience and knowledge of our many partners informs our ability to fund complex systems where added resources can be most meaningful. To ensure this coordinated work is fully informed by local voice and national expertise, CFSC engaged a team of experts in the immigration philanthropy space to facilitate an Opportunity Assessment. Through in-depth conversations with 80 local and regional stakeholders, including community members closest to the issues and nonprofit, government, and funding leaders, we collaboratively identified the current priorities for the Fund for Belonging.

Those engaged through the Opportunity Assessment highlighted that heightened threats of deportation and racial profiling have affected their feelings of safety and, consequently, their health and well-being. These threats create fear of attending work or school and even seeking medical care or going to the grocery store. They have deepened a sense of isolation and disconnection from other members of the community. This fear is compounded by the lack of a reliable source of information on ever-shifting legal and policy changes. It has also increased economic uncertainty, with challenges to accessing work that is stable and safe. In addition, language barriers (i.e. Spanish, indigenous languages, Haitian Creole, and Asian languages), population-specific intersections (i.e. LGBTQIA+, older adults, and people with disabilities), and location-specific needs (i.e. more rural areas) present cross-cutting challenges. 

In this dynamic and complex environment, those closest to the issues identified the current funding priorities for the Fund for Belonging to support not only the direct needs of immigrant communities but also to bolster the systems and infrastructure that affect their daily lives:

1. Legal & Policy Information: To create and maintain a centralized source of accurate, accessible, timely, culturally sensitive, and easily understood updates related to legal and policy information that will be widely disseminated across Sonoma County through trusted messenger organizations.
2. Trusted Messenger Network: To disseminate accurate, accessible, timely, culturally sensitive, and easily understood information related to rapidly evolving laws and policies in each region of Sonoma County.
3. Income Generation: To support immigrant employment security, job training, and transition into high-growth sectors as well as entrepreneurship and small business development.
4. Safe Spaces & Wellbeing: To invest in safe, welcoming spaces of belonging where immigrants can access culturally appropriate mental health services, connect with one another, and strengthen community power.

How to Partner

The grant program associated with this fund is currently in development and will be released in August 2025. If you would like to share information about an aligned project or program or provide feedback on grant program development, please contact:

To learn more about the fund and explore ways to give, please contact: