GAJRA Earth
Money exists for work like this.
Aiming your work at joyful responsible abundance does not have to mean doing it for nothing. These are real programmes that already put money into alignment research, public-interest technology and AI aimed at something other than a share price. None of them has heard of GAJRA Earth. That is rather the point: the list is for you, not for us.
What this page is, and what it is not.
Every organisation below exists and every link goes to their own page: that much is checkable. What is not true is any relationship between them and this project. No application has been made, no grant has been received, nobody here has been endorsed by anybody. GAJRA Earth has no UN backing, no institutional home, and no budget.
Amounts and deadlines move constantly. Treat every figure here as a rumour until you have read it on their own site. If you find something out of date, the correction is a pull request.
The words these programmes use, in plain English
Non-dilutive. They give you money and take no ownership of what you build. A grant is non-dilutive; investment usually is not. For work meant to end up as a commons, this is the part to read twice.
Early stage. Some funders want a company with customers. Others will fund one person with a written idea and no company at all. The second kind is rarer and much more useful when the work is a public good.
In kind. Not money: compute credits, a desk, mentoring, an introduction. Sometimes worth more than a cheque, sometimes worth nothing at all, and occasionally it comes with strings that money would not have.
IP conditions. Who owns what you make afterwards. Read this before you read the amount. A grant that quietly takes your licensing rights is not a grant, it is a purchase at a discount.
Alignment and long-horizon research.
Two of the few places that will fund a person thinking carefully about intelligent systems, without requiring a startup wrapped around it first.
Foresight Institute
Fellowships and node grants across secure AI, neurotechnology, longevity and nanotechnology. The rare funder with safety written into the remit rather than bolted on. Roughly US$10k to US$100k per grant.
Astera Institute
A salaried residency for independent builders working on long-horizon problems. No company required, no equity taken. If you are one person with a serious idea and no institution, this is the shape that fits.
Horizon Europe, MSCA
Salaried public research fellowships, including work on artificial intelligence and privacy. Heavy paperwork and a European host institution, but genuine salary rather than a stipend.
AI for good, and public-interest technology.
If the three words mean anything to a funder, it is probably one of these. They are used to the argument that a system should be judged by what it leaves behind.
MIT Solve
Global challenges with real prize purses, including an AI for Humanity prize of up to US$150k. Open to anyone anywhere, which is unusual and worth a great deal.
NLnet, NGI Zero
European funds for a free and open internet: privacy-preserving, decentralised, searchable by humans. Grants of roughly EUR 5k to 50k, and they will fund individuals.
Mozilla Foundation
Technology fund and awards aimed squarely at trustworthy artificial intelligence. Non-dilutive, and comfortable funding work that criticises the industry it sits inside.
Grand Challenges
Gates Foundation and partners, with a first phase around US$100k, much of it now pointed at artificial intelligence in health. Structured, competitive, and wide in reach.
Challenge Works
Nesta's prize outfit, running public-interest challenge prizes such as the Longitude Prize on Dementia. Prizes reward the thing working, not the pitch about it.
Halcyon
An incubator fellowship for mission-driven work, with a stipend and housing. Relocation is the cost, and for some people that is impossible and for others it is the door.
United Nations adjacent, which is not the same as United Nations backed.
Worth saying plainly: GAJRA Earth has no relationship with any United Nations body. These are open programmes that anyone may apply to, and applying to one does not make you affiliated with anything.
UNDP and UNLEASH
Sustainable development innovation programmes, mostly in-kind rather than cash. The value is the room you end up in and the people already in it.
GEF Small Grants
The Global Environment Facility programme run through UNDP, around USD 50k, designed for community-scale environmental work. A plausible route to funding something on one island.
Earthshot and XPRIZE
Large public-good prize purses with global attention attached. Long odds and a long road, but they are looking for exactly the kind of thing that has no business model yet.
Funders who already believe in public goods.
Ethereum Foundation
Ecosystem support for open public goods. Will fund individuals with no company and no entity, which almost nobody else on this page will do.
Protocol Labs and Filecoin
Grants for decentralised public-goods infrastructure: storage, retrieval, and the plumbing that keeps a commons from depending on one company staying solvent.
A fuller atlas
This page is a slice. A longer working list of programmes, visas and pilots, scored and dated, lives in a separate project and is not part of GAJRA Earth.
One thing to check before you take any of it
Read the intellectual property conditions before the amount. Money that quietly takes ownership of the thing you were trying to give away has not funded a commons, it has bought one cheaply, and the people you were building it for end up renting it back.
The same test the trinity uses works here. Joyful: would the work still be worth doing on the terms offered. Responsible: when it goes wrong, does the funder's paperwork leave a name attached or a shrug. Abundant: at the end, can somebody else pick this up and string their own, or does it only exist while the grant does.
If you take one of these and it goes somewhere, that is worth writing down. Question five is about who ends up holding the power in arrangements exactly like these, and a real answer beats a careful guess.
What this page becomes later
A page called Support would normally be about supporting the project: who it is for, what it costs to run, where to send help. That page is worth writing once there are signatories, because until then there is no us to support, only one person and a repository, and asking for backing on that basis would be the same order of operations that went wrong last time.
So the page points outward for now. When the garland has people on it, this is where the honest version goes: who GAJRA is for, what it actually needs, and what it will never take money to do. Nothing is being collected in the meantime, and there is no account to collect into.