Safety for Women and Girls of Color

The Ms. Foundation for Women is making incredible strides supporting and strengthening the networks that are helping women and girls of color to survive and thrive, despite the ongoing assaults on the safety and health of people of color in the United States. With your support we have achieved so much in the past year; we have:

• Continued flexible, reliable funding to women of color, indigenous and transgender women of color leaders working across the nation, the most under-resourced and hardest hit region of the country.

We launched Ms. South and received tremendous interest in and positive feedback so far. We held two December webinars that were attended by hundreds of interested grant seekers, and we received over 350 LOIs. In addition, over 200 applications started in our system that were incomplete and are prospects for Ms. and partner foundations for other funding opportunities. The response was incredible and we are gratified that our outreach attempts were so successful. Overall, we received upwards of 17 million dollars in requests for a $1MM effort. The need is clear and tremendous. The questions that applicants have raised have provided us with helpful information that will allow the team to increase the efficiency and clarity of the process in the future. The team is looking forward to reviewing the proposals and learning more about the work being led by and for women and girls of color in the South.

•  Expanded multi-year, direct grantmaking to women of color led organizations:

In fall 2020, we funded a second cycle of the Activist Collaboration Fund, recommending a slate of ten grants totaling $215,000 to support organizations across the US, including  Puerto Rico, that are led by and for women and girls of color, trans women and girls of  color, and indigenous women and girls. This round of grants supported organizations to pivot in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, providing funding to address the needs of their communities and their organizations. Grants ranged from $20,000 to $25,000.

These grantees represent nine states: California, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Texas, and Puerto Rico. Of these ten grants, 80% are Black-woman, Indigenous women, or Trans person of color-led led and 20% are immigrant woman-led.  Five organizations are located in the geographic South, two in the Midwest, one in Puerto Rico, one in California and one in New York.

• Strengthening the short and long-term sustainability and the leadership of these organizations by providing training, coaching, technical assistance and healing/wellness resources.

Following up on the two-part virtual learning workshops we offered to grantees on financial resiliency in the fall, the Ms. Foundation offered grantees the opportunity to receive dedicated one-on-one coaching support from Financial Management Associates, a Latina-founded and led capacity building organization known throughout the country to support nonprofits to strengthen their financial management and knowledge. Eight grantee organizations from across the country will receive a one-on-one coaching from FMA to develop multi-year plans and conduct scenario planning to build their resiliency and sustainability during this pandemic and a time of economic downturn.

Earlier this year, the Ms. Foundation and The Management Center (TMC) jointly kicked off a new capacity building program to support grantees’ with management training and coaching as part of our investment in organizational and individual leaders’ sustainability, growth, and resilience. The Management Center specializes in helping social justice leaders learn how to build and run effective organizations. A total of 24 Ms. Foundation grantees received scholarship trainings to attend TMC’s management trainings and/or a combination of one-on-one coaching – intensive support for executive directors and senior leaders and core support for second-line leaders.

• Amplified the voices of women of color leaders and narrative change about feminism in print and digital media through communications.

The Ms. Foundation is delivering consistent, on-message content to followers in the midst of constant change. Our social media presence continues to grow as we test new techniques, such as creating an Instagram Live series featuring me (Teresa) in conversation with a series of Ms. Foundation stakeholders and influencers. We found fresh storylines to help contextualize the foundation’s message. We saw traction with messages that were personal and thought-provoking post and press statement for Intersex Awareness Day.