Client News
This week, Grantmakers for Girls of Color, co-founding organizations, and grantee partners celebrated the third anniversary of the Black Girl Freedom Fund and the #1Billion4BlackGirls campaign. They marked this tremendous milestone with a video highlighting all they have accomplished in three years, and the supporters and grantee partners – especially the youth of color, that co-created a beautiful community built around and dedicated to resourcing the braintrust, innovation, health, safety, education, artistic visions, research, and joy of Black girls, femmes and gender-expansive youth and their families. Follow Grantmakers for Girls of Color on social media to watch the video and for the announcement of their latest grantee partners next week.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Walter & Elise Haas Fund embarked on a learning journey to explore new pathways for supporting young people in the Bay Area to find the education and opportunities they deserve, particularly BIPOC-identified public school youth in Oakland and San Francisco. The results, they hoped, would help shape a new model for what it looks like to truly engage and support youth who have historically lacked the power to make decisions about their education, communities, and futures. Pui Ling Tam, Program Lead for the Fund’s Economic Well-being program, offers this piece about how they seek to shift power with a new approach to youth-led grantmaking.
Despite the billions of dollar funders pledged to advance racial equity and racial justice following the murder of George Floyd and the massive protests that followed, it comes as no surprise that many people-of-color-led organizations, especially those that operate on a smaller scale, still struggle to access funding. A new report from Young, Black & Giving Back demonstrates the extent of the challenges facing Black-led and -benefiting organizations and their leadership — by and large women of color — and how funders can better support Black-led and Black-serving nonprofit organizations. Learn more about the report and YBGB at Inside Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Times.
The San Francisco Bay Area arts community is still in recovery from the devastation of COVID-19. In the early days of the pandemic, arts funders in the Bay Area rushed to meet the moment by making emergency funds available, but a recent report shows that despite the influx of cash, grantseekers still struggled to find and access funds, and funding was unevenly distributed across counties. In response to learnings from this important research, and to better support the essential arts culture that so defines our region, three foundations collaborated to launch a common application to streamline the grantseeking process for artists and grassroots arts organizations and distribute resources more equitably. Learn more about the Common Application for the Arts in this piece from Margot Melcon from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Shelley Trott from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and David Blazevich from the Fleishhacker Foundation in Philanthropy News Digest.
Change Learning Hub
The Change Consulting team shares tips, tricks, wisdom, and lessons learned from working with changemakers to advance racial justice.
Over the last 15 years, Twitter cemented itself as our digital town square. For many of us, #BlackTwitter especially has served as a communal grounds for sharing jobs and creative opportunities, fortifying movements, and for marginalized folks to converse and strengthen our individual fights for our collective liberation. It was only a matter of time before a space like that came under attack.
As the platform’s new ownership makes it more and more difficult for organizing to occur, and much easier for Black and queer people to be inundated with hate speech and right-wing accounts, It feels imminent that the next time we log in, Twitter (or X as it was recently rebranded to) will be completely unusable. Kiah Albritton, Change Consulting’s lead digital media strategist, offers emerging alternatives and suggestions on how to strengthen our digital community on the other, existing apps, in a new post for our blog.