Season 2, Episode 6 – Iara Peng
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Iara Peng is the founder and CEO of JustFund. She has worked in nonprofits for over 20 years, building new programs and organizations within the sector and supporting emerging leaders. She launched JustFund.us, an innovative online portal that connects grantmakers directly to organizations to help move resources more quickly while facilitating greater trust, transparency, and accountability across funder communities.
Early in her career, she worked to build the progressive leadership pipeline and started Young People For, a national progressive leadership development program that has identified and trained thousands of leaders across the country. She is also the founder of Prism, an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color, that tells stories from the ground up: to disrupt harmful narratives, and to inform movements for justice, and the Democratizing Philanthropy Project shifting power to chronically underfunded, historically excluded frontline organizations by helping them build long-term, reliable small donor revenue and a dynamic, engaged base.
She holds a Masters Degree from Columbia University, where she studied public administration and nonprofit management. She has served as a strategic consultant and on the boards of dozens of nonprofits and is currently a board member of Donors of Color Network, East Bay Community Foundation, and on the advisory board of Girls Crushing It.
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Within the non-profit industrial complex, communities of color are chronically underfunded. This is a problem today’s guest, Iara Peng is working to solve. Iara is the founder and CEO of JustFund, an online portal democratizing philanthropy by connecting grantmakers directly to organizations.
In this fascinating episode, we learn about Iara’s personal relationship with concepts of democracy, why she drove the original Declaration of Independence from Vermont to New York, why philanthropy is inherently exclusionary, her visionary solution to making grantmaking more accessible, and more.
Ever wondered what Donor Advised Funds are or why philanthropy lacks accountability? This episode is rich with information the average person might not know about the philanthropic world and how we can build a more equitable system.
