HerRise MicroGrant Review — 2026
Is the HerRise MicroGrant legitimate? Yes — and it charges you $15 to enter. The money is real and the grantmaker is real: $1,000 a month, unrestricted, from the Yva Jourdan Foundation Inc. of Valley Stream, New York — a 501(c)(3) with an IRS ruling dated February 2013 and a public Form 990 filing history going back to 2012 (EIN 26–4264978). It is the nonprofit arm of HerSuiteSpot, a for-profit membership network for women founders, and nothing on the grant page or the application asks you to buy a membership. What separates this from almost every other grant we track is the entry price. HerSuiteSpot’s own FAQ says: “there is a nonrefundable $15 administrative fee payable via secure checkout.” That $15 is 1.5% of the prize — and it is the same $15 the Amber Grant charges for a shot at a monthly pool thirty times larger. That comparison, not the quality of your writing, is what decides whether this is worth your afternoon.
Updated August 27, 2026 — the award, the fee, the eligibility rules and the notification policy were read first-hand from hersuitespot.com/herrise and its live application form on August 27, 2026, and the grantmaker’s IRS filings were read from ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer the same day. The current window closes at 11:59 PM on Monday, August 31, 2026. Reviewed monthly.
Who actually funds the HerRise MicroGrant in 2026
Two organisations, and the distinction matters. The check comes from the Yva Jourdan Foundation Inc., a registered New York 501(c)(3). The website, the application form and the $15 checkout belong to HerSuiteSpot, a for-profit membership network for women founders. They are related — the foundation is described as HerSuiteSpot’s nonprofit arm — but they are not the same entity.
Most write-ups of this program name “HerSuiteSpot” and stop there. That is the platform, not the grantmaker. HerSuiteSpot is a for-profit business led by founder Marsha Guerrier, selling memberships, an academy, workshops and a podcast to women entrepreneurs. Its own HerRise page states the arrangement plainly: “Since 2017 the Yva Jourdan Foundation, the non-profit arm of HerSuiteSpot, has been raising funds to help under-resourced women, including women of color entrepreneurs, access the non-equity capital they need.”
That foundation is findable in the public record, which is the first thing worth checking about any grant that asks you for money. Yva Jourdan Foundation Inc. is registered at an address in Valley Stream, New York, holds IRS subsection 501(c)(3) status with a ruling date of February 2013, is classified under NTEE code P20 (human service organizations), and has filed with the IRS every year for which data is published — Form 990 through 2019 and Form 990-EZ for its two most recent filed years. Its EIN is 26–4264978. A real, decade-old, tax-exempt charity is writing the checks. That is not a small thing to be able to say about a $1,000 microgrant.
The same operator runs a second, near-identical program: the Hustler’s MicroGrant, also $1,000 a month, also a $15 nonrefundable administrative fee, described on HerSuiteSpot’s own site as “created by Deja Vu Parker in partnership with HerSuiteSpot and the Yva Jourdan Foundation.” If you were planning to enter both, you should know you are paying this operator $30 a month for two shots at $1,000, not $15 for one.
The $15 fee: what it is, and what it is not
It is a real, disclosed, up-front entry fee charged before anyone reads your application, and it is not refunded whether you win, lose, or are never read. It is not the shape a grant scam takes — but it is unusual, and it is what most guides bury.
Here is the fee in the program’s own words, from the FAQ on its grant page:
“Yes, there is a nonrefundable $15 administrative fee payable via secure checkout. The application process requires administrative resources to review, process, and manage the applications.”
HerSuiteSpot, HerRise MicroGrant FAQ, read August 27, 2026The single most useful test for a grant scam is when the money moves. A fraudulent “grant” asks you to pay after telling you that you have won — a release fee, a processing fee, a tax deposit on winnings you never actually received. HerRise does the opposite: the $15 is charged at the front door, disclosed before you fill anything in, and no one tells you that you have won anything in order to extract it. Combined with a registered 501(c)(3) grantmaker and a decade of IRS filings, that is enough to call the program legitimate.
