As we recognize Black Philanthropy Month with One Million Black Women initiative investment in the Future Economy Lab, we have important announcements and ‘save the date’ reminders!
Dear Community,
August is Black Philanthropy Month! Founded by Dr. Jackie Bouvier Copeland, Black Philanthropy Month is a powerful movement to celebrate and empower Black funding in all its forms. We are proud to be a part of this global effort to amplify the philanthropic contributions of Black communities– especially Black girls, femmes and gender-expansive youth!
We kicked off the month with an announcement about an exciting investment in The Future Economy Lab: Abundantly Investing in Girls, Femmes, and Gender-Expansive Youth of Color. This is a partnership between G4GC and SecondMuse Capital, and the investment was made by Goldman Sachs’ One Million Black Women Initiative (read the announcement below!).
This has been a full summer at G4GC! We celebrated our New Songs Rising Initiative anniversary, culminated 2 years of learning and building together with a Youth Advisory Retreat in New York and have continued to grow our G4GC team. Through it all, we continue to be steadfast in our mission to mobilize resources to support organizations, movements, and strategies led by and centering girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth of Color. We are grateful to be in community with you as part of this critical effort. We also welcome you to check out a few things that have inspired us this summer below!
Stay tuned for exciting announcements this fall as we gear up for our annual convening (Mark your calendars for Oct. 25th-28th, and an in-person Festival celebrating our youth Oct. 29th.Details to come!) and introduce some new additions to our growing team!
In Community,
All of us at Grantmakers For Girls of Color
Goldman Sachs’ One Million Black Women initiative investment will directly support Black girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth between the ages of 13 and 24, as well as thought leaders and movement leaders in co-creating and co-designing financial tools to advance racial equity through our Future Economy Lab.
“Giving Black girls the financial tools to shape and contribute to the broader economy is a smart investment,” said Asahi Pompey, President of the Goldman Sachs Foundation.
Historically, the financial structures that make up our economies have been developed through highly exclusive and extractive processes at the expense of communities that have experienced centuries of systemic oppression. The Future Economy Lab is already underway and we have an advisory group of more than thirty girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth of Color, ages 13 to 24, who will engage in a year-long paid process. They will learn different economic theories and approaches, share their own expertise as young and active participants in the economy, and engage directly with stakeholders including leaders in the financial sector and social movements to achieve economic justice.
“We are thrilled to receive this investment for the Future Economy Lab, which is an opportunity to engage Black girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth in the economic development and financial literacy efforts from which they have been historically marginalized while shifting the narrative about the capacity of our young people to be effective leaders in financial spaces,” said Dr. Monique W. Morris, our G4GC President and CEO.
In addition to Goldman Sachs’ One Million Black Women initiative, the lab has received generous support from Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda French Gates company.
G4GC YOUTH RETREAT IN NYC
At the end of June, we invited and hosted a fabulous gathering of G4GC Youth Advisors from all over the country for a retreat in Brooklyn!
This retreat was a culmination, after nearly two years of learning and building together virtually with the Youth Advisory Committee and Design Team, as well as the Black Girl Freedom Fund Youth Grantmaking Council.
There were 13 girls, femmes and gender-expansive youth of Color who joined us to further distill their insights around what it means to engage and center young people of Color in philanthropy, to deepen their relationships with each other and the G4GC community, and to celebrate their work and leadership. “I really enjoyed spending time with all of the other girls* in real time,” recounted one of the youth advisors, Zen, of her experience after finally meeting the other youth advisors in person.
Our G4GC team remains grateful to these amazing young contributors, and will continue to lean on their wisdom as we engage young people in our communities and in our work.
(Photo: Members of the Youth Advisory Committee and Design Team and the Black Girl Freedom Fund Youth Grantmaking Council gather for lunch at G4GC offices. Credit: Lisann Ramos, G4GG, used with consent from the youth in the image).
On July 28 we celebrated one year of our New Songs Rising Initiative with an enriching webinar hosted with our partners at Seventh Generation Fund For Indigenous Peoples. We heard from our grantee partners at Tewa Women United, Hmong American Women’s Association, Gedakina, First Peoples Fund and The Northeast Network of Kinship and Healing. Most importantly, we discussed the role that Indigenous girls play in communities and larger efforts to achieve justice, and why it is so critical to resource them.
G4GC advisory board member and CEO of Seventh Generation Fund, Tia Oros Peters, said it best, “Our purpose, our role and our responsibility in our work is to support the good that’s happening in communities. To support our peoples. Our women, our girls, throughout the Indigenous world.”
You can watch the webinar in its entirety on G4C’s YouTube channel. And in the words of one of our panelists, Nefititi Jette from The Northeast Network of Kinship and Healing, “Take a deep breath in, and exhale that, and realize that we are the continued breaths of our grandmothers.”
SAVE THE DATE: G4GC ANNUAL CONVENING & YOUTH FEST!
We’re busy planning an exciting 2022 G4GC annual convening, and we have exciting surprises that you won’t want to miss! This year we will also have a Youth Festival on October 29th in NY where we will come together to center and celebrate the beauty, diversity, and energy of our youth!
