In 2022, the BLMF had its biggest year of grantmaking yet, moving $8 million to 71 Black-led organizations. In partnership with the Communities Transforming Policing Fund, the BLMF hosted a Liberation Learning Lab with 14 grantee partners who, together, helped the Fund develop a new framework for telling the stories of its grantee partners. The BLMF also moved $1.25 million in rapid response grants to address urgent and strategic community and movement needs.

Internally, the Fund launched its inaugural participatory grantmaking process by recruiting and onboarding a 10-person community grantmaking committee. For the BLMF, participatory grantmaking offers an opportunity to shift and share power, and be more aligned with the real-time needs of the movement. Starting in March 2023, the BLMF expects to move all multi-year, core support grants through a participatory committee of Black community organizers. A participatory approach will make it possible for BLMF to continue funding folks like The People’s Advocacy Institute which hosts the only bail fund in the state of Mississisppi — the Mississippi Bail Fund Collective, and New Orleans’ Women With a Vision whose Sex Worker’s Rights program supports women charged with prostitution offenses and offers alternatives to incarceration.

In the spring of 2022, the CTPF celebrated its fifth year of grantmaking and its first round of participatory grantmaking, awarding $5.1 million in grants to 64 organizations, its biggest commitment in multi-year giving yet. This round of grantmaking was led by CTPF’s participatory grantmaking committee—which consists of advocates across the country who have been directly impacted by policing and the criminal legal system. CTPF prioritized grantmaking in several areas, including funding legal support networks for protesters of police violence, groups leading campaigns to divest from policing and invest in communities, decriminalizing sex work, drugs, and poverty, creating community-based safety strategies, and campaigns to remove police from schools.

CTPF has 17 additional multi-year core grantee partners from 2021, such as grantee partner Marijuana Justice who shared that their campaigns helped to successfully end the prohibition of simple possession and sealed over 64,000 misdemeanor marijuana charges. And grantee partner HEARD, which maintains the only database of deaf/blind/disabled people impacted by police violence and discrimination across the nation and in U.S. territories, was able to develop a new user-friendly and multilingual database allowing for its advocacy work to become more efficient and impactful.

The Disability Inclusion Fund heeds the advice of disabled movement leaders who have made it unwaveringly clear that disability justice is not only for this moment, but for all of our futures.  In 2022, the Fund continued resourcing disability justice movement-aligned organizations through a participatory grantmaking process led by members of the disability community. The Fund moved $4.18 million to 57 disability-led organizations, and launched Joy Grants to support and seed restoration and joy as a critical part of disability justice movements. The DIF also launched its Disability x Tech initiative, supported by Ford Foundation’s Technology & Society Program, to ensure that technology can be used by everyone and is free from ableist bias.

DIF grantee partners had significant gains and increased recognition in 2022. Senior & Disability Action successfully advocated for the Bay Area transit system to extend its mask mandate. And Detroit Disability Power, Autistic Women & Non-binary Network, and the DIF’s program director, Sandy Ho, attended a reception at Vice President Harris’ residence to commemorate the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The ELLC Fund invests in leaders whose work addresses the intersections of harm and inequity by building community power. In 2022, the ELLC Fund announced its biggest year of grantmaking yet, moving more than $2.5 million in grant support to 46 movement organizations. In order to support young queer and trans leaders of color, the ELLC Fund provides two primary types of support: 1) general operating support grants, and 2) Young Trans Women of Color (YTWOC) leadership grants.

Leading up to and during the aftermath of the fall of Roe vs. Wade, the ELLC Fund established a rapid response fund to support Queer and Trans BIPOC-led reproductive justice groups, as well as donor education opportunities for funders invested in hearing from folks on the frontlines. The Fund also spent the year sharpening its YTWOC grantmaking program, which invests in trans leaders who are organizing across movements and issues. Grantee partner the Knights & Orchids Society (TKO) mobilized trans youth, adults, and allies, against Alabama state bills targeting trans and other LGBTQ youth. While both of these bills passed, TKO has expanded their youth engagement and is ramping up their youth ambassadors program to build more trans youth power.

In 2022, the Fund for Trans Generations continued to invest in emerging trans-led organizations through capacity building offerings and grants, supporting organizational development, leadership development, and healing justice work. The FTG prioritized BIPOC, trans-led emerging and growing organizations through its participatory grantmaking process, and ultimately moved over $3.5 million to 75 trans-led organizations. The FTG also mobilized to move an additional $10 million to the trans movement ecosystem through the Trans Futures Campaign, alongside other trans funders.

