By Tamara Vasan | Director of Institutional Partnerships
With support from Gucci's CHIME FOR CHANGE and you, the Ms. Foundation continues to lift up and leverage our voice and the voices women and girls of color through strategic grantmaking. We also share our grantee partners' activities on our social media and promote our voices in press statements and releases. Additionally we moderate and facilitate different media outlets that allow us to lift up our grantees, including how we design and promote our graphics, such as the new strategic image we developed for our 45th Anniversary gala.
We are working to strengthened women of color-led grassroots movements by elevating the advocacy and policy work of grantee partners. Highlights of our narrative change work include over the past year include:
(It’s Time to Listen to Black Women. We’ve Been Talking About Police Sexual Violence for a Long Time)
The Ms. Foundation is also supporting narrative change through sponsoring the Baltimore Museum of Art's upcoming exhibition on the Art of Women of Color.
We continued to build power through strategic grantmaking that zeros in on the most hot button gender and racial justice issues of our time; for instance, we support Girls for Gender Equity, based in Brooklyn, NY, and their work around the Surviving R. Kelly docuseries and highlighting the sexual violence towards women and girls of color; SisterReach, based in Memphis, TN, and their work to ensure reproductive autonomy of women and girls of color; Atlanta Jobs with Justice in Atlanta, GA, on their work to increase wages for women and girls of color; and EveryBlackGirl in South Carolina to combat the violence towards and criminalization of Black girls.
We strengthened the infrastructure of women of color-led social justice organizations through increasing our grantmaking in 2019-2020 and supported 28 grantees. Highlights of our grantmaking include:
Other programmatic work included the development of a new Girls Initiative, Activist Response Fund, and increased Regional focus on the South and Midwest, and the Building Connections Initiative challenge grants for women's funds nationally.
Building Connections Initiative: We developed a new challenge grant program targeted to public women's funds nationally to increase funding to women and girls of color and push philanthropy to more effectively support organizations and projects led by and centering their concerns and advocacy agendas. The effort also seeks to build partnerships with and between women's funds working at the local or regional level to advance gender and racial equity. The Ms. Foundation made nine (9) matching grants of $25,000 each; grantees will be required to demonstrate a 100% match by the end of the grant period.
As a high-engagement funder, the Ms. Foundation maximizes its grantmaking investment by offering various ways for grantees to access capacity building and technical assistance. We provide a diverse range of one-on-one and cohort-based capacity building support including leadership transition and executive coaching, advocacy and communications support, financial management coaching, and technical assistance to respond to opposition attacks.
As a national voice for women working in partnership with grantees, the Ms. Foundation can continue to serve as an important incubator for fresh new strategies that serve to integrate the specific ways that multiple issues impact the lives of women and girls in the current context. Thank you for your support.
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