Overview
The People’s Support Foundation, or PSF, is a private grantmaking organization that primarily disburses its funds to a handful of organizations with overlapping personnel, including the United Community Fund, the Justice and Education Fund and The People’s Forum.
Its funding stems from activist Neville Roy Singham, who started the foundation with a former employee in 2017 after selling his technology company ThoughtWorks for $785 million. Singham’s wife Jodie Evans, the co-founder of CODEPINK, is the president of PSF. The foundation has no paid staff and low operating expenses, spending almost all of its budget on charitable disbursements and making its revenue through investment income.
Both directly and indirectly, PSF funding has supported media organizations whose content aligns with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) messaging, according to The New York Times. PSF and its grantees have also drawn scrutiny from journalists and members of Congress over alleged connections to Singham, who is reportedly under criminal investigation by the Justice Department.
Tax classification — 501(c)(3)
Location — Chicago, IL
Founded — 2017
Annual revenue — $6,826,361 (FY 2024)
EIN — 82-1202926
Notable connections — Jodie Evans, president and director; Jason Pfetcher, treasurer and director; Layan Fuleihan, director; People’s Welfare Association; United Community Fund; The People’s Forum; Worldwide Media Holdings
Activities
According to its website, PSF is dedicated to “fund[ing] and build[ing] partnerships with progressive civil society organizations dedicated to advancing justice, peace and equality worldwide.” Its primary activity is distributing grants to other organizations, which accounted for about 96 percent of its expenses in 2024. PSF does not publish its grantmaking criteria and does not accept unsolicited grant proposals. (See “Finances” below.)
Beyond grantmaking, PSF reports funding “convenings” to bring together grantees and other partners. The organization spent $30,469 on travel, conferences and meetings in 2024, about 0.14 percent of total expenses.
While PSF appears to host a website, its 2024 tax filing lists “n/a” in the website field. There is no information on the website about the organization’s recent activities.
Related Organizations and Affiliations
Related Organizations
As of 2024, PSF did not identify any related organizations in its tax filing. In its 2018 filing, however, PSF identified United Community Fund, or UCF, as a related organization and reported granting it $6,171,000 that year. UCF is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization whose fiscal year 2025 filing lists no website. In that filing, UCF says it supports “education and advocacy programs that promote human rights and social justice,” along with “civic engagement programs” and programs that promote “journalism that betters the lives of impacted communities.” It says those efforts focus “principally on foreign communities with large marginalized populations.”
Affiliations
PSF is one of the most consequential funding sources in a tight network of nonprofits whose 990 filings between 2018 and 2024 reveal overlapping personnel, mutual financial support and aligned missions.
In 2024, PSF granted $5 million to The People’s Forum, accounting for more than 86 percent of TPF’s contributed revenue and more than 70 percent of its total revenue for that year. Jodie Evans is both the board president of PSF and the board secretary of The People’s Forum. Layan Fuleihan joined the PSF board in 2023, one year before the foundation disbursed the grant to The People’s Forum, where she was listed as the highest-paid employee.
As of March 2023, Fuleihan was also the board treasurer of the United Community Fund, which received more than $6.1 million from PSF in 2018. UCF was listed as a “related organization” in PSF’s tax filing that year.
The majority of PSF’s itemized grants have gone to the People’s Welfare Association. Between 2020 and 2024, reported grants from PSF to the People’s Welfare Association amounted to nearly $64 million, accounting for at least 62.2 percent of PWA’s revenue. PSF has also granted more than $5 million to the Justice and Education Fund.
Controversies
Much of the controversy related to PSF stems from the organization’s purported connections to Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman living in Shanghai, China. In August 2023, The New York Times reported that PSF “donated at least $450,000 for training” at the Nkrumah School in South Africa. The Times recounted a training workshop at the school in which participants from around Africa were instructed that the “United States was waging a ‘hybrid war’ against China by distorting information about Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Xinjiang region where Uyghurs were held in camps.” Cebelihle Mbuyisa, a former employee who helped prepare materials for the workshop, said, “They’re being rounded up to be fed Chinese propaganda.” Mbuyisa also told the Times, “Whole social movements on the African continent are being hijacked by what looks like a foreign policy instrument of the Chinese Communist Party.”
In August 2023, then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) wrote to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland that “it appears organizations tied to [Singham] … have been receiving direction from the CCP,” referring to the Chinese Communist Party. The letter named PSF specifically, alongside The People’s Forum and the Justice and Education Fund, or JEF, another grantee. Rubio claimed PSF was part of a “dark money system” created by Singham and asked Garland to investigate its “potential violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
Rubio’s letter referenced the aforementioned Times article, which was published days earlier under the title: “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul.” The “mogul” referenced was Singham, who the piece alleges “works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.”
