Paula Green Legacy Fund

In honor of the pioneering and inspiring work of our founder, the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding launched the Paula Green Legacy Fund in 2022. The fund is designed to honor and carry on Paula’s legacy by providing support directly to our local peacebuilding partner organizations—both for short-term, urgent needs, and for longer term capacity development.

Among grassroots peacebuilding organizations, small amounts of funding can make an enormous difference. We look forward to continuing to work and learn together with our partners to ensure this fund has the greatest strategic impact.

This fund is a special initiative, separate from the Annual Fund that supports our core operations across all program areas. 

The Paula Green Legacy Fund gives us the flexibility to support many more strategic, community-based peacebuilding responses—arising from our partnerships in more than 30 countries over the past 29 years. We hope it will also allow us to provide bridge funding to grassroots initiatives after or between grant-funded projects, to sustain local peacebuilding capacity.

Please note: this is a limited fund that makes small grants by invitation only.

Our very first grants from the fund in 2023 supported these three longstanding Karuna partners during these times of economic hardship worldwide:

• The Center for Peacebuilding (CIM)—which works in areas still deeply impacted by the Bosnian War to rebuild trust and foster reconciliation across ethnic and religious divides, through activities including dialogue, counseling, interfaith collaboration, youth peace camps, and skill-building in conflict resolution.
• Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC)—which creates psychological supports for people and communities, including survivors, former perpetrators, bystanders, and returnees of the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, to heal their traumatic conflicts and rebuild their peaceful lives.
• Sarvodaya Shanthi Sena—meaning Peace Brigades—is the youth wing of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement. It is country-wide youth force consisting of over 120,000 youth volunteers dedicated to peacebuilding and community development, through some 9,800 Youth Circles around the country. This grant supports interfaith peacebuilding training for youth religious leaders within interfaith councils that were part of our earlier joint project to foster inter-ethnic and inter-religious reconciliation in the aftermath of civil war.

Please visit their websites to learn more about these organizations’ innovative and vitally important contributions to peace!