Each grant area has its own decision-making committee comprised of Natan members. Natan members review all of the Letters of Inquiry and the Full Proposals, meet with the applicants at the end of the year, and make grant recommendations to Natan's Board of Trustees. The Board reviews all of the committees' grant recommendations at the end of each grant cycle.

You can find an updated list of Natan members on our Our Community page. Membership on the committees often changes year to year, and you will meet the members at the presentation nights.

We encourage you to carefully review our guidelines before applying, which can be found in each grant area's Request for Proposals. If you are interested in discussing your eligibility with our staff, feel free to be in touch with info@natan.org to discuss the likelihood of receiving a grant. Please keep in mind that Natan has a very small staff and receives hundreds of inquiries and grant applications each year. We urge you to spend time carefully reviewing the materials on our website, since it is not always possible for staff to have conversations with every potential applicant.

Natan is primarily interested in supporting emerging organizations (including startups) that have not yet gained traction with major donors and that are innovative in their approach to Natan's funding areas. All first time grantees must have an annual operating budget of less than US$1.5 million.

Natan will not consider applications from projects that are part of organizations with budgets greater than $1.5 million, no matter how independent the project is.

*Please note that this does not apply to 2022-23 Natan Confronting Poverty grants.

Natan is a risk-tolerant funder, willing to support entirely new ideas and new leaders for the Jewish community. Natan members have always had a preference for startups and social entrepreneurs acting outside of existing Jewish structures, believing that these organizations and people have a strong capacity to create truly new access points to Jewish life and to bring truly new people into the Jewish world. Of course, innovation can happen anywhere, and there are many benefits to innovating within existing structures. However, Natan is focused on providing support to fledgling organizations that - at least when they first come into Natan's funding portfolio - have few other means of support.

On most of its grant committees, Natan can only support organizations with tax-exempt status in their home country or organizations/projects with tax-exempt fiscal sponsors.

Fiscal sponsorship is when a tax-exempt organization formally agrees to act as the fiduciary agent of a project that does not have tax-exempt status. Typically, charitable donations are made to the fiscal sponsor and are then ear-marked for the sponsee. (Natan, for example, is fiscally sponsored by FJC.) If you are starting out with a new project, we recommend working with a fiscal sponsor in order to avoid the legal and administrative work involved with creating your own tax-exempt organization. For more information on Fiscal Sponsorship, visit Candid Learning. If you would like a list of fiscal sponsors that have worked with Natan grantees, contact info@natan.org.

Due to our multi-stage process and the many individuals involved in our decision-making process, we can only accept Letters of Inquiry for a short period of time each year. Let us know if you're interested in applying for a grant in our next cycle by submitting an interest form on the apply page or by emailing info@natan.org and we'll alert you when the Requests for Proposals go out.

Natan has a very small staff and receives hundreds of inquiries and applications each year. We do try to offer feedback to applicants after decisions are made at each step of the process, but it sometimes takes a while to get through the whole list. Let us know at info@natan.org if you're interested in feedback, and we'll be in touch as soon as we can.