FTG grantee partners like inTRANSitive are steadily responding to an onslaught of anti-trans legislation by bringing national attention to the anti-trans efforts of the Arkansas legislature. Trans organizers are helping folks survive and identify innovative ways to sustain their organizations during these intense times. The Fund also witnessed FTG grantee partners move towards purchasing land and buildings in order to disrupt cycles of displacement and provide spaces that allow for safety and security.

In 2022, the Racial Equity to Accelerate Change Fund focused on healing, deepening its community of practice, and unlocking resources to advance racial equity. The Fund awarded $2.13 million to 19 groups, representing its largest annual grantmaking to date. The REACH also shifted its grantmaking schedule, and due to the support of MacKenzie Scott in 2021, was still able to provide an additional $116,000 to all REACH grantee partners in 2022.

Because the REACH Fund believes there is no racial justice without healing justice, it invited grantee partners to participate in a 6-month long monthly somatic circle and access their own healing tools and practices to support their work. A big focus of the REACH team was to secure additional resources to support and expand racial equity work among grantee partners. For example, REACH grantee The Embodiment Institute hosted somatics sessions making space for folks to examine the impact the work has on them as racial equity practitioners. In addition to self-care, REACH grantees like the Shriver Center on Poverty’s Racial Justice Institute were able to create, design and successfully launch new public courses focused on uplifting racial equity.

What news and information ecosystems do Black, Indigenous, Latine and Asian communities need to be well? This is a question the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund considers often, and one that led its work in 2022. The REJ Fund prioritized resourcing BIPOC-led news organizations providing people of color with content and/or programming aimed at strengthening civic discourse and participation. In turn, it moved $5.2 million to 44 BIPOC-led and -serving field building and media organizations.

Last year, the REJ Fund launched efforts to incorporate community power building and civic participation as pillars to their work. REJ even piloted a capacity building program focused respectively on business development and operations, while simultaneously facilitating peer exchanges, learning, and collaborations among the grantee community. Meanwhile, REJ grantees like Documented launched SMS-based verticals targeting New York’s Chinese and Caribbean immigrant communities, and now publishes in five different languages. And Cicero Independiente launched and expanded their Reporting Fellowship to include more Latine cohort members receiving photojournalism training.

Last year, the Racial Equity in Philanthropy Fund provided $2.16 million in general operating grants to 25 grantee partners who are at the forefront of advancing racial equity in the philanthropic sector and are pursuing cutting edge approaches, innovative collaborations, and transformative change. The REP Fund trusts that these additional resources will enable them to deepen the impact of their work in the months to come.

In 2022, the Fund focused on facilitating connections between grantee and donor partners through its first donor learning session in August, which featured a lively discussion led by Dr. Megan Ming Francis, who spoke on the importance of philanthropic organizations supporting racial justice by leveraging their political power to the benefit of the communities they aim to serve. The Fund was also proud to witness a collaboration between grantee partners Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP) and Native Americans in Philanthropy (NAP), which co-hosted the Power in Solidarity conference on building cross-racial solidarity, power, and resources in AAPI and Native communities.

In 2022, the Spark Justice Fund was proud to move $3.5 million to 30 grassroots organizations working to decarcerate, redirect resources for jails to community, and transform our collective vision of community-led safety.  The Fund provided grantees with one-on-one organizational development support, unpacked the many ways surveillance leads to over-incarcerating marginalized communities through donor-learning sessions, and resourced groups with limited access to national funding streams. In 2022, 35% of SJF grantees had budgets under $350,000.

SJF grantee partners also witnessed many wins, affirming the dignity of incarcerated folks and our need for a future without prisons. Miami-based grantee partner Beyond the Bars’ advocacy led to reduced prices of calls for incarcerated individuals, saving families an estimated $5.5 million each year. As a result Miami-Dade County is exploring models for implementing free jail calls. Grantee partner SOUL, in partnership with Cassandra Greer-Lee, protested the lack of clean, safe drinking water in Illinois’ Stateville Prison. Together, they were able to provide 16,000 bottles of clean drinking water to the prison. And Mano Amiga secured additional funding from the San Marcos City Council, as well as $5 million in American Rescue Plan funds, for the opening of a Public Defender’s Office in Hays County, Texas.