Why we’re heading to the Sexual Violence Research Initiative Forum in Cape Town, South Africa
CFF Announces 2024 Grantmaking
CFF’s Grantmaking in 2024 to Support Safety and Survivor Justice Movement Organizations
This year, CFF is making grants to 50 organizations totaling more than $6 Million in general operating funding over the next two years, nearly all of which are renewed funding to existing grantee partners.
The ecosystem that CFF’s grants support
We support movement-building organizations that are addressing gendered, sexualized, and racialized violence through policy, advocacy, organizing, and services and support for survivors. We fund ecosystems, rather than siloed issues or strategies. We purposefully resource a mix of organizations — small to large annual budgets, as well as local, regional, national and transnational groups. We focus on groups that are historically and systemically under-resourced, and our grants are sized to support individual groups over multiple years within this diverse ecosystem.
The safety and survivor-justice organizations we fund are also rooted in economic justice, reproductive justice, education, racial justice, immigrant rights, and much more — because comprehensive solutions to addressing violence must be intersectional.
Their work addresses interpersonal violence as well as state and structural violence. They utilize an array of strategies to do this — policy, organizing, legal advocacy, healing justice, arts, narrative change, and direct services.
We prioritize work that centers survivors, Black, Indigenous, and women of color, queer, trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people of color, people of color with disabilities, and im/migrants, who are cultivating community and sustaining transformational work. The groups we fund often aim to challenge the status quo, focusing on creating survivor-centered, community-based solutions independent of the state. Many seek to reimagine entire systems, recognizing colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism as the root causes of violence. Additionally, they organize beyond borders, utilizing transnational feminist networking, organizing, and solidarity.
Our approach also shows up in the kind of strategies for impact that we fund. We focus on interwoven strategies, which grantee partners carry out in tandem. Here are just a few examples of how these strategies show up in the work we support:
- Centering survivors and their communities’ needs to stop and prevent gendered, sexualized, and racialized violence, including providing direct support, spaces for healing, and responding to acute and ongoing situations of harm and violence:
Transforming Generations created a sexual assault curriculum tailored for Hmong, Southeast Asian, and queer communities called “Journey Towards Collective Care” as a training manual for anti-violence advocates and community members in Minnesota and the surrounding area.
An organization of Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ+ survivors, Waking Women Healing Institute reclaims traditional pathways for healing and development through practices such as birthing, rites of passage, traditional medicines, and land and water protection.
- Organizing for civic participation, policy advocacy, community organizing, and base-building to change systems that enable violence to occur:
Feminist Alliance for Rights’ work addresses the marginalization of feminist voices from the Global South by facilitating the participation and influence of feminist voices in international and local policymaking connected to ending violence and harassment in the world of work through ILO Convention 190.
The CARES (Creating, Affirming, Responsive, Equitable, Schools) initiative created by National Black Women’s Justice Institute aims to end school pushout by transforming schools into the nurturing, caring, and supportive educational spaces that Black girls & gender-expansive youth and all students deserve, where they can grow and thrive.
- Advancing safety narratives that are rooted in gender, racial, and economic justice and changing community norms around safety and accountability:
HEART Women & Girls is changing community norms through “The Sex Talk: A Muslim’s Guide to Healthy Sex and Relationships,” a workshop and resource designed by HEART for sexual health literacy that is sex positive, inclusive, comprehensive, and considers how faith and cultural identity can intersect with sexuality and relationships.
- Building skills and capacity for transformative, community-rooted safety practices, including digital and physical security infrastructure to protect women and gender expansive people of color against threats to safety:
Reclaiming Our Own Transcendence’s core program Healing Cycles of Harm meets the needs of BIPOC survivors and those impacted by violence through an abolitionist, collective accountability, wellness-circle model.
We believe deeply in the incredible power and strength of this movement, and the important work grantee partners have been doing to address violence and create safety in spite of an increasingly challenging political environment and funding landscape.
We see supporting these movement-building organizations as a key element of working towards a future free from violence, where everyone experiences collective safety, shared abundance, joy, and power.
CFF's 2024 Grantee Partners
A Long Walk Home
AAPI Women Lead
Acorn Center for Restoration and Freedom
African American Policy Forum
Alianza Nacional de Campesinas
Asia Floor Wage Alliance
Black Girls Restored
Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project
Black Women’s Blueprint/Restore Forward
Coalition for Restaurant Safety and Health
Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women
Colectivo Ilé
Creative Interventions
El/La Para TransLatinas
Equality Labs
EveryBlackGirl
Feminist Alliance for Rights
Free Hearts
Freedom, Inc.
