About Us
Welcome to the Home for Progressive Los Angeles. No matter how you connected with Liberty Hill: You are part of a community. You are part of a solution. You are part of a movement for change.
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Our Mission
Liberty Hill Foundation is a laboratory for social change philanthropy. We leverage the power of community organizers, donor activists, and allies to advance social justice through strategic investment in grants, leadership training, and campaigns.
Our Vision
Liberty Hill envisions a society in which all people have a powerful voice, including those currently shut out of our democracy, people cut off from opportunities because they are poor, because of their skin color, because of their gender or sexual orientation, because of where they live, or where they were born.
We will not rest until society provides justice and equality for all.
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Liberty Hill is a laboratory for social change philanthropy
Who We Are
At Liberty Hill our work is focused on Los Angeles County, because we understand that what happens in L.A. often influences the nation.
As a public foundation, we provide critical support for social justice campaigns, and as a nonprofit, we lead research and policy initiatives designed to drive systemic change. Our training institute strengthens and connects community leaders and our role as a convener allows us to bring unusual allies together across our region to affect change.
Liberty Hill is the Home for Progressive Los Angeles
Building An Ecosystem
Liberty Hill is an accelerator of community organizing in Los Angeles.
We are uniquely positioned to bring together individual donors and diverse institutional partners to leverage funding for grassroots community organizing in Los Angeles.
Currently, we facilitate and direct funding to the grassroots from three sources:
An Agenda for a Just Future
Through our recently launched Agenda for a Just Future, we have focused our attention on three of our region’s most pressing social issues.
Ending youth incarceration as we know it
More young people are incarcerated or under law enforcement supervision in L.A. County than in any other jurisdiction in the nation.
Fighting to put a roof over every head
Los Angeles has the nation's largest unsheltered homeless population.
Eliminate toxic neighborhood oil drilling
Los Angeles is the largest urban oil field in America.
Our History
Over the past four decades, organizing and advocacy powered by Liberty Hill has changed national policies, launched social change movements, transformed neighborhoods, and nurtured hundreds of community leaders who respond to the experience of injustice by fighting for their rights.
Learn more about the evolution of Liberty Hill in the timeline below.
L.A.'s Social Justice Epicenter Since 1976
It Started with a Picnic
In 1975, four young people of privilege met for a picnic in Topanga Canyon to discuss better ways to donate to progressive causes. That conversation planted the seeds of a bold philanthropic vision, and in 1976, Sarah Pillsbury, Larry Janss, Win McCormack and Anne Mendel launched a new public foundation.
A Vision Takes Shape
By the mid-1980s, Liberty Hill had formed an infrastructure for reaching out and listening to grassroots leaders. The focus was on seed funding, and the community funding board members were adept at identifying groups that would turn out to be effective in the long run.
The Movement Grows
As Liberty Hill grew through the still turbulent late '90s and into the new millennium, we continued to concentrate on Southern California grassroots organizing and entered a period of movement building.
A Time of Change & Growth
Liberty Hill's fourth decade was a time of change and began with the blossoming of the immigrants' rights movement in 2006 when millions demonstrated on May Day and beyond. Environmental justice issues blew up as air pollution, urban oil drilling and toxic emissions affected the health and safety of thousands of residents.