We Just Directed $2.4M to 27 Movement Organizations

In our most recent round of grants, we sent $2.4M to 27 organizations dedicated to creating safer, healthier, and more just communities for all. This latest round of support maintains our commitment to existing partnerships, explores new catalytic opportunities, and meaningfully backs a wide ecosystem of change-builders. 

$600k to Black-Led Movements and Community Safety

Jean Hardisty Initiative

The Jean Hardisty Initiative has long committed to dismantling racist, oppressive systems – and our efforts are far from over. In just the past year, we’ve seen a stark increase in the number of bills targeting LGBTQIA+ communities, abortion criminalization, book bans in school libraries, and continued efforts to create barriers at the ballot box, which all disproportionately impact people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, and people with disabilities. BIPOC leaders and voters are speaking up and turning out through long-term organizing and power-building to protect their communities and all people.    

Our sustained support and trust enables small organizations like ProjectQ to provide safe, gender-affirming spaces for BIPOC queer and trans unsheltered youth. At the national level, our reinvestment in organizations like Liberation Ventures and BlackOUT Collective strengthens the broader Black-led movement ecosystem and builds capacity to achieve reparations and liberation for all.

Our Jean Hardisty Initiative moved $600k in the first round of grantmaking, with six $100k renewals for:

Jean Hardisty Initiative’s Strategic Guideposts

In addition to WDN’s overarching funding principles, Jean Hardisty Initative’s steering committee maintains a strategic framework of:

  1. Building movement infrastructure by supporting grassroots organizing, movement-building, and long-term movement infrastructure for Black-led movements.
  2. Having national & local footprints with continued investment in local organizing while building national alliances and coalitions that connect the local to the national. 
  3. Developing and training new movement leaders, particularly Black, Brown, LGBTQIA+, and youth leaders.

$600k for Economic, Gender, and Repro/Birth Justice

Opportunity & Equality for All Impact Collective

In 2022, we experienced unceasing attacks on reproductive rights. As the legal landscape continues to shift, more and more communities – especially poor people, people of color, and young people – may face criminalization for accessing reproductive support and services.

The Opportunity & Equality (O&E) Impact Collective has always been committed to fighting for economic equality and security, combating workplace harassment, and gender-based violence, which are inextricably linked to bodily autonomy. Over the last two years, we’ve become more intentional about including reproductive and birth justice in our funding, recognizing that abortion is healthcare and cannot be separated from struggles against racism, economic inequality, homophobia, transphobia, and other systems of oppression. 

In our first round of grantmaking this year, we reinvested in organizations providing critical movement infrastructure and working at the intersections of reproductive, birth, economic/worker, and gender justice.

Opportunity & Equality For All moved $600k in the first round of grantmaking, with six $100k renewals for:

Opportunity & Equality For All’s Strategic Guideposts

In addition to WDN’s overarching funding principles, Opportunity & Equality For All’s steering committee maintains a strategic framework of supporting:

  1. Frontline workers organizing at the state-based/local (especially in critical electoral states) and national level to fight for worker and gender justice.
  2. Policy change advocacy, including legislative advocacy for worker justice issues like childcare, paid leave, and affordable housing.
  3. Reproductive and birth justice including legal support, policy advocacy, messaging, and community building.

$700k to Youth Organizing & Protecting Our Democracy

Participation & Representation For All

In recent years, our democracy has faced various challenges and attacks, both foreign and domestic, leading to a rise of authoritarianism, domestic extremism, political polarization, and disinformation.

Our Participation & Representation For All Impact Collective has a history of supporting organizations advancing gender, racial, and voter justice and protecting our democracy. Following the Dobbs decision, we also intentionally deepened our commitment to supporting leadership development, capacity building, and Black and Indigenous women-led work at the intersection of voter and reproductive justice. 

In our first round of grantmaking this year, we supported organizations focused on youth voter engagement and protecting our democracy.

Our Participation & Representation For All Impact Collective moved $700k in the first round of grantmaking, with seven $100k grants to:

Participation & Representation For All’s Strategic Guideposts

In addition to WDN’s overarching funding principles, Participation & Representation For All’s steering committee maintains a strategic framework of:

  1. Expanding voting access through policy advocacy around automatic and same-day registration, voting rights restoration, and other election security measures.
  2. Election reform to ensure our government is genuinely reflective of our country and all voices are represented. Efforts include addressing gerrymandering, partisan gridlock, no-choice elections, and barriers to fair representation.
  3. Combatting mis/disinformation that targets and polarizes marginalized groups and holding media institutions accountable for their roles in spreading harmful, misleading info.

$525k for Trusted and New Climate Justice Comrades

Safe & Sustainable Future For All

We’re witnessing the destruction of our ecosystems and our movement partners are calling on us to take action. Over the last year, we’ve seen the harmful escalation of corporate power and corporations promoting “false solutions” like net zero, carbon capture, and greenwashing, furthering systemic injustices. Urgent, collective action is required to slash emissions and enhance the resilience of communities. 

The Safe & Sustainable Impact Collective is committed to grassroots solutions, narrative strategies, and civic engagement led by women of color and communities most impacted by the dual crises of capitalism and climate change.

On the heels of a $100k rapid response grant to Power Shift Network (PSN), our committee leaned into long-term partnerships and new strategic opportunities with our first round of grantmaking in 2023. 

Safe & Sustainable Future For All recently moved $525k:

$100k rapid response grant to:

$75K each to:

$25k each to:

Safe & Sustainable Future For All’s Strategic Guideposts

In addition to WDN’s overarching funding principles, Safe & Sustainable Future For All’s steering committee maintains a strategic framework of:

  1. BIPOC-led Just Transition efforts, emphasizing Black and Indigenous women’s leadership throughout the U.S. and Global South.
  2. Narrative and culture change strategies that advance an intersectional, feminist environmental justice perspective for confronting the root causes of climate change and developing solutions with real potential for enacting a Just Transition.
  3. Issue-based power-building and organizing to convey the urgency of the climate crisis through messaging, political power-building, and holding the fossil fuel industry, its enablers, and proxies (i.e. elected officials, corporations, etc.) accountable for their harmful roles.

What’s Next

Each of the initiatives featured in this grant update will continue to support existing partnerships while also exploring new opportunities to ensure that our impact is both deep and wide-ranging. In May our grantmaking steering committees will coalesce for another all-initiatives call to continue strategizing, learning, and planning. 2023 is another year of funding movements to power justice. 

If you’d like to read about some of our other grantmaking, take a look at the latest impact report from our Abortion Bridge Collaborative Fund.

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