Girls for Gender Equity
The HEAL Project
Healing to Action
HEART Women & Girls
In Our Names Network
International Domestic Workers Federation
Jahajee Sisters
JASS/Just Power
Justice for Migrant Women
Matahari Women Workers Center
metoo. International
Miami Workers Center
MO Ho Justice
Mother Nation
Moving Mountains
National Black Women’s Justice Institute
National Women’s Law Center
One Fair Wage
Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative
Reclaiming Our Own Transcendence
Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples
Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative
South Asian SOAR
Tahirih Justice Center
Trans Resilience Fund
Transforming Generations
VidaAfroLatina
Vision Change Win
Visioning BEAR Circle Intertribal Coalition
Waking Women Healing
Women on the Rise
Living Our Labels
Being a pooled fund means we bring together diverse funders of different types and sizes, with different missions and entry points, toward a common purpose: resourcing the movement to end violence. Being an intermediary means we serve as a bridge, especially between donors and movements. And being feminist means we constantly engage with questions of power at every level.
CFF Announces Movement-Centered Advisory Council
Over the past five years, CFF has embraced a different way of operating that is rooted in feminist principles, is responsive to movement vision and strategy, and is less centered on the donor-to-donor conversations that are often the norm in the philanthropic sector. For CFF, it has been critical to ensure that donors who are collaborative partners in the fund can play their important role of expanding resources and sustainability for the movement to end violence, while not speaking for, or on behalf of, movements. CFF’s donor partners have agreed that CFF, as an intermediary feminist funder, is a useful space to prototype expanding the power of movement activists in setting the strategic direction of a philanthropic organization, and this Advisory Council is a meaningful step forward in the service of that vision.
Values of dignity, safety, humility, deep relationship, collaboration, and trust all inform Collective Future Fund’s work. Thus, listening to, learning with, and being in community with movement partners, including grantees, have been central ways for CFF to enact these values since its inception.
Collective Future Fund is thrilled to announce that three long-time women-of-color movement leaders will be part of CFF’s inaugural Advisory Council. These leaders, representing three grantee partner organizations, include:
Dr. Connie Wun, Co-Founder & President, AAPI Women Lead
Joanne N. Smith, Founder & CEO, Girls for Gender Equity
Mónica Ramirez, Founder & President, Justice for Migrant Women
The inaugural Advisory Council will also continue to include Collaborative Donor Partners. Celiné Justice, representing Pivotal Ventures, and Adeline Azrack, representing Fondation CHANEL, will fill these roles.
The purpose of the Advisory Council is to provide strategic guidance and feedback to CFF’s team on its high-level direction and programs, including grantmaking and advocacy to the philanthropic sector. The Council members will also serve as ambassadors for CFF in critical policy and donor advocacy spaces. With their collaboration, CFF will continue to mobilize resources for survivor-centered movements to end gendered, sexualized, and racialized violence.
As CFF is a fiscally-sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA), the Council will not replace RPA’s role providing fiscal oversight, grants management and approval, and human resources for CFF, and will not duplicate the role of RPA’s Board.
CFF Inaugural Advisory Council Members:
Connie Wun, PhD, is the Executive Director and co-founder of AAPI Women Lead. For nearly 30 years, Dr. Wun has worked on issues related to racial and gender justice. She is a writer with publications in academic books, journals, and mainstream press including the anthology, Antiblackness, as well as Educational Policy; Race, Ethnicity and Education; Critical Sociology; and Elle magazine. She is a co-editor for the anthology, Abolition for the People, with Colin Kaepernick and Christopher Petrella. Dr. Wun has been a keynote speaker and panelist across multiple platforms and has been featured on Democracy Now!, MSNBC, NPR, ABC Nightline News, NBC Asian America, local news, as well as a range of podcasts. She is a former fellow for the National Science Foundation, Open Society Foundation’s Soros Justice program, American Association for University Women, UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Office, and more. She’s also been recognized by California API Legislative Caucus with the 2021 Excellence in Civil Rights Award and by GoldHouse with an A100 award. Connie is a former sex worker, high school and college educator, anti-sexual assault advocate and organizer. She continues to co-facilitate community-driven research projects on the intersections of race, gender, and state violence with organizations across the U.S. and its territories. Dr. Wun, who was born in Oakland, CA, is a child and grandchild of powerful Vietnamese refugees and freedom fighters. She was raised by a brilliant mother from whom she learned to commit to racial solidarity and liberation struggles across the globe. Dr. Wun is a disabled queer survivor who has been practicing yoga for nearly 25 years. She is a yoga instructor with a daily meditation practice and is an avid student of Muay Thai and kickboxing.
