Supporting Strong Grassroots Movements Led By Women of Color and Transgender People: Liberation Fund Update

Building a vibrant grassroots base to win large-scale social change. 

In the wake of a game-changing election in 2017, Groundswell started the Liberation Fund to support the strongest grassroots organizing efforts led by women of color and transgender people across social justice sectors.

A joint project of Groundswell Fund and Groundswell Action Fund, the Liberation Fund supports the strongest grassroots organizing efforts led by women of color and transgender people of color across social justice sectors. Grantees are recommended by an advisory group of 14 prominent grassroots leaders of color from various U.S. social justice movements.

Throughout 2023, the Liberation Fund grantees fought against the prison and immigration industrial complex, pushed back against gentrification, defended community members’ homes from developers and corporate giants like Amazon, championed for the dignity and livelihood of trans and gender-expansive people, and uplifted environmental justice.

As part of our 2020-2025 Blueprint, Groundswell Fund committed to expanding the amount of resources we move to women of color and trans and gender-expansive people of color-led climate justice work by complementing and bolstering key ally funder efforts.

We’re thrilled to report, that Groundswell’s Liberation Fund made its first specific grants for Climate Justice work through a $100,000 grantmaking partnership with Astraea Lesbian Foundation.

In 2023, the Liberation Fund awarded $1.5 million to 17 grantees across the country.

Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA)

Promoting personal transformation and building community power for social and economic justice

MUA trains member-leaders in California to lead organizing campaigns for immigrants, workers, and women’s rights. Through their statewide campaigning, MUA led efforts in finalizing the Domestic Worker Health and Safety Act, approved in the California state legislature in November 2023, making domestic worker health and safety guidelines enforceable.

MUA also served on the California Domestic Workers Coalition, helping to solidify a permanent new state budget for the Domestic Worker and Employer Outreach Program, which will distribute funding to community-run domestic worker and employer outreach programs statewide.

“These [domestic] workers deserve the same protections working in a home as workers in other workplaces.”

— Kim Alvarenga, Executive Director of the California Domestic Workers Coalition

SOURCE: gswell.info/MAUquote

Black Youth Project100 (BYP100)

In 2023, BYP100 celebrated a vote by Chicago’s Community Commission on Public Safety andAccountability to erase the city’s racist and ineffective gang database. This vote cameafter years of BYP100 working with other community organizations in the Erase theGang Database coalition to get rid of a system that unfairly targets and criminalizes Black andBrown people.

Community groups held rallies, protests, and press conferences, as well as drove petitions andfiled lawsuits to end the database, which was deemed ineffective by the city’s Inspector General in an April 2019 audit. Though the coalition knows this is just the first step in ending the city’s harmful surveillance practices, BYP100 is committed to ensuring no other databases are created and that those harmed by this system are made whole again.

Social justice movements had a steep uphill climb in 2023, and 2024 has been even harder as we navigate the Supreme Court’s reversal of affirmative action, attacks on gender-affirming care, the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, climate change, vilification of immigrants, and the rise of fascism. 

Philanthropy must invest in the movements working to transform policies, systems, and material conditions that impact lives. That’s why we continue to support grantee partners that are building a vibrant grassroots base with the scale, sustainability, and integrity necessary to win large-scale social change and dramatically improve the material conditions of those at the intersection of race, class, and gender oppression.

Together, we can ensure grassroots organizations have the resources and support needed to fight for our future. Our liberation is bound to one another’s, and the surest way to freedom is to follow and fund those who know the way.