Meet Our Grantee Partner — Cambridge HEART

Cambridge HEART team members after an outreach event centering youth. Summer 2023.

Cambridge HEART (Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team) is a community-led alternative safety program meeting public safety needs outside of policing systems. Grounded in transformative and disability justice principles, Cambridge HEART uses a peer-response model to respond to emergency calls prompted by the immediate needs of people in conflict or crisis, including those with mental illness and/or substance use disorders. Cambridge HEART also engages in conflict resolution processes, coordinates mutual aid to support material needs, and works to address the root causes of harm.

Cambridge HEART is a recipient of BWF's 2023 Momentum grant. Corinne Espinoza, Co-Director at Cambridge HEART, spoke with us about what their work looks like in practice, how the organization is supporting the safety of women, girls, and gender-expansive individuals in their community and the upcoming launch of their new peer-to-peer support line. 

What led you to create this organization or take this leadership role? Can you tell us more about your connection to the work and the specific need you saw?

Cambridge Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team (Cambridge HEART) was created in 2021 by The Black Response (TBR) as an alternative to policing. TBR did powerful advocacy work to push the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to invest in alternatives. Faced with inaction by the City, TBR decided to build something with the community. TBR did Participatory Action Research, and, with that guidance from the community, designed and built Cambridge HEART. We are grateful to the community and to the Black women who founded and built HEART including Stephanie Guirand, Queen-Cheyenne Wade, Dara Bayer, and many others. We are grateful to the hundreds of volunteers and donors who supported those early efforts and who still form such an important part of our organization today. 

We knew that the community expressed a need to receive help from an unarmed person when in crisis. We knew that people wanted to be able to ask for help without being worried that the help itself would cause harm. Community members’ words guide us: “What if, when you called for help, you received help? What if a call for help didn’t make things worse?”

Can you share more about how Cambridge HEART’s work is fostering greater safety for women, girls, and gender-expansive individuals in the communities you serve? 

Cambridge HEART’s work fosters greater safety for women, girls, and gender-expansive individuals in our communities by offering support aligned with our values of care, healing, transformative accountability, self-determination, and community. 

To share an example, if a gender-expansive person experiences harm in an intimate relationship, they may not feel comfortable talking to police or other systems about that situation due to transphobia and other systemic discrimination. A gender-expansive person who dares to confide in a Cambridge HEART responder about harm in a relationship is met with respect, kindness, and love. We center their autonomy and offer to accompany them on the journey they want to take. They may want to stay in the relationship. We can offer a person to talk to, safety planning, and harm reduction. We can also offer support around the other stressors in the person’s life. Often people are facing multiple challenges at the same time, and addressing one issue only is not sufficient. Sometimes, people do not feel they have a choice about leaving a relationship if the relationship is the only way other needs (like housing, health, and food security) are met. Addressing the holistic situation opens up true options to a person as they consider what they might want for their life. 

Another example of how Cambridge HEART supports safety for women and girls is related to our approach to mandated reporting. Currently, if a woman or girl tells certain people that she is having thoughts of hurting herself, teachers, doctors, or therapists may be required to take certain actions. These actions can result in unwanted outcomes like DCF involvement with any children in the home, forced hospitalization, and more.  With a Cambridge HEART peer responder, the person will be met with care. We focus on what the person needs to make it through the day and pay attention to root causes that are a part of the stressful situation. If a woman is feeling like she can’t make it any longer — if her fridge is empty and she has an eviction notice on the door — Cambridge HEART would connect her to longer-term resources and mutual aid as well as provide emotional support. Supporting a person’s stable housing and food security is an integral part of their mental health — they are all intertwined. 

What’s one thing people might not know about your organization?

One logistics detail: People have been surprised to learn how much of our funding comes from individual donors. Some government agencies and foundations are still nervous when it comes to innovative projects like ours. Some funding sources feel nervous about abolition and ideas for projects that support our community in the ways we do. We are so grateful that individual donors have stepped up in a major way to support us. More than 50% of our funding comes from individual donors!

One programmatic thing: People may not know that everyone at Cambridge HEART is deeply rooted in our community and deeply rooted in lived experience. Our team has lived experience with: incarceration, mental health diagnoses, disabilities, growing up in domestic violence homes, navigating relationships where someone used violence against us, financial difficulties like food insecurity, housing insecurity, and more. These experiences help us connect with our community and deeply understand the context in which their crisis is unfolding.

What’s next for you? What project or goal is Cambridge HEART working on right now?

Cambridge HEART is entering a new stage of our work. We have been working hard to get to this point, where we can serve people in the moment. We plan to launch our “warm” line soon, and two months after that, we will launch our mobile crisis response.  