Joanne N. Smith (she/her) is the founding President & CEO of Girls for Gender Equity (GGE). She moves GGE closer to its mission through strategic advocacy, development, and leadership cultivation. Mrs. Smith is a first-generation, Queer Haitian woman and New York native. A staunch human rights advocate, she has co-authored Hey Shorty: A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets.
Smith’s work to combat sexual violence is featured in the documentary Anita: Speak Truth to Power and the docuseries Surviving R. Kelly Part II & III: The Reckoning & The Final Chapter, aired on Lifetime and Netflix in 2020 and 2023. Her culture shift efforts continue in Pushout – The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, a feature-length documentary that closely examines the educational, judicial, and societal disparities facing Black Girls. Featured in the 2021 & 2022 Nonprofit Power 100.
With public officials, philanthropic leaders, and nonprofit executives leading the sector in New York, Smith’s leadership helped facilitate a $40M commitment from government and philanthropy to invest in community-driven recommendations of the nation’s first Young Women’s Initiative. Smith co-founded The Black Girl Freedom Fund, a 10-year initiative to invest 1 Billion dollars into advancing Black girls and gender-expansive youth, and a member of Move to End Violence -an initiative designed to strengthen the collective capacity to end gender-based violence in the United States. Smith resides in Brooklyn, NY and Philadelphia, PA.
Mónica Ramírez is Founder & President of Justice for Migrant Women. Ramírez hails from a farmworker family that settled out of the migrant stream to live year-round in rural Ohio. She is a long-time advocate, organizer, social entrepreneur and attorney fighting to eliminate gender-based violence and secure gender equity. For over two decades, she has fought for the civil and human rights of women, children, workers, Latinos/as and immigrants. In 2003, Mónica created the first legal project in the United States dedicated to addressing gender discrimination against farmworker women, which she scaled to create Esperanza: The Immigrant Women’s Legal Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In addition to founding Justice for Migrant Women, she co-founded Alianza Nacional de Campesinos and served as President of their Board until 2018. In her capacity as Alianza’s Board President, Mónica wrote the letter that was published in TIME magazine from farmworker women to women in the entertainment industry. It has been credited with helping to spark the creation of the TIME’S UP movement. Mónica is recognized as a thought leader and prominent voice in the Latinx community. She has been awarded numerous awards for her work, including Harvard Kennedy School’s inaugural Gender Equity Changemaker Award, 2022 James Beard Leadership award, the Feminist Majority’s Global Women’s Rights Award, and inclusion on Forbes Mexico’s 2018 list of 100 Powerful Women, among other distinctions. Mónica is a graduate of Loyola University Chicago, The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and Harvard Kennedy School.
Celiné Justice serves as Program Strategy Director for Centering Women & Girls of Color at Pivotal Ventures, leading a team that resources the work of movements fighting to end violence and advance economic justice through innovative grantmaking, deep trust, the power of convening, and a dedication to continuous listening, learning, and responding to the changing needs of those that hold immense power while also being held back by structural and historical barriers. Prior to Pivotal, Celiné served as the Founder and President of Rooted Justice Solutions, a small consulting firm in which she supported a roster of clients on their philanthropic journeys including work with Moore Philanthropy, Abigail E. Disney, and the Warner Music Group Social Justice Fund. She holds a B.A. from Brown University and joined the Pivotal Ventures team in 2021.
Adeline Azrack is the Managing Director, Americas for Fondation CHANEL, an international corporate foundation dedicated to improving the economic and social conditions of women and girls. Adeline also supports corporate initiatives, including diversity and inclusion, sustainability, and employee engagement and communications. Prior to joining the Foundation, she spent over 10 years working with the UN, governments and NGOs in the Caribbean, South Asia, East and West Africa and the United States as a specialist and team manager in social justice and health justice movements, global maternal and child health, health economics and operational research and evaluation. In addition to her role at the Fondation CHANEL, she serves on the Steering Committee of the CARE Fund and the Board of the Hopital Albert Schweitzer in Haiti — a hospital and health justice organization in Deschapelles, Haiti. Adeline has a Masters in Public Health (Social Determinants of Health) from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and a Bachelors of Arts in Cultural and Social Anthropology with a minor in Feminist Studies from Stanford University. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.