“Legitimate” and “good value” are different judgements, and this page is going to make both. A paid entry is genuinely rare. Of the 736 US programs in the GrantCompass catalog as of August 27, 2026, only 17 charge any fee to apply — and most of those are government loan and certification programs where the fee covers underwriting or inspection. Only nine are privately run grants charging a small entry fee of $15 to $25. HerRise is one of the nine. The other 719 programs on our list cost nothing to enter.
What the grantmaker’s own filings show
This is a small charity. Its most recently published return, a Form 990-EZ for fiscal 2024, reports total revenue of $32,446, total expenses of $55,631, and $5,174 in assets at year end. Twelve $1,000 awards a year is $12,000 — well within that scale, but it tells you the program is funded out of a modest, year-to-year budget rather than an endowment.
| Fiscal year | Form | Total revenue | Total expenses | Assets at year end |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 990-EZ | $32,446 | $55,631 | $5,174 |
| 2023 | 990-EZ | $61,051 | $56,620 | $27,681 |
| 2019 | 990 | $4,585 | $6,311 | $0 |
| 2018 | 990 | $2,982 | $2,936 | $0 |
| 2016 | 990 | $4,398 | $4,531 | $929 |
Read this fairly. The foundation grew sharply between 2019 and 2023 — from under $5,000 a year to over $60,000 — which is what you would expect of an organisation that started raising real money for a monthly grant. In fiscal 2024 it spent more than it took in and its assets fell from $27,681 to $5,174. That is not evidence of anything improper; small charities routinely spend down a good year in the year that follows it, and the 990-EZ is a short form that does not break out grants paid as a separate published line.
What it does tell an applicant is scale. A $12,000-a-year grant program run by an organisation with five figures of annual revenue is a genuine but slender operation. It is why the award is $1,000 rather than $10,000, why the committee is small, and why the fee exists at all. It is also the reason to check that the current month’s window is actually open on the program’s own page before you pay — the GrantCompass record for the HerRise MicroGrant carries the current status and deadline, and we re-read the source page monthly.
What happens after you pay — and what does not
You will not hear back unless you win. There is no rejection notice, no status page, and no published list of past winners you could check yourself. The winner is revealed at HerSuiteSpot’s First Friday Mixer the following month.
- NoNo rejection notice. The FAQ is explicit: “Due to the overwhelming response, only selected entrepreneurs receiving grants will be notified.” If you do not win, nothing arrives. Silence is the outcome, and it is indistinguishable from your application never having been opened.
- NoNo refund, in any circumstance. The $15 is described as nonrefundable on both the grant page and the application, and the applicant has to acknowledge that before submitting.
- WaitThe reveal is an event, not an email. “Winners will be revealed at the next month’s HerSuiteSpot First Friday Mixer. You do not have to be present to be selected.” Applications close on the last day of the month; the reveal follows in the first week of the next one.
- DoKeep your own record. Because there is no status page and no decision notice, the only copy of what you wrote is the one you keep. It is also the raw material for the next monthly application — here and everywhere else.
The absence of a rejection notice is normal for small microgrants and unremarkable on its own. Combined with a paid entry, it is worth naming plainly: you are paying $15 for an outcome you will only ever learn by not hearing anything. Founders who apply repeatedly — which the program permits, and which is the only sensible way to play a monthly draw — should decide up front how many months of $15 they are willing to spend before that silence becomes information.
Has the monthly cadence actually held in 2026?
The intake is verifiably live and current in August 2026. The award record is not public, so the monthly cadence cannot be independently confirmed — and the program itself does not claim an unbroken run, even though several third-party grant listings do.
Here is what could be verified on August 27, 2026, and what could not. Verified: the HerRise page is live and carries a 2026 copyright; the application form is open and functional; the stated cadence is unchanged (“Apply by 11:59pm on the last day of the month to be eligible for that month”); and the selection language is present tense (“Every month our committee selects a winner from submitted applications”). On the calendar that puts the current deadline at 11:59 PM on Monday, August 31, 2026, with the reveal falling at the following First Friday, September 4, 2026.
