Announcing Kingston Common Futures

KINGSTON COMMON FUTURES is a new Just Transition community fund offering grants directly to the Kingston community, for the Kingston community, decided by the Kingston community.  

Kingston Common Futures’ purpose is to challenge historic imbalances of power and systems of oppression while working towards an inclusive and collaborative ecosystem empowered to serve the common good.

Kingston Common Futures was created and is co-led by community members, and will allocate a total of $150,000 in grant funding in 2025, its first year. Grants will range from $5,000-$50,000 for projects building the common good in Kingston. The funding process is designed to be highly transparent and supportive to applicants. It also includes a community-led decision-making process. The goal is to fund a diverse group of projects serving community needs, while inspiring ways of managing shared resources that are regenerative and collaborative. 

A major inspiration for the approach of the fund comes out of reclaiming the idea of “the commons.” Amanda Cassiday, Director of Strategy and Development, explains that “the practice of people coming together to manage and share collective resources autonomously–food, water, land, tools, skills and knowledge–has existed all over the world and is as old as our human history. We understand “the commons” to be a self-organized social system that stewards resources, and a cultural system that honors the values and identity of the stewarding community. We want to put more of that into action here in Kingston.”

Kingston Common Futures aims to seed opportunities for different versions of the common good to exist and serve different communities, especially within communities that have not had as much access to resources historically. An example of a project that most people can recognize as a common good is a community garden: a group of people establish agreements to build and tend a garden; they pool resources, work, and knowledge; and then they are able to share the food it generates. As this example shows, there are also many other ripple effects to projects like these, including building relationships with neighbors, creating chances to pass down knowledge, and working to make a place of connection and beauty.  

In addition to offering grant funding, Kingston Common Futures is growing a network of resources and relationships to support applicants and projects. Through fostering a culture of mutual support, the fund seeks to create a collaborative environment. The hope is that no matter how someone participates or whether they receive funding, everyone who interacts with the fund gains a valuable connection or relationship.

“As we worked to decide what kind of funding to offer and how folks could apply, we kept returning to one strong intention: whether or not a project is funded, we want every applicant to benefit,” explains Clay Moodey, Director of Process and Learning. “As author Heather McGhee points out, the idea “if someone else is getting something, I must be losing something” has done so much harm to our society. We are working to model a different way, where it is not a zero-sum game, where the process of applying to this fund connects you to a profound network of mutual support and connection.”– Clay Moodey, Director of Process and Learning 

KCF has been hosting events and engaging in a robust community engagement process to get the word out, with a Street Team that is fanning out into different communities to encourage first-time applicants to funding of any kind. Mentors and staff are standing by to support applicants and help community groups form an idea into an application. The core value of collaboration is showing up throughout this process.

Reflecting on her commitment to this outreach, KCF team member Angélica Medaglia shares, “I am eager to explore how interdependence, when applied in actionable ways, can reveal more evidently the reciprocal web that already exists across the many spheres of our lives. Just like in nature, beings depend on one another to thrive—if this value were more ingrained in society, rather than individualism, greater respect, appreciation, and right action would naturally inform our behavior and ambitions.”

Another important feature of Kingston Common Futures is that the staff are not the fund’s decision makers. Rather, they are facilitating a process that recruits volunteers across the community to read and score applications based on a publicly available scorecard inspired by the fund’s mission and values. The finalists will then be evaluated by a volunteer jury of 10-12 community members who will make the final funding decisions.

WHO CAN APPLY?

Individuals, groups, businesses, and organizations with projects that serve the Kingston community and align with the mission of the fund are eligible to apply. Funding will be distributed in early fall 2025. The application portal opened on March 20th, with a first deadline to submit a letter of intent by May 1st.

A CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS:

As a community-driven fund, Kingston Common Futures is seeking involvement from the community in several ways, as mentors, application reviewers or “readers” and serving as a jury member on the Decision Circle. KCF is recruiting for all these roles currently, and more information can be found on the KCF website.

The Origin of Kingston Common Futures:

Kingston Common Futures evolved out of a community fund design process facilitated by Good Work Institute. Through a 9-month learning journey and collaborative design process, 18 Kingston residents worked together to create the mission, structure, and  implementation plan for a new community-led fund. To learn more about this process, check out our blog post A Heart-Led Community Fund is Coming to Town.

Kingston Common Futures is fiscally sponsored and incubated by Good Work Institute. 

This project is generously supported by NoVo in Kingston, a branch of the NoVo Foundation.

Leadership:

Kingston Common Futures is co-led by Amanda Cassiday and Clay Moodey, who stepped into leadership roles in September 2025, hired out of the original community fund design cohort. Their work is in service to the community, directing and facilitating the community-engaged, transparent, and democratic funding process.  

Amanda Cassiday, Director of Strategy & Development, comes to Kingston Common Futures as a regenerative business consultant and the co-founder of Engather, a local movement and digital platform to revive a thriving gift economy and strengthen the connective tissue of care that underpins community.

Clay Moodey, Director of Process & Learning, joins Kingston Common Futures with skills in collaborative process and experimentation developed as a theater artist whose work is rooted in care and reorienting relationships to power and value.

In January 2025, Angélica Medaglia joined the team to lead outreach and communication for the fund. Angélica brings deep community connections and relationship-centered approaches through her experience as a journalist, classical texts translator, and producer for a wide range of immigrant communities, most recently with the Spanish-speaking audiences with Radio Kingston.

Critical to rolling out a community-driven fund is ensuring the community is not only informed, but invited into the fund, recognizing that this fund is designed for their active input and engagement. From January through April 2025, Kingston Common Futures activated an Outreach Street Team responsible for grassroots connection, support, and information-sharing with a wide range of communities throughout Kingston. An exceptionally talented and community-driven team, they have played a pivotal role in engaging with BIPOC, LGBTQ+ communities, Spanish-speaking and immigrant communities, youth, long-time residents, artist communities, food security, environmental and agricultural communities. The Street Team includes Jasmine Wood, Ravin Williams, Simon Moore, Elba Becker, Sarah Carlson, and Daniel Woodham.

To learn more about Kingston Common Futures, please visit www.kingstoncommonfutures.org