Collective Future Fund receives new grant from Melinda French Gates
Collective Future Fund was named as one of the organizations selected by Melinda French Gates to receive a grant as part of the next chapter of her philanthropic giving.
Reflecting on 2023
2023 Wrapped!
Since the start of 2024, we at CFF have taken some time to reflect on a few moments from 2023, and what they mean in context to what’s ahead for CFF and our partners in the coming year.
As we move into our fifth year as a collaborative fund, we’re reflecting on how CFF was born at the height of the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements and just before the onset of the global COVID pandemic. In just a few years, we’ve witnessed the escalation of violence against Black and brown gendered bodies, attacks on bodily autonomy, and threats to democracy deepen — only further amplifying the demands and visibility of our movements.
Last spring, we journeyed to Oxford, UK for the Skoll World Forum where we sparked conversation about the dire lack of funding to end gender-based violence. We also joined our policy colleagues, grantee partners, and co-conspirators in Washington DC to discuss gendered violence with the White House Gender Policy Council, and marked the launch of the White House’s first-ever U.S. National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence. Our team attended the 22nd Century Initiative Conference in Minneapolis where we moderated a session titled Reimagining Safety: Centering Survival and Thriving in a Pluralist Democracy, featuring some grantee partner leaders.
Last fall, CFF co-sponsored the Women’s Funding Network’s Feminist Funded Conference in Washington, DC and joined the Ford Foundation’s Free Future 2023 Forum on Preventing Gender-Based Violence. And as some of the most exciting milestones of 2023, CFF announced a pilot of transnational grantmaking totaling $500,000 to 9 organizations, before hosting a powerful funders briefing at the Ford Foundation in New York City, where we discussed our collective work toward a future of safety and democracy.
We grew our team, deepened our impact, and expanded our vision of safety for all. Yet survivor-centered work to end gendered, racialized, and sexualized violence continues to be critically under-resourced, even as women and gender-expansive people of color are powerfully situated as agents of change both within the U.S. and also in solidarity and collaboration with feminist struggles transnationally.
With a lot at stake in 2024 here in the US and globally, we’re ready to go even further to invest in sustainability for survivor leaders and their communities who are meeting these crises head on. We hope you’ll continue on with us in this journey.
Collective Future Fund Deepens Transnational Grantmaking with Additional $500,000 Investment
Funding for transnational solidarity is more important than ever
In CFF’s inaugural round of grantmaking in 2019-20, we asked grantees to share about work they were doing outside the US or transnationally. We were encouraged to learn that many groups already had a growing body of work to build solidarity with movements addressing gendered, sexualized, and racialized violence across borders, with a focus on relationships with movement leaders, organizations, and networks in the Global South.
This kind of connection across contexts is more important than ever. We are living in an era of ultraviolence that links many forms of legislative and physical violence against Black and brown gendered bodies. This moment is shaped by global phenomena, including a rise in white nationalism, militarization, attacks on bodily autonomy, ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws and prohibitions on teaching critical race theory. These phenomena are based on interests seeking to consolidate power across political, policy, and cultural contexts.For CFF, transnational means operating across national borders. CFF’s grantmaking prioritizes transnational feminist networking, organizing, and solidarity because the structural causes of oppression and injustice that lead to gendered, sexualized, and racialized violence exist across borders.
As billions of dollars flow from far-right organizations in the US to fund “anti-gender” initiatives abroad, it is critical to make visible the linkages between efforts that attack bodily autonomy, curtail the human right to reproductive and gender-affirming care, and escalate systemic violence against Black and brown gendered bodies. Now is the time to resource the survivors and their communities working to end all forms of violence. These leaders include women and gender-expansive people of color who have long been at the frontlines, building democracy by standing up for rights and justice as they work to turn the tide toward care-centered systems and policies here in the US.