Not verified: a single named 2026 recipient. The program publishes no winners page, no archive of past awards and no running total of dollars granted. HerSuiteSpot’s public event calendar, read the same day, listed no upcoming First Friday Mixer date. Because only winners are notified, there is also no population of unsuccessful applicants publicly reporting an outcome. The award record is, in effect, private.
That matters because several widely syndicated grant-listing sites state that HerRise has run “without interruption since 2017—one $1,000 check every single month.” The program does not say that. Its own wording is that the foundation “has been raising funds” since 2017 — a claim about fundraising, not an award ledger. We have not found a primary source for the unbroken-run claim, and we do not repeat it. What is safe to say is that the program is active, currently accepting applications, and eight years old as a fundraising effort.
Before you spend $15, see what you qualify for that costs nothing. Answer a short eligibility check and GrantCompass returns every US program matched to your business — the 719 free-to-enter ones included — and watches the deadlines on anything you star.
See your matches — freeThe odds math: what $15 buys here versus elsewhere
Nobody publishes an applicant count, so no win rate can be calculated. But two published numbers — a $1,000 prize and a $15 fee — give you a threshold instead: the fee is worth its face value only if fewer than about 67 people apply in a month. The program describes its own intake as an “overwhelming response.”
Start with what is genuinely known. One winner is selected per month, so the program awards twelve $1,000 grants a year, $12,000 in total. There is no published applicant count, no published number of entries per month, and no approval rate anywhere on the program’s site. We will not invent one, and you should distrust any page that quotes one.
What you can compute honestly is the break-even point. If N people apply in a month, one $1,000 award is worth $1,000 ÷ N to each of them on average. That equals the $15 you paid when N = 67. Above 67 applicants, the ticket costs more than the average share of the prize; below it, less. This is not an odds estimate — it is a threshold you can hold the program’s own language against. HerSuiteSpot describes the response as “overwhelming,” and the sister program’s page says the fee “helps offset these administrative costs and ensures that the organization can effectively handle the influx.” Neither is the language of a program that receives fewer than 67 applications a month.
| Program | Fee | Prize pool per month | Break-even applicant count |
|---|---|---|---|
| HerRise MicroGrant | $15 | $1,000 — one award | 67 |
| Hustler’s MicroGrant (same operator) | $15 | $1,000 — one award | 67 |
| YippityDoo Big Idea Grant | $15 | $1,000 — one award | 67 |
| Freed Fellowship Grant | $19 | $500 monthly (+$2,500 year-end) | 26 |
| Hey Helen Grant | $15 | $10,000 — one award | 667 |
| Amber Grant for Women | $15 | $30,000 — three $10,000 awards | 2,000 |
Read the last column as “how crowded the field would have to get before this $15 stops being worth its face value.” The Amber Grant’s rules page, read first-hand on August 27, 2026, states the identical fee — “The $15 application fee is non-refundable, regardless of outcome” — against “three (3) $10,000 Amber Grants” awarded every month plus three $50,000 year-end grants. Thirty times the monthly prize money for the same entry price, on the same monthly cycle, with the same eleventh-hour deadline.
Two honest counterweights before you conclude the comparison settles it. First, a thirty-times-larger prize plausibly draws a larger crowd — almost certainly it does — and nobody publishes either applicant count, so the break-even columns are not a ranking of your actual chances. Second, HerRise is choosing from a narrower field on purpose: it is explicitly prioritising under-resourced women, including women of color, which most open microgrant committees are not. If you are the founder that committee is looking for, you are competing inside a smaller, more defined pool than the raw arithmetic suggests. The arithmetic does not measure that; it just tells you what the money is worth before the judgement starts.
The fine print in HerSuiteSpot’s own documents
Three hard gates, one grey area on membership, no fee waiver, and taxable income at the end of it.
