Good Practice Feature: The Third Wave Fund’s New Grow Power Fund
In this sector we tend to end our meetings and conversations with a list of action items and priorities for funding. In the following Q&A with Third Wave Fund Executive Director Rye Young, learn how the Grow Power Fund has implemented so many of these ideals – long-term and core support, capacity building, addressing root causes – in an new initiative built to “put resources in the hands of visionary young women of color, queer and trans youth of color, and low-income youth to form their own solutions, and to build long-term power.” FCAA is pleased to share this example of good practice and to encourage HIV-related funders to consider how gender justice intersects with your work.
1. The Third Wave Fund recently announced the launch of the new Grow Power Fund. Could you tell us about this new opportunity?
The Grow Power Fund is a new initiative the Third Wave Fund launched in January 2016. We set out to design a funding strategy around the long-term needs of community-led organizations. Specifically, we were interested in growing power within communities and regions that have lacked investment from philanthropy, but have some of the most acute needs.
Grow Power will offer up to six years of support for emerging organizations that haven’t yet received significant funding from national foundations. The fund will prioritize groups with budgets of under $200,000 that are located in under-resourced areas and are led by low-income youth of color. Grants will be for up to $40,000 per year for general operating support, capacity building, and ongoing organizational development coach. The coaching will support the groups with organizational development goals, and will help co-design the capacity building approach each year. Beyond simply providing financial support, we will provide grantees with multiple resources that will enable them to leverage this opportunity and address long-term challenges. In Third Wave’s experience as a grantmaker, we’ve had the most impact when we focused our efforts on activism that emerges out of necessity in the faces of significant political challenges. We want these grants to lift up creative and visionary organizing work that is coming from a place of deep need. We’ve seen that organizations that are flying below the radar, and might not even be searchable on Google, can make a tremendous impact of given the right opportunity.
2. What was the process behind the fund’s creation? Was there community involvement?
We took a pause on our grantmaking in 2014 to go through a strategic re-envisioning process. We wanted to redesign our grantmaking to ensure we met the needs of the communities we serve during the evolving political challenges of our time. We asked past grantees what worked about our grantmaking, what would they change, and what internal and external barriers their organizations and leaders face. The new Grow Power Fund is the result of these conversations. We learned that there is a historic under-resourcing of and lack of progressive infrastructure in the communities and regions most vulnerable to conservative attacks. We will therefore work to direct Grow Power funding to places that other funders are likely to overlook. We also learned that leaders of small organizations felt that they needed to have a large budget in order to access grant funding and that they saw no way to grow to the level of scale that larger national funders would recognize unless they already had access to large-scale funding. This fund is designed to address this cyclical problem—serving as a pipeline for resources and coaching that will work with organizations for up to six years and will allow them to reach their goals in terms of capacity, scale, and power to affect change.
4. Can you give an example of the type of gender justice organizing work that you might envision being supported by the Fund? What does gender justice encompass?
We recently developed an online resource called ‘What is Gender Justice?’ because the term means many different things to different people! To us, gender justice is as a movement to end patriarchy, transphobia, and homophobia and to create a world free from misogyny. It is also a movement that sees gender oppression as interwoven with all other forms of oppression. The Grow Power Fund has received 92 letters of intent from organizations that work on a huge range of gender justice issues, including sex workers rights, ending sexual violence, HIV decriminalization, and the organizing efforts of trans women of color. Amidst this diversity of issues, every proposal addresses the right to exercise control over our own bodies, our sexualities, our reproduction, and our genders. We call all of that work gender justice. We like Gender Justice as a framework because it is specific and yet expansive enough to hold work that might fall under the categories of Feminist Liberation, Reproductive Justice, and LGBTQ Liberation.