As we consider their work, we cannot afford to overlook the interdependence of our global context, especially in the wake of a pandemic that laid bare widespread violence as a symptom of vast inequity. These lessons remain, along with the interconnected work of the #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, climate justice, LGBTQIA+ rights, and other pro-liberation, anti-authoritarian movements.
Why collective safety depends on movement building across borders
CFF seeks to end all forms of violence by specifically working at the intersection of gendered, sexualized, and racialized violence. While the particular aspects of gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, religion, disability, and other dimensions of politicized identity present themselves differently in various contexts, the systems of oppression that underpin them are part of our global operating system.
This requires feminist organizations, networks, intermediaries, and funders that are working for collective safety to be creative, to learn from one another, and to collectively target not only specific actors, but also systems perpetrating violence through actively practicing solidarity locally, regionally, and transnationally.
CFF has observed that our partners are stronger and more resilient because of their transnational work. Unleashing the power of transnational organizing also requires a greater investment in building solidarity and connection across movements. This involves developing organizing capacity, sharing experiences, and ensuring the sustainability of activists’ work.
Over time, we will continue to build within a transnational ecosystem on particular issues that are ripe for collaboration. We will emphasize learning from and co-creating with grantee partners around how to resource opportunities and spaces for transnational exchange and solidarity-building. Additionally, as a fund that is still just four years old, we will be assessing the organizational development and infrastructure that CFF will need to develop in order to do intentional, trust-based grantmaking to locally-based groups in the Global South.
CFF is committed to playing a role in building these bridges and acting as a catalyst for breaking down barriers to transnational organizing.
2023 TRANSNATIONAL GRANTEES:
An Asian labor-led global labor and social alliance across garment-producing countries (such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka) and consumer regions (USA and Europe) for addressing poverty-level wages, gendered violence, and freedom of association in global garment production networks.
A survivor-led civil and human rights organization that works to build a powerful community of solidarity through direct action and advocacy, including opening a safe house for LGBTQ people in Ghana, and developing formal relationships and shared resources with a matriarchal village near Nairobi, Kenya, and with a traditional healers collective in Johannesburg, South Africa.
An anchor in the Border Butterflies Project, co-anchored by Transgender Law Center and Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, with participation of other US and Mexican partners working to to support LGBTQ asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border with legal, humanitarian, and post-detention support and organizing. BLMP also hosts a transnational exchange with LGBTQIA+ Garífuna people living in Central America, to connect Black, gender justice movement-building in the US to power-building in Honduras.
A survivor-led Dalit civil rights and power-building organization. They work at the intersections of advocacy, research, and digital security to end caste apartheid, gender-based violence, Islamophobia, and religious intolerance. Their multi-pronged strategy aims to create a comprehensive survivors’ political platform and pathways for Dalit feminist leadership toward safety, healing, and systemic policy change, both in the US and South Asia
A feminist movement-support organization anchored in the Global South that has grown a transnational web of multiple organizations, partners, and allies in many countries and regions with a focus on Mesoamerica, Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa. JASS is developing feminist leaders, fostering cross-pollination and movement learning, and amplifying stories of grassroots feminist human rights defenders working on gendered violence and other issues affecting their communities.
An advocacy, education, and power-building organization focused on migrant and farmworker women. Justice for Migrant Women partners with an organization based in South Africa on organizing, power-building, and systemic change through the multi-year Bandana Connect Retreat project to support migrant women facing sexual violence as they cross international borders.
An advocacy and survivor-support organization that works at the intersection between anti-violence and immigrant rights. Tahirih Justice Center centers women and girls in danger of sexual violence at the US border, and is advocating for US asylum law to formally name gender and gender-based violence as a ground for asylum.
An initiative that draws on in-depth research and narrative work at intersections of gender and violence for marginalized women around the world to inform activist organizing, policy debates, and art. PSVI believes that the Global South exists in Harlem, Markham, St. Thomas, in dense pockets animated by the legacies of violence “back home.” PSVI leads the Eelam Writer’s Resistance Workshop, which has grown to over 12 countries, to support young women and queer folks’, former combatants’, and emerging activists’ poetry, nonfiction, and polemics.
A project of Corporación Centro de Estudios de Derecho Justicia y Sociedad (DeJusticia), Colombia-based research and advocacy organization, Visión Afro 2025 is an inter-institutional, transnational platform for strengthening North-South multicultural dialogues that bring together North American and Latin American organizations working with Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities on gender and sexuality within the African diaspora, particularly in Colombia.
