Freedom Requires Investment

August CEO Update, from Yamani Yansá Hernandez

You may have noticed this newsletter arrives a week later, a couple of days into September. That’s because every year, August invites us to think about liberation differently. This year, we dreamt and organized anew, gathering our network of reproductive and social justice leaders through an in-person convening in Memphis, Tennessee, for three days of community-building, listening, and sense-making for our movement nationwide.

This is Black August’s legacy.

Black August began as a time to honor the lives, sacrifices, and political organizing of Black freedom fighters and political prisoners. Their struggles helped shape the movement for Black liberation, rooted in reflection, political education, discipline, and collective action. August should remind us that freedom requires more than aspiration — it has always required people willing to organize, sacrifice, and imagine a future beyond the one we’ve inherited.

Movements endure because communities invest in one another — in leadership, in relationships, in institutions, and in the long work of building a more just future. Freedom and democracy have always required deep financial and community investments.

As primary elections continue across the country, we witness the results of years of community organizing, leadership development, and civic education — despite the most volatile organizing landscape in our recent history. Election cycles may capture the headlines, but the work of building a truly representative democracy happens every day in our neighborhoods, schools, and communities of faith, sustained by the health clinics and local organizations where people seek relationships, share information, and solve problems together.

Despite the bleak realities, we share in the light of knowing democracy doesn’t begin when ballots are cast. It begins much earlier, in the everyday work of people helping others understand the issues shaping their lives, strengthening local leadership, and ensuring that communities have the relationships and resources they need to participate fully in civic life.

Groundswell invests in local, grassroots organizations because our partners understand that bodily autonomy is a cornerstone of democracy. They experience it every single day.

In Pennsylvania and Ohio, New Voices for Reproductive Justice helps people connect the issues they face  – like healthcare, pregnancy, parenting, and voting – to the decisions being made in their communities. They knock on doors, bring neighbors together, develop local leaders, and create opportunities for people to shape the policies that affect their lives. Their work reminds us that democracy isn’t something that happens every election cycle. It grows when people have the knowledge, confidence, and opportunity to participate in decisions that affect them.

In Florida, Commonsense Childbirth has spent decades proving what becomes possible when communities invest in care. Founded to address the unacceptable disparities in maternal and infant health experienced by Black families, they provide community-based maternity care, train doulas and midwives, and surround families with the support they need to experience healthy pregnancies and births. Their model has consistently produced healthier outcomes than state and national averages, demonstrating what is possible when care is rooted in trust, community, and dignity. Their work is a reminder that bodily autonomy is about more than the freedom to make a choice.

For generations, Black communities have pooled resources, cared for one another, funded local leadership, and built institutions when larger systems failed to do so. Long before philanthropy recognized grassroots organizing as essential, communities were already investing in each other because survival required it.

Today, these grassroots organizations remind us that movements are not built through moments alone. They are built through sustained investment.

That lesson sits at the heart of Black Philanthropy Month, and that legacy continues today.

Every grant we make is an investment in people already building the future. Every organizer supported, every birth worker trained, every young leader mentored, every family connected to care, and every community equipped to participate more fully in civic life strengthens the foundation upon which democracy depends.

It’s long been told that freedom demands sacrifice. Black August teaches us that there is no way to lose if we invest in ourselves. So we continue to build together, generation after generation.

Thank you for continuing to invest in that work.