Small grants, big impact
A group of hackers got together and decided to create a fund. The idea was simple: sometimes a small amount of money is what stands between a good research question and someone actually doing the work.
PDXHF makes small grants, usually around $1,000, to help remove those barriers. The amount is not set in stone. What matters is what the funding makes possible and how the work benefits the community.
Fund the missing piece
Security research can get stuck for surprisingly ordinary reasons. Someone has the skills and a useful question, but cannot justify buying the hardware they need to investigate it. Or they want to spend a few months working with capable AI agents, but the cost of access gets in the way.
A small grant could cover that hardware or several months of access, depending on the tools and their cost. It does not have to fund an entire research program to make a difference. Sometimes it just needs to make the next experiment possible.
These are examples of what a grant can unlock, not a checklist of eligible projects or a requirement to use AI. The point is to identify a concrete barrier and explain what becomes possible when it is removed.
Small input, useful results
That is what we mean by asymmetric impact: a modest investment can enable work whose value reaches well beyond its cost.
Responsible security research might help a vendor understand and patch a vulnerability. It might become a useful talk, a writeup that others can learn from, or a tool other researchers can build on. A documented project can also give a researcher credible work to show in a portfolio and help open up career opportunities.
None of those outcomes is guaranteed. Research involves uncertainty. We want to make thoughtful work possible and give useful results a chance to reach the people who can benefit from them.
Keep the fund working
The foundation invests its capital and uses investment returns to support these grants. The aim is to keep supporting new work over time. Returns vary, so this is a funding approach rather than a promise of a particular return or a fixed number of grants every year.
The practical question stays the same: what small amount of support would let someone do something useful for the Portland hacker community?
Tell us what would help
If you have a project in mind, tell us what you want to investigate or build, what is getting in the way, and who could benefit from the result.