Collective Future Fund Expands Multi-Year Grantmaking with Additional $3.4M Investment
Funding awarded to 29 grassroots organizations will advance survivor-led movements working to build power and end violence in all its forms
NEW YORK—Today, the Collective Future Fund (CFF) announced funding for 29 survivor-based organizations in the next phase of its multi-year grantmaking, totaling $3.4M over two years. The grants will support the healing and leadership of women and gender expansive people of color as they protect communities against an onslaught of attacks on human and civil rights, while advancing a new vision of safety and liberation through organizing, advocacy, and policy change.
“In the face of escalating and pervasive violence, survivors are developing new ways of resistance and leading us to a future grounded in safety, abundance, and dignity for everyone. It is their work that is dismantling interconnected systems of oppression and creating the transformative change required in this moment of political, social, and economic upheaval,” said Aleyamma Mathew, Director of the Collective Future Fund. “The solutions to the immense challenges we face will not be fully realized in a matter of a few years, but instead require time and resources to build. We urge philanthropy to better recognize this fact and to make investments in women and gender expansive people of color that reflect the power they have clearly demonstrated. Our collective future depends on it.”
Last year, after disbursing rapid response grants, CFF launched its first multi-year grantmaking effort to sustain survivor-leaders responding to multiple crises exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The funding came as many intersectional anti-violence organizations navigated dwindling philanthropic investment in the face of heightened need–an issue that long preceded 2020 and only continues to grow. The expanded docket announced today will provide these organizations with general operating support to plan beyond the most immediate crises, to align day-to-day work with their vision for the future, and to deepen relationships in the field that ultimately strengthen the movement to end patriarchal violence.
Today’s announcement follows the five year anniversary of the viral hashtag #MeToo, which ignited a historic conversation on the world stage about sexual violence and led to the creation of the Collective Future Fund as part of philanthropy’s response to this massive milestone. Since then, survivor-leaders have continued to demonstrate their power and centrality to other social justice movements, working in solidarity across communities and issue areas. Despite this, philanthropic investments remain stagnant, and CFF is now one of the only existing funds focused on ending gender-based violence in the United States.
Central to CFF’s strategy is the recognition that all forms of violence are persistent, interconnected, and mutually reinforcing – whether systemic or interpersonal. All grantees in this docket, of whom 22 are previous recipients, are advancing a new vision of radical safety and liberation through strategies that confront state violence, workplace violence, and violence in specific communities.
Among the awardees is Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, the first national women farmworkers’ organization in the United States created by current and former women farmworkers, along with women who hail from farmworker families. Alianza is composed of 15 member organizations in 20 states that are playing a leadership role in helping to end all forms of exploitation and abuse perpetrated against campesinas, most of whom are immigrants, guestworkers, or refugees. Another, Reclaiming Our Own Transcendence (RooT), is a Black and Brown, queer, grassroots-led initiative that offers transformative, collective healing and growth accountability spaces and workshops to address cycles of harm and violence.
Grantees include:
Acorn Center for Restoration and Freedom
Alianza Nacional de Campesinas
Black Girls Restored
Black Transcendence
Coalition for Restaurant Safety and Health
Colectivo Ilé
Creative Interventions/STOP
El/La Para Translatinas
Fireweed Collective
Free Hearts
HEAL Project
HEART Women & Girls
Healing to Action
In Our Names Network
Jahajee Sisters
Matahari Women Workers Center
Mirror Memoirs
MO Ho Justice
Mother Nation
National Black Women’s Justice Institute
Reclaiming our Own Transcendance
Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples
South Asian SOAR
Trans Resilience Fund
Transforming Generations
Vida AfroLatina
Visioning B.E.A.R. Circle Intertribal Coalition
Waking Women Healing
Women on the Rise
“Resistance against patriarchal violence, and healing through reclaiming our Indigenous ways of being is an everyday act for us as Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit, that often goes unnoticed. To receive this funding through CFF means we are seen, heard, and valued. This funding is life saving, and ensures that we can continue to grow spaces of healing and resistance against sexual violence,” said Founder and Executive Director of Waking Women Healing Institute, Kristin Welch.
“CFF has been a pioneer in recognizing and alleviating funding barriers for BIPOC organizations that are doing the cultural work of ending sexual violence. This is long-term work requiring sustainable support, and CFF is modeling how it is done,” said Aredvi Azad, Co-Executive Director, The HEAL Project.
