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About the Ploughshares Fund
Ploughshares Fund enables the smartest people with the best ideas for building a safer, more peaceful world to implement their ideas and achieve results. A public grantmaking foundation, Ploughshares Fund pools contributions from individuals, families and foundations and directs those funds to initiatives aimed at preventing the spread and use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and other weapons of war, and preventing conflicts that could lead to the use of weapons of mass destruction.
History
In the twenty-five years since the Ploughshares Fund was founded, we have made grants totaling over $50 million to become the largest grantmaking foundation in the U.S. focusing exclusively on peace and security issues. Ploughshares Fund was founded in 1982 by San Francisco philanthropist and activist Sally Lilienthal. Her ability to draw people in and motivate them to act fueled the organization's early growth. Naila Bolus joined Ploughshares in 1997 as executive director and has overseen the expansion of the Fund's grantmaking capacity and its role as a convenor of the peace and security community as a whole. Active as president of the Board of Directors until the end, Sally Lilienthal died in 2006, just as Ploughshares prepared to commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary.
How We Work
As a so-called “venture funder” we specialize in giving start-up funding to promising new endeavors, and then helping to leverage more substantial support from other sources. So doing, the Ploughshares Fund has proven time and again that modest amounts of money, given to the right people at the right time, can yield profound results. Among the people and initiatives that have been sustained with early funding from the Ploughshares Fund are:
History
In the twenty-five years since the Ploughshares Fund was founded, we have made grants totaling over $50 million to become the largest grantmaking foundation in the U.S. focusing exclusively on peace and security issues. Ploughshares Fund was founded in 1982 by San Francisco philanthropist and activist Sally Lilienthal. Her ability to draw people in and motivate them to act fueled the organization's early growth. Naila Bolus joined Ploughshares in 1997 as executive director and has overseen the expansion of the Fund's grantmaking capacity and its role as a convenor of the peace and security community as a whole. Active as president of the Board of Directors until the end, Sally Lilienthal died in 2006, just as Ploughshares prepared to commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary.
How We Work
As a so-called “venture funder” we specialize in giving start-up funding to promising new endeavors, and then helping to leverage more substantial support from other sources. So doing, the Ploughshares Fund has proven time and again that modest amounts of money, given to the right people at the right time, can yield profound results. Among the people and initiatives that have been sustained with early funding from the Ploughshares Fund are:
- The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, whose efforts led to a global treaty to abolish anti-personnel landmines in record time, and the Nobel Peace Prize;
- Entrepreneurial programs to prevent nuclear terrorism by locking down and removing vulnerable nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere;
- Public campaigns to compel governments to oppose the development of a new generation of “usable” nuclear weapons and to take their nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert;
- Programs to reorient Russian nuclear weapons facilities and scientists to productive, economically viable endeavors, including the establishment of non-proliferation centers at former nuclear weapons labs;
- A network of civil society organizations that are monitoring governments’ adherence to the biological weapons treaty, in the absence of any official verification regime;
- Unprecedented collaborations between Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders to address nuclear weapons and other security threats.
Ploughshares Fund is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.