Deadline: Ongoing Opportunity
The Groundswell Fund is providing Rapid Response Fund (RRF) to grassroots organizations led by women of color, trans people of color, and low-income women and trans people in critical, but unexpected fights to protect and advance reproductive and social justice.
Funding Information
- The Rapid Response Fund also collaborated with the Black Trans Fund to grant $200,000 specifically to Black trans-led organizations. In addition to the $1.1 million, RRF moved $150,000 in one-time rapid response support grants to existing Birth Justice Fund grantees.
What does the Rapid Response Fund support?
- There is a range. The Rapid Response Fund has supported organizations doing work around activating and mobilizing their base for direct action, key campaigns, organizing opportunities, and building up coalitions and alliances.
- The Fund is a multi-issue Fund and has resourced work around reproductive justice, abortion care and support, trans justice, criminal legal reform and abolition work, environmental justice, healing justice, building communities and systems of care, among other critical issues of the time.
Criteria
Groundswell’s Rapid Response Fund will continue to center its criteria around:
- Urgency: The request is responding to an unanticipated event, political moment, and/or requires urgent or timely action. It is a new/unexpected critical opportunity or threat.
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Leadership:
- Must be majority women of color and/or transgender, gender expansive people of color-led organization.
- Groundswell Fund defines majority leadership that is more than 50% in decision making.
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Organizing + Base-Building:
- Groundswell Fund’s RRF aims to support organizations with a history of dismantling systems of oppression by way of organizing as a central strategy.
- Groundswell defines organizing as ongoing, systematic engagement and relationship building with an ever-expanding and increasingly committed number of constituents and leaders who act collectively to change the conditions harming the community due to systemic oppression and state-sanctioned violence.
- Specifically, this is achieved by building a base. Groundswell defines base building as using strategies to build the leadership of directly impacted communities to create solutions to the issues negatively impacting their lives, and gain skills, abilities, and collective power needed to transform and dismantle policies and systems that affect their lives.
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Building Systems of Community Care:
- For birth justice groups, using a reproductive justice and community-centric frame to provide a spectrum of support which includes abortion services, birth, and postpartum care that is urgent and responsive to a specific event.
- Building new systems and imagining new ways of care for directly impacted people outside of existing systems which may include mutual aid and food sovereignty. This must be tied to organizing and not direct service provision.
- If the organization is an existing Groundswell Fund grantee, the RRF request must fall outside their existing scope of work.
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We are particularly interested in supporting the following issues in response to this political moment that meets other funding criteria and addresses the following community care needs:
- Community Care, mutual aid, and disaster resilience efforts in response to climate disasters led by directly impacted communities.
- Local efforts to advance vaccine equity and health justice in places where Covid-19 variant deaths and cases are on the rise rooted in issues organizing and base-building organizations.
- Housing justice efforts in response to the eviction moratoriums being lifted
- Community rooted and local birth justice efforts and organizing. This means using a reproductive justice and community-centric frame to provide a spectrum of support which includes abortion services, birth, and postpartum care that is urgent and responsive to a specific event.
- Healing justice connected to a specific campaign or issue organizing opportunity
Ineligible
- 501(c)4 organizations
- Funding for individuals, personal projects, or personal needs such as personal health, emergency relief, and assistance, medical bills, rent, providing food or basic essentials to individuals
- Direct service provision defined as meeting individuals’ basic immediate needs and other emotional and social supports
- Travel expenses and conference fees
- Academic scholarships, campus education, K-12 after school or youth education initiatives, school programs (public or private, K-12, university, or postsecondary)
- Capital campaigns
- Congregations/churches
- Community arts and theatre-based projects
- Publications, media events, or research unless it is tied to an organizing strategy
- Replacing revenue shortfalls or addressing cash flow challenges
- Organizational development or infrastructure building costs
- Leadership transitions
- General operating requests for ongoing work or existing programs that are not timely or urgent in response to sudden shifts in the political climate such as an unexpected threat or an unforeseen opportunity to build power
- Any projects not in the U.S., Puerto Rico, or the Virgin Islands, Guam, The Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa
For more information, visit Groundswell Fund.