2023
MOVEMENT BUILDING GRANTS
WHAT IS
MOVEMENT
BUILDING?
BWF supports community-led grassroots movements that build collective power to advance racial, economic, social, and gender justice.
Movement building starts with a shared vision focused on systems change where a collective addresses concerns and creates opportunities that no person, organization, or institution can alone.
BWF BELIEVES THAT THE FOLLOWING ARE ESSENTIAL TO MOVEMENT BUILDING
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Base Building: Movements engage individuals and communities most affected by the issue/s the movement seeks to change. Movements build power in those communities.
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Alliances/Partnerships: Movements depend on relationships, collaborations, and networks that share a collective vision and commitment.
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Collective Leadership: The focus is not on an individual leader, rather on developing horizontal leadership, particularly of women, girls, and gender expansive individuals from the community/constituency most affected.
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Systems Change: Movement building ultimately creates positive changes in policies, conditions, infrastructure, etc. for women, girls, and gender-expansive individuals and their communities.
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Intersectionality: Movements acknowledge the multiple interacting systems of oppression
2023 MOVEMENT BUILDING GRANT CYCLE IS CLOSED
With the leadership of the Allocations Committee, Boston Women’s Fund awarded three grassroots organizations led by women, girls, and gender-expansive individuals in the Greater Boston area with a one-year $25,000 grant to support their movement building work. Movement Building grants provide general operating support to grassroots organizations. To remove the application burden from organization leaders, we rely on nominations from community members.
Timeline
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January 2023: Nominations and call for Allocations Committee
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February 8, 2023: Allocations Committee Orientation
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February - March 2023: Allocations Committee interviews, research, and application assembly
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April 6, 2023: Allocations Committee Consensus Session
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Late-April 2023: Grantee partners notified
Funding Priorities
This year, BWF and its Allocations Committee prioritized organizations that are doing *Reproductive Justice work.
SisterSong defines Reproductive Justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. Reproductive Justice is a framework, movement, and personal embodied value that holds intersectionality and human rights at its center.
*Our understanding of Reproductive Justice is not synonymous with Reproductive Health or Reproductive Rights. Where Reproductive Health involves the direct servicing of an individual’s reproductive needs and Reproductive Rights involves the individual legal rights to reproductive health care services, Reproductive Justice incorporates and expands on the two — centering equity, intersectionality, human rights, and community care.
BWF continues to work with women, girls, and gender-expansive individuals working in their communities in the Greater Boston area who are Black and Brown, Indigenous, elderly, immigrants and refugees, LGBTQIA+, low-income, or disabled and neurodiverse.
BWF also encourages non-traditional approaches to reproductive justice organizing (creative ideas, partnerships between organizations, etc.).
Nominate an organization
Nominations are now closed.
Congratulations to our 2023 Movement Building Grantee Partners!
This year, we've welcomed Birth Equity & Justice Massachusetts, Melanin Mass Moms, and Propa City Community Outreach to the BWF family as Movement Building Grantee Partners.