According to the Times article, Singham’s wealth — made through the sale of his tech company ThoughtWorks for $785 million in 2017 — flows through a network of nonprofits (including PSF) to entities around the world, creating a “seemingly organic bloom of far-left groups that echo Chinese government talking points.” Singham has also attended at least one Chinese Communist Party “propaganda forum.”
In its most recent tax filing, PSF claimed it did not “attempt to influence any national, state, or local legislation,” “participate or intervene in any political campaign” or “carry on propaganda” in 2024. However, nearly half of PSF’s expenses were cash grants to PWA, which reported spending close to $1 million on political campaign activity expenditures in fiscal year 2025.
In September 2025, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) echoed Rubio’s concerns in a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Their letter asked Bessent to investigate 19 entities “alleged to have ties with Mr. Singham,” including PSF and its grantees UCF, TPF and JEF.
According to June 2026 reporting from Fox News Digital, a federal grand jury in New York was evaluating potential criminal charges against Singham based on financial crimes.
“I categorically deny and repudiate any suggestion that I am a member of, work for, take orders from, or follow instructions of any political party or government or their representatives,” Singham told The New York Times in an email. He wrote, “I am solely guided by my beliefs, which are my long-held personal views.”
The People’s Forum, a PSF grantee, publicly called Singham a “Marxist comrade” and said he had been involved with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, a group inspired by Chairman Mao and Fidel Castro.
In a statement published by People’s Democracy, the official publication of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Pfetcher called The New York Times article “slanderous.” But in the same statement, Pfetcher acknowledged Singham’s ties to PSF. He said that Singham wanted to “give away most of the proceeds he received from the sale” of ThoughtWorks, where Pfetcher used to work, so together they “created a private foundation … called the People’s Support Foundation.”
PSF has reported $0 in contributed revenue after its first available filing. Instead, interest and dividends from the investments secured with that seed — which Pfetcher identifies as Singham’s funds — account for the institutional revenue which PSF disburses via grants. (See “Finances” below.)
Finances
In 2024, the most recent year for which data was available, PSF held more than $111.6 million in assets. According to Pfetcher, the board treasurer, “all funds donated to PSF came from the sale of ThoughtWorks,” Singham’s company.
PSF’s annual revenue in 2024 was nearly $7 million, almost all investment income, while expenses were nearly $22.2 million. The foundation has reported $0 in contributed revenue after its first available filing.
In 2018 and 2019, PSF granted to a wide variety of organizations, including many international recipients. Since 2020, however, the organization’s institutional giving has significantly consolidated. Most of its itemized grants go to PWA. Other recipients since 2020 have included UCF, JEF and TPF. Just $185,000 of PSF’s reported grants in that time went to international entities, representing about 0.24 percent of its charitable disbursements.
TPF received $5,000,000 from PSF in fiscal year 2024. As of 2024, Manolo De Los Santos, the executive director of TPF, was also the secretary for the Justice and Education Fund and served on its board of directors. JEF received $5,370,000 in grants from PSF in fiscal year 2024. Tings Chak served as a director for both JEF and UCF in 2019, including serving as JEF’s board chair. UCF received $425,000 from PSF in fiscal year 2024. The current JEF chairman, David Chung, is the organizing director at TPF. And TPF reported giving a $100,000 grant to JEF in 2024, while JEF has granted $131,446 to TPF since 2020.
In 2023, PSF reported paying $142,154 in consulting fees to Shanghai Maku Cultural Communications Co., also known as the Maku Group. According to The New York Times translation of the Maku Group’s website, the firm’s mission is to “tell China’s story well,” which the Times identifies as language “commonly used for foreign propaganda.”
Board of Directors
As of 2024
Jodie Evans, president
Jo Anderson-Figueroa, secretary
Jason Pfetcher, treasurer
Carolyn Baker
Layan Fuleihan
Evans, Pfetcher and Anderson-Figueroa were founding board members, while Baker and Fuleihan were first listed in 2023. As of August 2026, the People’s Support Foundation website did not list Baker in its board directory.
Evans, Singham’s wife, is a co-founder and board president of CODEPINK. She also serves on the board of The People’s Forum.
In addition to serving on the PSF board, Fuleihan is also the board treasurer for UCF and the education director at TPF, both PSF grantees. (See “Affiliations” and “Finances” above.)
Compensation
As of 2024, PSF did not have any paid staff and did not compensate its board members.
Revenue and expenses
Assets and liabilities
Founded in 2026, the Civil Defense Institute is a nonpartisan investigative research organization. We research people, organizations and networks whose conduct undermines civil society and Americans’ freedom to participate in public life. Our work examines extremist and conspiracy-driven campaigns, foreign influence, organized harassment and the institutions that enable them.