Grants for Women of Color — November 2026

Four tiers, status-verified — filter the 103

Every one of the 103 programs below is sorted into a tier by how directly it is aimed at women of color, and stamped with the status we verified on November 3, 2026. Tier 1 names women of color in its eligibility rules. Tier 2 is a women-and-minority program — you are a named priority, not the only audience. Tier 3 is a general women’s program: open to you, not targeted at you. Tier 4 is minority or tribal capital that is not women-specific at all, mostly CDFI lending. Program names link to the GrantCompass page for that program, where the eligibility detail lives.

• Tier 1 — explicitly for women of color: 8 programs, 3 open now.
• Tier 2 — women + minority priority: 17 programs, 4 open now.
• Tier 3 — general women’s programs: 18 programs, 7 open now.
• Tier 4 — minority & tribal capital, not women-specific: 60 programs, 51 open now.

What these applications actually ask

Which of these close next

One of the eighteen closes on November 6, 2026: Sephora Beauty Grant. After that, the Business Freedom Grant has a review round closing November 15, 2026 and a final deadline of December 31, 2026; the Tory Burch Foundation Fellows Program closes November 17, 2026; the Amber Grant for Women closes November 30, 2026; the Freed Fellowship Grant closes November 30, 2026; the HerRise MicroGrant closes November 30, 2026; the Hey Helen Grant closes November 30, 2026; the IFW Startup Accelerator Grant closes November 30, 2026; the YippityDoo Big Idea Grant closes November 30, 2026; the Hiring Our Heroes Small Business Grant closes December 15, 2026; the Outta Excuses Small Business Empowerment Grant closes December 31, 2026; the SecretSoS Small Business Grant closes December 31, 2026; the Her Agenda Breakthrough Grant closes January 19, 2027. The Hustle Grant: Monthly (winner named on the 15th; The Hustle announces each cutoff in its newsletter). Seated Together Small Business Microgrant: Rolling; reviewed in quarterly cycles. Hustler's MicroGrant: Applications open monthly (no published closing date). Awesome Foundation Micro-Grant: Rolling; most chapters choose a project each month. Thiel Fellowship: Rolling: applications are accepted year round. Each link opens that grant’s page with the draft form ready.

What each form asks, shortest application first. The question wording for each grant is on its own page, and a dash means we found no hard cap on the form.

Two things follow from the table. A short form is not an easy one: a 250-character limit leaves room for one or two sentences, so every word has to carry a fact. And four of the eighteen publish point or percentage weights, which differ from funder to funder, so read them before deciding where to spend your words.

GrantCompass drafts all eighteen of these applications from your own answers: four short questions, a free preview with no card, and $9 for the full draft. We use only what you tell us, and you submit it yourself on the funder’s form. Start from the box above, or read how the drafting works.

Tier 1: the 8 programs written specifically for women of color

• digitalundivided BREAKTHROUGH — Grant for Black & Latina Women Founders$5,000 per company · Black & Latina women founders · Open Cohort applications live — Northern California and Nashville (verified Aug 23, 2026) 6 intel fields — locked
• HerRise MicroGrant$1,000 per month · Under-resourced women, including women of color; 51% women-owned · Open Rolling — 11:59pm ET on the last day of every month 6 intel fields — locked
• Hot Bread Kitchen — HBK Incubates Food Business ProgramIn-kind (free program) · Food entrepreneurs — focus on women of color & immigrant women · Open Rolling admissions, free 6 intel fields — locked
• Black Girl Ventures BGV Pitch Program$5,000 + audience crowdfund · Black & Brown women founders · Closed 2026 cohort closed May 15, 2026 6 intel fields — locked
• Tarte Shape Your Future Small Business Awards$10,000–$25,000 · Black women-owned businesses · Between Between intakes — next round not announced 7 intel fields — locked
• PepsiCo Juntos Crecemos Jefa-Owned Business Grant$10,000 (20 winners) · Latina-owned food & beverage businesses · Between Between intakes — next round not announced 6 intel fields — locked
• Fearless Fund Strivers Grant$20,000 (program enjoined) · Black women-owned businesses (program ended) · Ended Permanently closed by the September 2024 settlement — will not reopen 7 intel fields — locked
• SoGal Foundation Black Founder Startup Grant$5,000–$10,000 (historical) · Black women & nonbinary founders · Ended Grant page returns 404; no active SoGal grant programme 6 intel fields — locked

Which dedicated program fits you: Black, Latina, Asian American or Indigenous founders

The table below reads each program’s own eligibility wording and its hard gates. Answer the four questions and each row is marked as a fit, a maybe, or not a fit, with the reason. Nothing you pick leaves this page.