In our approach to grantmaking, we encourage proposals that don’t fit neatly into a single issue. This strategy is important to us because, while the communities that are the targets of attacks pretty much stay the same, their needs are always changing and evolving in response to political and social climate. For example, conservative forces target women of color in multiple ways: women of color bear the brunt of harmful economic policies and of attacks on reproductive health, violence against transgender women often disproportionately affects transgender women of color, and so on. If we want to see strong grassroots infrastructure that can take on evolving conservative attacks and systemic long-term challenges, we need to be more flexible about our issue areas and we need to support communities working to build power for the long-haul. Some of the most important struggles of our time (and some of the most vital actions that we have funded) are cross-issue, cross-movement, and highly adaptive. We ought to function the same way in philanthropy—so that the way we do our funding actually keeps pace with the needs of our communities.
5. How has reaction been to this announcement?
Across the board, organizations that learn about this fund get very excited. Activists have said things like, “If I could design a foundation I would do it that way!” When I’m talking with staff-members of other foundations, I hear things like, “I wish I had the freedom to fund this way,” or “that’s so exciting that you can fund this way, but we could never support emerging groups for that many years.” Launching the fund has led to a lot of great conversations about the barriers that program officers face with their grantmaking decisions, the nuanced political implications of our sector’s limitations, and how those limitations may work against our good intentions. Thankfully we’ve had a number of foundations see the Grow Power Fund as a way that they can support the development of grassroots power even if they themselves are unable to fund emerging and small organizations or make multi-year commitments within a diverse range of issues.
6. How can people get involved?
We are always looking for new foundations to partner with! We consider this a pilot phase, starting with five to six grantees. It is our desire to be able to scale up the project by increasing the grantee cohort each year, building up to a natural progression of some groups cycling on each year, and some cycling off. This means we will need to grow the fund consistently over the next six years. We would like to find partners that already fund in the area of gender justice, but who lack a way to support youth leadership and small organizations. We are also looking to partner with funders in sectors that may be aware that gender is an important issue, but haven’t necessarily incorporated a gender lens into their work. When you look at the communities we support – young women of color, queer and transgender people of color – their issues cut across all philanthropic sectors but their funding tends to come only from the LGBTQ, Women’s, or Reproductive Justice funds. We want to build partnerships across the spectrum of funders, in order to really put intersectional thinking into practice.
7. You recently spoke about philanthropic justice at the International Human Rights Funders Group conference in San Francisco. What advice would you give to funders who may be new to or considering new methods of applying a social justice lens to their work?
When you look at the larger field of philanthropy, there is a direct correlation between under-resourced regions and communities, and the regions and communities that experience the most acute attacks on human rights. It doesn’t matter the issue – you could be looking at women’s rights, HIV, abortion, LGBTQ rights, education reform, etc. So to only fund where there is existing capacity and strong infrastructure is to reinforce this trend. Funders need to ask, “Where are things the worst? Who bears the brunt of injustice?” If there’s a lack of large and stable grantees in these areas or led by these communities, then we need to focus on capacity building, and grantmaking at the grassroots level in order to address the gap between needs and resources. It is also important to think about how to best structure our grants in order to contribute to organizational stability that will outlast our foundations’ relationship to a group, region, or community. It’s a do no harm approach. Mindfulness and analysis of inequality within the nonprofit sector is critical for long-term and meaningful change.
About Rye: Rye Young is Third Wave Fund’s first Executive Director, carrying Third Wave Foundation’s work forward at its new Proteus Fund home. He began his career as an abortion fund hotline intern at Third Wave Foundation. Rye served in various program roles at Third Wave, and dedicated himself to developing systems for impact measurement and grantmaking, while crafting programs that met the needs of Third Wave’s grassroots, community-based organizations. Rye strives towards a gender justice movement that is strong and interconnected across other social justice movements. He was a Grace Paley Organizing Fellow with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and serves on the Board of Directors of Funders for LGBTQ Issues and the New York Abortion Access Fund. Questions or interests in partnering with the Grow Power Fund or Third Wave? Contact Rye [email protected]