By Tamara Vasan | Director, Institutional Partnerships
The Ms. Foundation for Women launched the Activist Collaboration Fund in January 2020 to strengthen collaboration in and across social justice movements for women and girls of color, trans women and girls of color and indigenous women and girls. The goal of the fund is to deepen movement-building collaborations and support the often unfunded relationship and trust building work that is crucial for transformational work that leads to social change for women and girls of color.
Our ACF grantmaking process spanned the months of January to April, an intense period of time when Covid19 emerged in full force exacerbating all of the existing structural inequalities that women and girls of color face in our country. Through our conversations with applicants grappling in real time with the pandemic, we observed the following:
- Movement building organizations led by and for women and girls of color are best-equipped to meet the needs of and build power with people most impacted by racism and inequity. Each organization we reviewed had deeply rooted relationships and practices that support healing, organizing and power building.
- In moments of crisis, these organizations move the quickest to meet community needs, respond to attacks against communities, and build offensive strategies to build power to fight back against oppressive systems.
- For WGOC organizations working at the state and local level, direct service is very much part of organizing work.
- Healing is a critical part of the power building process; time and care must be taken to ensure leaders and individuals are supported and are able to stand in their power to demand change for themselves and their communities.
- WGOC organizations are significantly underfunded, and could do even more with more resources. Many grantees in this docket have budgets well under $500k.
To build women's power, the Ms. Foundation has prioritized organizations led by and for women and girls of color, trans women and girls of color, and indigenous women and girls with budgets at $1M or under, and ensured at least half of funded organizations centered trans women and girls of color and indigenous women and girls. Overall, we aimed to support a national portfolio that was geographically diverse, and prioritized historically underfunded regions including the South, Southwest, Midwest, and U.S. territories.
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