For the warm line, a person who needs someone to talk to will be able to call us and get peer-to-peer support over the telephone in the moment. They will also be offered the opportunity for follow-up support and care if they are interested. With mobile crisis response, we can travel to the person to support their needs and offer follow-up support if the community member would like that.

What does liberation look like to you?

No one is free until everyone is free, so it looks like fighting for and imagining liberation until every single person is free. To me, liberation is true peace and self-determination. Liberation looks like the freedom to bring your body where it wants to be (regardless of borders and other colonial constructs), to be able to exist in peace in the world, to be able to connect with others, or to have solitude. 

Liberation looks like everyone’s belly being full, and everyone, especially children, being surrounded by love and joy and playfulness. It looks like people’s needs being met whether or not they are able to participate in the workforce. It looks like a safe roof over everyone’s head, a warm place to sleep. It looks like having a true choice to pursue as much education as a person wants (without debt or cost). It looks like having a true voice in our policies and laws. Liberation to me would be a return to our ancestral ways of caring for each other, community, love, generosity, and responsibility toward the earth, other beings, and each other. 

Meet Our Grantee Partner — Melanin Mass Moms

A support group hosted by Melanin Mass Moms

Melanin Mass Moms is a network of moms of color working to bridge the gap between community resources and health disparities for mothers of color as they navigate all stages of motherhood. The organization provides mental health resources, postpartum support, and avenues for advocacy aimed to increase access to community-wide resources.

Melanin Mass Moms is a recipient of our Movement Building Grant. We sat down with Julia Lotin, Executive Director, to learn more about how her postpartum experience inspired her to create the organization that today connects thousands of mothers across the state and what’s next for Melanin Mass Moms.

What led you to create this organization or take this leadership role? Can you tell us more about your connection to the work and the specific need you saw?

Six years ago, as a new mom, lost in the trenches of the fourth trimester, I found myself yearning for community and connection. I was excited to find new mom support groups in my area, which were great — but I quickly realized that my needs and experiences as a mom of color were not shared in those spaces as I was the only person of color in most cases. This experience sparked my interest to create Melanin Mass Moms (MMM) the social network. My vision for MMM was to become a hub of resources for moms of color to connect and feel validated in their experiences throughout the different stages of motherhood. There was a need for open conversations about the joys of melanin motherhood but also the scary and real experiences we go through as moms of color. There was a huge need for community, a safe space for diversity in dialogue and connection; that’s where MMM comes in.

Can you share more about how Melanin Mass Moms’ work is improving or supporting the health of women, girls, and gender-expansive individuals in the communities you serve?

Through the expansion of MMM from the social network to now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, our team of admins and board of directors saw this as an amazing opportunity to support our community of moms through their motherhood journey. Part of our goal was to build a collective where moms can provide peer support. As we continued to expand in the mental health and maternal health sectors, we learned about the extreme maternal health crisis impacting moms of color. Melanin Mass Moms supports the mental health of our community by providing monthly support groups where we can normalize the postpartum experience, support moms in all stages of motherhood, and connect them to resources such as mental health clinicians, doulas, etc. Our maternal health campaign has allowed us to shed light on this crisis through presentations with community leaders and providers who are doing the work to eliminate maternal mortality and providing access to doula care as an additional resource during labor and delivery.

What’s one thing people might not know about your organization?

Melanin Mass Moms is a unique organization, as we reach black and brown moms statewide through our online network. Over the past five years, word of mouth has grown our network to over 5,000 moms! The support and solidarity seen in our online community truly make this work rewarding. Our team of admins works hard to ensure this remains a space for us, by us.

What’s next for you? What project or goal is Melanin Mass Moms working on right now?

Melanin Mass Moms is thrilled to announce our 501(c)(3) Spring 2024 Doula Scholarship, designed to make a significant impact on the lives of four expectant mothers giving birth between March and August 2024. Our organization is committed to addressing health disparities and bridging the gap in available resources to mothers of color as they navigate the complex journey of motherhood.

Our mission is rooted in providing comprehensive support, encompassing mental health resources, postpartum assistance, and advocating for equitable access to community-wide resources for mothers of color. With this scholarship initiative, we aim to centralize the importance of doula care in addressing healthcare disparities, particularly during the crucial period of pregnancy and childbirth.

What does liberation look like to you?

Liberation for black and brown moms would be nothing short of safe birthing experiences, supportive and accessible mental health and wellness services, and existing in spaces of empowerment. Liberation looks like motherhood in bloom rooted in joy and safety. 

