For more than three decades, Nathan Cummings Foundation (NCF) invested in the non-profit social change ecosystem in Israel, supporting women’s leadership, a nascent environmental sector, shared society efforts, peace-building organizations, and innovative civic engagement models that address inequities and build capacity for a better future.
In 2024, Nathan Cummings Foundation’s Board of Trustees made a commitment to expand our work in Israel beyond the country’s 1967 borders to include the West Bank and Gaza and to reframe it from an Israel portfolio to an Israel-Palestine portfolio. This was a recognition that our north star of racial, economic, and environmental justice couldn’t stop at a line on a map, and that our values and the moment in history required us to engage more directly in funding Palestinian leaders, communities, and solutions.
Since then, we have developed several partnerships that show this commitment in action.
The Palestine Impact Initiative Fund, a first-of-its-kind pooled vehicle channeling philanthropic capital to small and medium enterprises in the West Bank. At a moment when West Bank GDP has contracted by nearly 19%, and unemployment has reached 35%, there is an urgent need, and almost no infrastructure, to direct impact capital toward Palestinian economic resilience. PII, led by a Ramallah-based team through the Middle East Investment Initiative, is working to build that infrastructure.
Ra’a: A Palestinian Filmmakers Incubator. Ra’a supports Palestinian filmmakers and screenwriters within Israel, providing education, mentorship, and production support at the career junctures where systemic barriers most often push promising creators out of the field. This is an investment in Palestinian cultural leadership and in who gets to tell their own story.
Zimam, which is building a platform for solutions-oriented Palestinian leadership and civic organizing in the West Bank, building an ecosystem of policy, media, and organizing that can build an independent civil society infrastructure for Palestinian progressives. Zimam is the fastest-growing youth movement in Palestine, bringing together thousands of Palestinians from across the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Working across nine governorates, it empowers young people to become decision-makers in their communities, fostering democratic attitudes and transforming public thinking toward a more pluralistic society.
COMET-ME, which develops off-grid solar and water systems for Palestinian communities. COMET-ME provides renewable energy, clean water, broadband internet, and security systems to some of the most contested and under-resourced Palestinian communities in the West Bank, advancing environmental justice where it is needed most.
We are aiming to finalize within the next few weeks a program-related investment to finance Palestinian and Arab-owned small businesses inside Israel.
COMET-ME builds on NCF’s longer-standing commitments in the region, including our multi-decade relationship with the New Israel Fund and its work inside Israel, and grants to Standing Together and A Land for All, two of the most compelling voices for a shared, democratic future. We are also excited to be partnering with the regional environmental justice organization EcoPeace, which is co-led by Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli leaders, as it conducts feasibility studies for regional energy and transportation development that would tie the Middle East together economically. We are immensely proud of the work we support inside Israel and across the region.
We expect to continue adding voices from Palestine and Palestinian civil society to our partner list over the coming year and beyond. This region asks a great deal of everyone who engages with it seriously. We are trying to do something that can feel impossible: to pursue justice without leaving anyone behind. We think that’s exactly why foundations with a clear values commitment have a role to play; not to impose answers, but to provide resources to the people closest to the work, and to keep showing up even when the way forward isn’t obvious.
We are committed to learning, engaging, and showing up, not because the work is easy or the path is clear, but because we believe that staying at the table, learning, building relationships, and deploying capital toward justice, is itself an act of values. As NCF President and CEO, Rey Ramsey, has written, NCF has “long partnered with institutions and individuals on a justice journey to improve unfair systems,” and our values “are not seasonally adjusted. They endure.” This portfolio is that justice journey in action.
Please learn more at: nathancummings.org/focus-area/israel-palestine
