November 27, 2023
This Giving Tuesday, Invest in the Healing and Rest of Local Movement-Building Organizations
by Shawnda Chapman, Ms. Foundation for Women and Kheira Issaoui-Mansouri, Najam Consulting
This Giving Tuesday, the Ms. Foundation for Women is holding a dual reality: we are celebrating moving $1 million through our Activist Collaboration and Care Fund, and we are recognizing that we cannot meet the urgent needs of this moment alone—it will take all of us. We invite you to join us in moving resources to the women and nonbinary leaders of color who are imagining and building more equitable, caring, and loving futures for all of us. You can do so by perusing this list of all the movement-building organizations that applied to this year’s Activist Collaboration and Care Fund, and selecting one or two organizations of your choice to give to directly. Together, we can support these leaders and help them thrive in the long-term fight for equity and justice. At the Ms. Foundation, two core truths drive our work: It is these core truths that drove us to launch the Activist Collaboration and Care Fund in 2020 to invest in the healing, rest, safety, and survival of the women and nonbinary people of color who lead our movements. As we finalized our third round of ACF funding this year, we noticed the same concerning pattern we observed when we published our groundbreaking Pocket Change report in 2020: across small towns, cities, states, and the whole nation, women and nonbinary leaders of color are on the frontlines of justice— and yet, they continue to be critically under-resourced. Further, in these times of relentless crisis, their healing, rest, and survival continue to be particularly neglected, as our newest published Pocket Change research, Living With Pocket Change, reports. This year, we received $8.8M in ACF grant requests from 338 eligible organizations, and were able to award $1.24M to 87 organizations, the highest amount ever. Award recipients for this year’s cycle include organizations located in 28 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, and span a wide range of issues including but not limited to abortion justice, trans justice, climate justice, civic engagement and voting rights, sex workers rights, and immigrant and refugee justice. Nearly half of the requests we received were for healing, rest, and restoration work, which highlights the need for movement leaders and organizations to create space for healing and rest amid compounding crises, scarce resources, and increasing demand for their services. We now need you. Collectively, we can resource our women and nonbinary people of color-led movements. We are inviting partners and supporters to leverage the impact of ACF by donating directly to a WGOC-led organization of your choice. Each of these organizations submitted a thoughtful, heartful application to ACF, and we are excited to be sharing their work with you. You can review the list of ACF applicants here, where you can filter or search the list by state, city, or name; review organizations’ missions and requests for funding; and access their website to make a donation. This Giving Tuesday, we hope you’ll join us in shifting towards a care-based philanthropic approach and invest in the leadership, sustainability, and well-being of the women and nonbinary people of color showing up for our movements everyday.