The three hard gates are absolute
Straight from the grant page: your business must be “51% owned by women,” “currently registered in the US,” and have “less than $1 million in gross revenue.” These are stated as requirements, not preferences. Being a woman of color is described separately, as who the program is for — “under-resourced women, including women of color entrepreneurs, across a variety of industries” — which reads as a priority, not a fourth gate. A registered US business under $1M in revenue and majority woman-owned clears the bar; anything short of that fails it, and the fee is still nonrefundable.
Membership is not asked for — but the checkout is the platform’s
This is the question founders ask most often about HerRise, and the honest answer has two halves. Nothing on the grant page, the FAQ or the live application requires HerSuiteSpot membership, and no membership check appears anywhere in the flow. But the application and its card checkout both sit on hersuitespot.com, the for-profit platform, not on the foundation’s own site — and the same page that takes your $15 also sells an Academy subscription. You are handing your details to a business whose other product is a paid membership. Expect to be marketed to; you are not required to buy.
No fee waiver appears anywhere
Worth flagging because a direct competitor offers one. The Amber Grant’s rules page states: “If you’re unable to pay the fee, we offer a fee-waived application option,” requestable by email. No equivalent language appears on the HerRise grant page, its FAQ or its application as read on August 27, 2026. If $15 is a real barrier for you this month, one of these programs has a published route around it and the other does not.
The $1,000 is taxable, and the $15 is not deducted from it
A business grant is ordinary business income in the year you receive it — the $1,000 arrives whole and is taxed as revenue, and the entry fee you paid is a separate business expense, not a netting-off. On a $1,000 award the practical after-tax figure is meaningfully below $1,000. That does not change the decision much, but it should change the number you have in your head when you weigh it against the fee.
Apply or skip: the verdict on the HerRise MicroGrant
Conditional. Apply if you are specifically the founder this committee is looking for and you can treat $15 as a ticket you will buy more than once. Skip it if $15 is your only $15 this month — the identical fee buys thirty times the prize pool at the Amber Grant, and 719 of the 736 programs we track cost nothing at all.
Apply if you are an under-resourced woman founder, and particularly a woman of color, running a registered US business under $1M in revenue — and if you are prepared to enter more than once. This is a small, real, eight-year-old program run by a registered charity, and it is one of very few that names your position as its priority rather than as a diversity footnote. The application is short and self-serve, the funds are unrestricted, and reapplying in later months is permitted. Played as a habit rather than a hope — a recurring $15 alongside the free applications you are already filing — it is defensible.
Skip it if this would be a one-off, or if you would be choosing it over a free application. Three facts, taken together, make a single entry hard to justify: the prize is the smallest in its class while the fee is the same as its class leader’s, you will never be told you lost, and no public award record exists to check the program against. None of that makes it a bad organisation. It makes it a $15 lottery ticket that you should buy knowingly, in a market where almost everything else is free to enter.
And do not let it be your grant strategy. Twelve $1,000 awards a year is $12,000 of national supply. Whatever your odds are, they are not the reason you would be funded this year. The open-now report lists what is actually accepting applications today, and the monthly grants guide covers the programs that give you a fresh chance every thirty days.
Worth weighing against it, all monthly, all open on August 27, 2026
- Amber Grant for Women — the direct comparison. The same $15 nonrefundable fee, three $10,000 awards every month plus three $50,000 year-end grants, the same 11:59 PM month-end cut-off, and a published fee-waiver route if you cannot pay. If you are only buying one ticket this month, the arithmetic points here.
- Freed Fellowship Grant — $500 a month plus a $2,500 year-end award, $19 to enter. A smaller monthly prize than HerRise, but our record for it notes that feedback is typically provided by the end of the following month — which is the one thing a paid entry can buy that silence cannot.
- Galaxy Grant for Women and Minority Business Owners — run by Galaxy of Stars, the nonprofit arm of Hidden Star, and free to apply. The no-fee alternative in the same demographic lane; check the current cycle date and award on the record before you start.