“CFF’s donation empowers Matahari to continue fighting for the rights of domestic and restaurant workers in Massachusetts through labor and community organizing. Workers in these sectors, particularly immigrant and women of color, have historically been left out of labor protections and subject to extreme forms of violence, exploitation, and oppression despite playing essentials roles in our society,” said the team at Matahari Women Workers Center.
“The survivors who called for an end to sexual violence in the wake of #MeToo are the very same leaders who are now protecting communities across the country from attacks on their fundamental human and civil rights,” said Jennifer Agmi, CFF Collaborative Partner and Senior Program Officer at The Libra Foundation. “We are proud to partner with the Collective Future Fund to resource this life-saving, transformative work.”
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The Collective Future Fund brings together social justice movements, survivors, and donors to heal, resource, and mobilize towards a future free from all forms of patriarchal violence.
Our power comes from survivor-led movements
To our friends and supporters,
Collective Future Fund joins our community in grief and rage over the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade. Criminalizing abortion only widens the net that is used to enact violence against women and gender expansive people of color in this country, and this decision will be catastrophic for survivors.
It also comes on the heels of a month filled with horrific violence: Buffalo, Uvalde, organized right-wing attacks on Pride events, the passage of transphobic legislation, rampant misogyny in the Depp-Heard trial, and more.
We are angry. We are mourning. But we are not resigned.
These attacks are the expected backlash to the power that survivor-led movements have demonstrated. They are meant to demoralize and immobilize us. But just like those came before us, survivors are prepared for this moment. They are creating and leading movements rooted in community care, providing us with a pathway to a better future. Now, philanthropy must resource survivor-led movements at the level they deserve and require.
We cannot disconnect the ruling that overturned Roe from the dismantling of the democratic process, mass shootings, ending the Child Tax Credit and unemployment benefits, increased police budgets, or the January 6th insurrection. Multiple systems are working together to oppress women and gender expansive people of color, seeking to prevent a future of safety, abundance, and liberation for everyone. If we hope to meaningfully address the multiple and severe crises this country is facing, philanthropic institutions must contend with white supremacy and heteropatriarchy as our true antagonists.
That means de-centering narratives that depict survivor-leaders as marginal and instead recognizing them as central to every social movement. It means following the wisdom of those who have been deeply in the work of building power for freedom: survivors of gendered, sexualized, and racialized violence, who know all too well what it means to have their lives subjected to the will of those in traditional authority roles.
We at Collective Future Fund are committed to doing this work. We will continue to invest in survivors because we know that a future free from violence can only be achieved through the power of those who are transforming experiences and legacies of trauma into collective action.
We hope that you will join us.
In solidarity,
Aleyamma Mathew
VAWA Reauthorization is a Testament to the Power of Survivors
Partners & Friends,
After years of bold advocacy from diverse coalitions, yesterday President Biden signed an expanded version of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) into law. This overdue renewal will provide funding for organizations offering lifesaving programs, services, and resources to survivors of gendered and sexualized violence, including expanded provisions for those who have long been invisibilized yet disproportionately impacted like Indigenous, immigrant, and trans women. These much needed funds will go a long way, and we have survivors from communities across the country to thank for it.
As we celebrate this victory, we cannot forget the fact that the original VAWA was passed under the premise that carceral responses to domestic violence keep us safe. Our grantee partners, many of whom are often the first line of defense in their communities, have made it clear: an increase in funds for policing is just further investment in a violent system that harms survivors, instead of supporting them. To end increasingly pervasive gendered and racialized violence, we must resource the community-rooted solutions that truly keep us safe.
Collective Future Fund calls on philanthropy to reject narratives that define violence narrowly as individual, interpersonal acts and instead recognize the scale and interconnectedness of violence as experienced by survivors. We cannot disconnect domestic and sexual violence from the overarching crises of state violence — mass incarceration, police brutality, family separation, the imprisonment of sexual assault survivors for acts of self-defense — that disproportionately harm survivors of color.
Philanthropic donors should fulfill their commitments to racial and gender justice and meet this historic moment by funding the organizations led by survivors, QTBIPOC women and gender expansive people that are cultivating community, building impactful movements, and sustaining transformational work.
We look forward to joining together with you in this work.
In community,
Aleyamma Mathew