More details to come, but mark your calendars now for the week of October 25th-29th, 2022!
Movement-led Kolibri Foundation launched their inaugural grantmaking cycle with $27 million available in support funds over the next 5 years.
With $5.2 million confirmed in support funds for 2022, proposals for the Summer 2022 Cycle can be submitted until August 31 from organizations working to address root causes and impacts of structural state and interpersonal violence.
For updates and to be part of a moment in history when social justice initiatives center BIPOC experiences, click here to subscribe to the Kolibri Foundation newsletter. Inquiries can also be directed to [email protected]. Assisting in the launch and overall communication strategy, Kolibri is collaborating with Black Heart, a creative agency in the space of Extended Reality (XR).
The Collective Identity Mentoring is currently seeking mentors for its Abound programlaunching this fall semester! Centered on helping Black girls, women, and gender-expansive youth ages 18-25 transition from adolescence into adulthood and professional life, the program features “level-ups” to help mentees prepare resumes, gain critical networking skills, and broaden their horizons through confabs and excursions.
They are seeking mentors who can commit to at least one (1) year of mentorship and dedicate 3-6 hours per month to their mentee via 1:1 in person meetings (when permissible), connect via phone, text, email and other forms of communication. Mentors should be able to attend TCI cultural excursions with their mentees on September 3, and October 29. Apply to volunteer as a mentor
FIGHTING AGAINST JUSTICE FEES AND FINES
Julissa Soto’s son stole a tube of toothpaste; at the end of his involvement in the justice system altogether she paid $8,000 in fees and fines.
Our grantee partner, Alianza for Youth Justice, just released a national fact sheet about the understudied negative impacts of fees and fines on Indigenous, AfroLatinx, Brown, Two Spirit, and LGBTQI+ youth as part of the national campaign for #DebtFreeJustice.
At its core, eliminating youth fees and fines is a racial/ ethnic/gender equity and economic justice issue.
You can follow @alianzaforyouth and @debtfreejustice and sign up for their webinarcoming up on August 17th.
“Last month, Disney+ released Ms. Marvel, which tells the story of Kamala Khan, a 16-year-old Pakistani girl from Jersey City who unlocks her superpowers from a magical bangle passed to her by her grandmother. The show features beautiful music, direction, art, and scriptwriting from some of the most incredible Muslim and South Asian creatives.
I was invited to attend the premiere of the film by our dear friends at Pillars Fund, which featured Iman Vellani, the show’s lead, creator Sana Ali, and award-winning journalist and Oscar-winning director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy! I cannot describe what it meant to sit in a theater surrounded by other Muslim South Asians celebrating the power and possibility of us. As someone who has worn bangles passed from my aunts and elders, almost every day of my life, Ms. Marvel unlocked so much joy in me!
My favorite moment was when Kamala is sitting on a roof with her best friend and says ‘It’s not really the Brown girls from Jersey City who save the world,’ and he replies ‘Maybe now they do.’”
~Maheen Kaleem, Our VP of Operations and Programs
CARE WORK: DREAMING DISABILITY JUSTICE
“Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a disabled, brown, queer activist transforming the future of movement. They posit that creating webs of care and healing are essential to liberation for all bodyminds,” writes Nahr Suha, Fund Manager for our Holding A Sister Initiative who is inspired by Leah’s book, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (pub. 2018).
“Care Work is a guide and hope for creating access for disabled folks in ways that would radically change the way we exist in space together and how we value one another and ourselves,” writes Nahr. “This books taps into intricate concepts and metaphors for a future that we all deserve such as: the meaning and multiverse of femme identities, lessons in leadership from survivors, queer and trans superabilities, and fair trade emotional labor – to name a few.”
Nahr also recommends Leah’s episode of the podcast Gender Reveal.
HOW SIGN LANGUAGE EVOLVES AS OUR WORLD DOES
Learn about the history of Black American Sign Language in this article recommendation by our Black Girl Freedom Fund Manager, Cidra Sebastien, recommends a short read articlethat explores how American Sign Language continues to shift and expand. “The article shares the fact that Black American Sign Language developed separately from ASL because of segregation in deaf schools, how ASL has expanded to express gender neutral words and phrases, and how it has shifted to express new technologies like the rotary phone to smartphone,” writes Cidra.
- 9: International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples
- 12: International Youth Day
- 23: International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition
- 26: Women’s Equality Day
September 2022
- 2-year anniversary of Black Girl Freedom Fund (celebration details to come)
Does your organization have a funding opportunity, upcoming conference, or other celebration centering girls of Color you want to share with the G4GC community? Or an important date to be included in our upcoming calendar section? Email them to [email protected] with “newsletter” in the subject line for consideration 6-8 weeks before the event or date.
*When G4GC refers to “girls of color” we include any cis, trans, gender-expansive, non-binary and/or any girl- or femme-identified person age 25 and younger who identifies as Black, Indigenous, Latin, Asian, Arab, Pacific Islander, and/or other People of Color.