- NASE Growth Grant — up to $4,000, no application fee, one winner selected monthly from member applications. The cost here is membership rather than an entry fee, which is a different trade and a bigger cheque.
See the free-to-enter women’s programs first
A $15 entry fee is only worth paying once you know what the free applications on your list look like. Filter the GrantCompass catalog to programs for women-owned businesses that are open right now, star what fits, and we watch the deadlines for you — free.
What the committee is weighing is not on this page
The GrantCompass record for the HerRise MicroGrant carries 6 of the 7 Win Layer fields — what funded businesses have looked like, how the committee weighs an application, the traps that end one, what to have ready, when the money actually lands, and clawback risk. They are locked on the free tier.
Pro turns all seven fields on for every catalog program and watches your deadlines. $49/mo · $249/yr.
See what Pro unlocks →The questions founders actually type about HerRise
Is the HerRise MicroGrant a scam?
No. The grantmaker, Yva Jourdan Foundation Inc., is a registered 501(c)(3) with an IRS ruling dated February 2013, EIN 26–4264978, a Valley Stream, New York address, and a public Form 990 filing history going back to 2012. The award is $1,000, unrestricted, paid to the winner. The $15 fee is disclosed on the grant page before you fill anything in — which is the opposite of the pattern that defines grant fraud, where the demand for money arrives after you are told you have won. The fair criticism is not fraud but value: you are paying 1.5% of the prize for an entry into a pool nobody publishes the size of, and you will never be told the outcome unless it is good.
Do I have to pay $15 to apply for the HerRise MicroGrant?
Yes, and there is no published way around it. The FAQ states: “there is a nonrefundable $15 administrative fee payable via secure checkout,” and the application requires you to acknowledge that the fee is nonrefundable before submitting. No fee-waiver, hardship or sponsored-entry option appeared anywhere on the grant page, the FAQ or the application as read on August 27, 2026. The fee is charged whether or not your application is selected, and it is not deducted from the award if you win.
Do I need a HerSuiteSpot membership to apply?
No membership requirement appears anywhere in the process. The grant page lists three eligibility conditions — 51% woman-owned, registered in the US, under $1 million in gross revenue — and none of them is membership, nor does the application ask for a member number. What is true is that the application and its checkout live on hersuitespot.com, the for-profit membership platform, and that the same site sells an academy subscription and other paid products. You will be inside a marketing funnel; you will not be blocked for declining to buy.
How many people apply for the HerRise MicroGrant, and what are my chances?
The program does not publish an applicant count, a number of entries per cycle, or an approval rate, and neither does anyone else — so any page quoting you a win percentage for this grant made it up. What is published is that one winner is chosen per month by committee, and that the response is “overwhelming” enough that only winners are notified. The most useful honest number is the break-even: at a $1,000 prize and a $15 fee, the entry is worth its face value only below roughly 67 applicants a month. A program that cites an “influx” as the reason it charges a processing fee is describing a field considerably larger than that.
When will I hear back, and how do I check my application status?
You will not, and you cannot. There is no status page, no confirmation of review, and no rejection notice — “Due to the overwhelming response, only selected entrepreneurs receiving grants will be notified.” Winners are revealed at the following month’s HerSuiteSpot First Friday Mixer, and attendance is not required to be selected. For the window closing August 31, 2026, that reveal falls in the first week of September. If nothing arrives, you were not selected — and you are free to enter again the following month, for another $15.
Who is behind HerRise — HerSuiteSpot or the Yva Jourdan Foundation?
Both, in different roles. HerSuiteSpot is a for-profit leadership and membership network for women founders, led by founder Marsha Guerrier; it hosts the grant page, the application, the $15 checkout and the First Friday Mixer where winners are revealed. The Yva Jourdan Foundation Inc. is the registered 501(c)(3) — described on HerSuiteSpot’s own page as “the non-profit arm of HerSuiteSpot” — and is the charity in the public record. The same pairing runs a second $1,000 monthly program, the Hustler’s MicroGrant, on identical fee terms.