• Black women foundersThe deepest bench: every program above except PepsiCo’s Latina grant admits you, and the Dream Investment Program is built around you in the South. The full Black-owned list is on Black-owned business grants.
• Latina foundersPepsiCo’s Jefa-Owned grant is the one cash grant in this table written for Latinas; digitalundivided’s mission names you too. More on Hispanic and Latino business grants.
• Asian American foundersThe GrantCompass catalog has no national cash grant written only for Asian American women. Sephora’s list names AAPI founders explicitly, and HerRise and Amber admit you.
• Indigenous foundersSephora names Indigenous founders; the larger money is tribal and Native CDFI capital, sorted on Native American business grants.

Not sure which rows apply to you? See which grants you qualify for

Closing in the next 90 days

3 programs on this page have a firm published deadline between today and February 1, 2027, sorted soonest first. Every other open program on this page is rolling, which means there is nothing to race.

Where the money for women of color actually is in 2026

Three distinct pools exist, and they behave differently. Corporate and brand microgrants — Sephora, Glossier, Tarte, Visa, PepsiCo — run once a year, award between $10,000 and $100,000, and attract tens of thousands of applicants. 21 of the 103 programs on this page sit in exactly this state right now: real, funded, and closed until their next annual window. Foundation microgrants — HerRise, Amber, Galaxy, Secretsos — award $1,000 to $2,500 on a monthly or quarterly cycle, which means a founder can enter them twelve or four times a year instead of once. Public and quasi-public capital — CDFIs, SSBCI-funded state programs, tribal loan funds — is by far the largest pool by dollars: 52 of these are lending today, and unlike the grants they do not close.

If your business is built around social justice, the TRANSFORM microgrant screens on values and need rather than revenue.

The 2023–2024 legal challenges reshaped the top of this market rather than the bottom. Large, explicitly race-conditioned grant programs became legally exposed; the Fearless Fund Strivers Grant closed permanently in a September 2024 settlement, and Black Ambition suspended its Prize Competition for 2026. Small foundation microgrants and CDFI lending were untouched. A founder optimising for expected dollars in 2026 should therefore work the repeatable small grants and the lenders, and treat the annual brand prizes as lottery tickets she buys once a year when the window opens.

The rolling monthlies: the only programs you can enter more than once a year

The HerRise MicroGrant issues $1,000 every month to an under-resourced woman-owned small business, including women of color (51% women-owned); applications close at 11:59pm ET on the last day of each month and the winner is announced at HerSuiteSpot’s First Friday mixer. The Amber Grant, run by WomensNet, awards three $15,000 grants every month plus three $75,000 year-end grants drawn from the monthly winners, on the same last-day-of-month cadence. The Women Founders Grant awards $5,000 in posted rounds with a $25 application fee; its October 31, 2026 deadline has passed and no new one is posted. The Secretsos Small Business Grant awards $2,500 each quarter to owners who have been turned down for bank credit, closing on the last day of each quarter — next, December 31, 2026 — for a $15 fee. The Galaxy Grant awards $2,500 and is free to apply to, with a 30-second form; its October 31, 2026 round has closed and the next is not announced.

Treat these as a calendar, not a task list. One evening a month spent refreshing the same three or four applications is a materially better use of time than hunting for new programs, because the population of programs written for women of color is small and slow-moving — 8 in a catalog of 665 US funding programs — while the number of chances to enter the rolling ones is unlimited. Star them in the GrantCompass database and the deadline reminder arrives without you tracking it.

