Supporting Women & Girls of Color to Innovate

The Ms. Foundation for Women deeply appreciates donors to our GlobalGiving project, Safety for Women and Girls of Color. Your investment comes at a critical moment when the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted entrenched and growing disparities for both women and communities of color.

As we have learned, women have borne significant economic, health, and caregiving impacts from the pandemic, and have been vulnerable to violence in particular ways under shelter-in-place regulations and in the escalation of violence we are seeing across the country now. Your support has enabled us to bring a gender equity lens to many important philanthropic conversations about economic recovery and advancing social justice, and allowed us to:

• Continue flexible, reliable “no strings attached” funding to women of color, indigenous and transgender women of color leaders working across the nation.
• Expand multi-year, direct grantmaking to women of color led organizations.
• Strengthen the short and long-term sustainability and the leadership of these organizations by providing training, coaching, technical assistance and healing/wellness resources.
• Expand our Program Related Investments and our Building Connections Initiative nationally to support the diversity of resources for advocacy, power building and leadership, with an emphasis on the South, Midwest and U.S. territories, where women of color have the least access to resources.
• Amplify the voices of women of color leaders and narrative change about feminism in print and digital media through communications.

Since the onset of COVID-19, the Ms. Foundation has stretched to accelerate and increase funding to women and girl of color-led organizations. In our most recent grant cycle we granted over $4M in funding to over 100 organizations. As an experienced funder in grassroots social change at the intersection of race and gender equity, the Ms. Foundation is tracking a dire need for additional rapid response to ensure that a key network of leaders and organizations is able to survive historic strains on capacity and limited (or nonexistent) reserves. The Ms. Foundation is working to ensure that communities of color throughout the United States have critical, life-saving services, access and advocacy.

We’d like to share the work of one organization that benefited from the support of donors to the Safety for Women and Girls of Color project.

National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF)

Founded in 1996, NAPAWF is the only organization focused on building power with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women and girls to influence critical decisions that affect their lives, their families and their communities. Using a reproductive justice framework, NAPWAF elevates AAPI women and girls to impact policy and drive systemic change in the United States. Ms. is proud to have supported NAPAWF this past year with a special grant and technical support as they responded to the spike in anti-Asian violence, specifically the spa shooting in Atlanta, GA on March 16th. Given that mainstream reporters and media outlets repeatedly overlooked how Asian American women are targeted because of their race and gender, NAPAWF worked hard to amplify a key narrative in mainstream media – that the targeting and killing of six Asian American women was an overt act of gender-based violence and sexual violence – the worst kind of racist misogyny that dehumanizes AAPI women because of their race and gender.

The Ms. Foundation for Women appreciates your support that enables our grantees to ensure the safety of their communities. To learn more about our work and to sign-up for our regular email updates, visit our website at: forwomen.org.

Links:

• Learn more at our website
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