Client News:
Black Girl Freedom Week wraps up tomorrow with a special Announcement about new grant opportunities from Black Girl Freedom Fund, a Party with Girls Make Beats! and a Recap of Black Girl Freedom Week. This celebration of the dreams, creativity, and leadership of Black girls, femmes and gender-expansive youth is much needed in this moment. We come away from the third annual, week-long event deeply inspired by the Black artists, activists, innovators, and girls and gender-expansive youth who participated, and more motivated than ever to do what we can to help achieve our shared vision for co-creating a future where Black girls and women are safe, free, and thriving.
Dr. Monique Couvson, president and CEO of Grantmakers for Girls of Color and a co-founder of Black Girl Freedom Fund, recently spoke with Danielle Wright of Girls United about the importance of lifting up Black women and girls’ leadership: “Our primary goal of having Black Girl Freedom week is to shout from the mountaintops that deep intelligence and amazing contributions that Black girls and femmes bring to this world.”
Essence included highlights from Dr. Couvson’s conversation with award-winning writer, director, and producer Gina Prince-Bythewood, known for creating space to engage with the artistic genius and contributions of Black women and girls, and from the woman-centered “Love & Basketball” and “The Woman King.” And in case you missed it, Black Girl Freedom Fund manager Cidra Sebastien wrote this piece for theGrio about the focus on arts and culture this year.
Visit bgfw.1billion4blackgirls.org more more information about the #1BillionforBlackGirls campaign and videos from the week’s events. And make sure to follow Black Girl Freedom Fund on social media to hear how the fund supports the leadership of Black girls and women year round: Twitter: @BlkGrlFreedom; Instagram: @BlackGirlFreedomFund; Facebook: Black Girl Freedom Fund; LinkedIn: Black Girl Freedom Fund.
Coming Up
On February 23, Zellerbach Family Foundation and Northern California Grantmakers will host an essential discussion for the immigration justice movement. Crimmigration and the API Community: Disrupting the School to Prison to Deportation Pipeline will include a conversation to better understand how crimmigration impacts the Asian Pacific Islander community, how organizations like the Asian Prisoner Support Committee are supporting incarcerated and formerly incarcerated API individuals, and how funders can support work to disrupt the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline. Register for this free event at ncg.org.
Change Learning Hub
The Change Consulting team shares tips, tricks, wisdom, and lessons learned from working with changemakers in the movement for racial justice.
Any effective communications strategy for an individual or organization must be based on a deep understanding of the landscape within which you operate, and your unique strengths, challenges, and opportunities. But how best to capture key elements of the complex ecosystem where the strategy will live? Dina Sigal, Change Consulting Communications Director of Strategy wrote a new piece for our blog that describes how we use research and insights to build effective communications strategies in alignment with our ethos of action over theory: “By leading with curiosity and grounding ourselves in the context our clients operate in, we can use what we learn to design communications strategies, tactics, and deliverables that advance the change they seek.”
More at the Change Consulting blog.
What We’re Reading
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police in 2020, Black- and people-of-color-led organizations saw a surge in financial support. Yet just two years later, funders had already reverted to the status quo. According to new research from the Nonprofit Finance Fund, not only does money flow unequally to white-led and minority-led organizations, donations to white-led nonprofits were almost two times as likely to be unrestricted funding. Resourcing organizations that represent their communities, and allowing them to spend the money according to the priorities of the people they serve, is a critical step in dismantling white supremacy and anti-Blackness. More about an initiative the research firm Candid is leading to close the racial gap in funding in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.