A 12-month application plan for women of color founders

Reuse one core application. HerRise asks for two answers of up to 250 characters; Amber’s form asks for longer written answers. Write the long version once for Amber and cut it down for HerRise, then refresh the numbers each month rather than starting over. Neither program promises a set number of entries before a win, so treat the $240 as a budget you choose, not an investment with a return.

Want this plan built from your own answers? See which grants you qualify for

Programs that paused, closed, or got sued — what actually changed

The Fearless Fund Strivers Grant is gone permanently. The $20,000 grant for Black women-owned businesses was suspended by a federal appeals panel in June 2024 and then terminated outright in a September 2024 settlement with the American Alliance for Equal Rights; the settlement bars the contest from operating and it will not reopen. The Fearless Fund itself continues as an investor. Black Ambition is not running its Prize Competition in 2026. Pharrell Williams’ organisation states on its own application page that it is “entering a new phase of impact in 2026” and will not accept new Prize applications, focusing instead on founders already in its portfolio. Comcast RISE has effectively wound down: comcastrise.com now redirects to Comcast’s Project UP page, and no 2026 application window has been published. The SoGal Black Founder Startup Grant has no live page. Eileen Fisher’s women-owned business grant and Stacy’s Rise Project are both dormant, with no verified cycle in recent years, despite appearing on dozens of “grants for women” listicles.

One more category deserves naming, because it wastes the most time: programs that fund organisations rather than founders. Mastercard Strive USA, the MBDA Capital Readiness Program, the MBDA Women’s Entrepreneurship Program and the Treasury’s Native American CDFI Assistance program all award money — to nonprofits, CDFIs and intermediaries who then serve small businesses. An individual business cannot apply to any of them for its own operations. They are marked on this page so you do not spend an afternoon finding that out.

How race-specific grants changed after the Fearless Fund case

The case was American Alliance for Equal Rights v. Fearless Fund Management (11th Cir. No. 23-13138). The court did not treat the grant as a gift. The contest’s official rules told entrants the rules were a contract, and a federal law from 1866, 42 U.S.C. § 1981, bars private parties from discriminating by race when they make contracts. The majority found the contest, which was open only to Black women, “substantially likely to violate § 1981” and “substantially unlikely to enjoy First Amendment protection,” because it categorically barred everyone else. The Alliance told NPR it had urged the Fund to open the contest to Hispanic, Asian, Native American and white women; the Fund ended it instead. Fearless Fund’s lawyer called the settlement “very narrow”: its investing and other charitable work continue.

What the programs still running say about who can apply

Three rules for reading eligibility now

1. “Centers,” “prioritizes” or “including” means the door is open. Apply whatever your background, and write to the program’s mission, because judges still read for it.
2. A rule that admits one race only is the exception now. Before you spend an evening on it, confirm on the funder’s own page that the round is live; several such contests paused or closed after 2024.
3. “Underrepresented” is a list, so read the list. Sephora’s names AAPI and Indigenous founders, first-generation immigrants and founders whose parents earned below the poverty line, so more women of color qualify than a headline suggests.

This is a plain reading of the court record and the funders’ pages, not legal advice. The full list of programs that paused or ended sits in the section above.

Want the programs whose rules you meet? See which grants you qualify for

The numbers behind “grants for women of color”

Of the 795 US funding programs GrantCompass tracks, 103 are usable by a woman of color, 43 are aimed at women in some form, and 8 name women of color explicitly. The tier distribution is the honest shape of this market, and it is not the shape the listicles imply.

• 3 of 8. Only 3 of the 8 programs written specifically for women of color are open today. Every other “grant for Black women” you will be shown is either a general women’s grant, a minority program, or closed.
• $25,000 is the median award ceiling across the 36 tier 1–3 cash programs that publish a numeric maximum — not the six-figure numbers the brand prizes advertise.
• 59 of 103 programs have no deadline at all. The scarcity is in targeted programs, not in open ones.
• 60 of 103 are minority and tribal capital, not women-specific grants. If you need $50,000 or more, the honest route for a woman of color in 2026 is a CDFI, not a grant competition.

The questions founders actually type

Frequently asked questions