Imago Dei Fund

Imago Dei Fund

The Imago Dei Fund was established in 2009 by Emily and Ross Jones, who structured it as a private grant-making foundation operating from Boston. The foundation's name — Latin for 'image of God' — signals its theological anchor: a conviction that every person bears inherent dignity. IDF channels that conviction into funding for organizations that fight gender-based violence, expand economic opportunity for women, and strengthen community-rooted solutions. The Joneses are not prominent industrialists or tech entrepreneurs; the vehicle was built around a philanthropic mandate rather than a specific corporate liquidity event. IDF runs a generalist grant-making strategy with heavy concentration in gender justice and human dignity causes. Its deployment touches direct-service nonprofits, advocacy groups, and faith-based partners. Named grantees across public filings and foundation communications include International Justice Mission — the anti-trafficking organization — and World Vision. The foundation's geographic reach is deliberately split between global programming, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, and a concentrated local portfolio in Greater Boston. Grants typically range from small-capacity-building awards to multi-year program support, avoiding PRIs or recoverable grant structures common among larger peer foundations. The foundation keeps a deliberately low profile: it does not publish an AUM figure, file a public 990-PF with detailed asset disclosures, or maintain a LinkedIn presence. Its team size is not publicly stated. Boston serves as the sole office. No adjacent donor-advised fund, LLC, or investment vehicle has been publicly linked to the Joneses or IDF, though the foundation's grant-making patterns suggest regular co-funding relationships with peer faith-aligned philanthropies, including the Greenfamily Foundation and the Bridgeway Foundation. Recent years have seen IDF maintaining consistent grant volumes across its core gender and education portfolios. The Imago Dei Fund occupies an unusual structural position: a private foundation large enough to run multi-continent programming but operating without institutional investment staff, a published endowment, or program-related investment vehicles. This lean, founder-directed architecture — common among faith-motivated foundations under roughly $50 million in assets — allows rapid grant-making decisions but limits the foundation's visibility to institutional co-funders. Its structural differentiator is the absence of the very institutional apparatus that most foundations of comparable grant volumes have already built, making it more akin to a family philanthropy than a professionally staffed endowment.