BWF Beginnings: Hayat Imam on Creating the 2000 Club

Forty years ago, the Boston Women’s Fund was born out of a desire to do philanthropy differently. That ethos inspired a radically unique way of granting money, questioning the status quo, and even redefining who a donor could be. Even then, our early leaders knew that philanthropy wasn’t just for the wealthy and white to take part in. We are all philanthropists. And in 1991, our then Executive Director, Hayat Imam, developed a new fundraising model based on that very idea. This project would set the fund up for success for decades to come. It was called the 2000 Club.

We sat down with Hayat to learn more about this groundbreaking practice.

Boston Women’s Fund: When did you first become involved with BWF?

Hayat Imam: I was on the board in the late 80s. [Stephanie Borns, the ED at the time asked me to join.] And I said to Stephanie, I'm happy to be on your board. But just don't ask me to fundraise…And since then, I've become a professional fundraiser! [laughs] But you know, that was a pivotal moment. Because, as soon as those words popped out of my mouth, the second set of words that entered my head was, “why not?”

I understand that you were BWF’s Executive Director from 1991-1993. And it was in 1991 that you created the 2000 Club. Can you tell me more about that?

I had left the Boston area and was working in Indonesia, when I received a call from BWF inviting me to come and be the ED of the Boston Women’s Fund. So, I came back and joined the Fund. The Fund was very tight for money at the time, but that was mainly because we had not done the necessary fundraising work. But I knew we had a lot of people who supported us, so I just went to every donor, and everyone was really open to us. In that process, I had a chance to build relationships with a lot of wonderful people. It was around that time that a lot of talk was going on about endowments.

Hayat Imam with two young people at a Boston Women's Fund event.

What would an endowment have meant for BWF at that time?

It was worth doing an endowment back then. Interest rates were higher, so we could see that if we had substantial money in the bank, the interest from the principal would be a meaningful sum for the Fund. It seemed like a really worthwhile thing to do. But, only if we could raise at least a million dollars for the endowment. But we didn’t have the kind of donors who could give us anything close to that. So how do we get a million dollars?

So what was the next move?

I don't know how this calculation happened, but I was playing with numbers, and I said: “I can’t believe this, but 2,000 people giving $100 a year for five years adds up to a million dollars!” And lots and lots of people can do $100! The idea was to get a lot of people to give a little bit of money on a regular basis. That would be much easier to achieve than a few people giving a lot of money — and clearly we didn't have the second option.

So, long before AOC and Bernie Sanders figured out that $25 from a lot of people can be a lot of money, we said “hey, this could work!”

How did you decide on the name 2000 Club?

We named it the 2000 club for two reasons. In 1991, the year 2000 was just around the corner, and we thought by the year 2000, we'll have achieved the endowment! Secondly, we were aiming to have 2000 members. So that was the reason it was called the 2000 Club.

For one member it would normally be a $100 donation each year for five years. But we said, many people could be in a membership! Two people could pair up and pay $50 each, and that would count as one membership. Or four friends could give $25 each, so just about everyone could participate! So that was the vision that would allow all of us, grantees, donors, and grassroots folks to be part of building an endowment for the Boston Women's Fund.

Had you seen any other foundation do something like that?

I had not. I think it's a unique thing actually. I don't think anyone had done that then. Now this notion is out there: that a lot of people giving a small amount of money is a lot of money. I sometimes smile and think: “we did that first!”

It’s a brilliant idea, and it really changes the idea of who gets to be a donor, who gets to be involved in philanthropy.

Exactly! It's an artificial divide. We're all donors in our own way. We give time; we give money if we can; we do the work. There was this very artificial division between donors and grantees that I found very uncomfortable. It created a hierarchy. And I wondered if we could think differently about this. Couldn’t we all be donors of the Boston Women's Fund, including our grantees?

So I know the goal was met in 1999. Where did the club go from there?

The next idea was that if we could say that we, as a grassroots community, were raising a million dollars for the women of Boston, we could perhaps go to someone with means and say “Can you join us in matching this first million?” And a Donor did join us, and that match did come in!

BWF was created partly in response to how difficult it was for women and gender-expansive people from persistently excluded communities to get philanthropic funding for the grassroots efforts they were a part of. But BWF, as a team of many women of color, must have experienced the same challenges in fundraising that its grantee partners were facing.

What was that like? How did we overcome that?

We had more individual donors than foundation donors first of all, and we had just one, maybe two, family foundations giving us money at that time. So, I think we had a particular kind of woman who was attracted to us, and many of our donors were women. We had women who were feminists, who were interested in the philosophy and politics that Boston Women's Fund displayed. One of our key supporters was someone who lived in Chicago, and there's a very strong, big, Chicago Women's Fund. But she told us that she preferred to fund us in Boston, rather than Chicago, because of our politics and our strong social justice stance. So we attracted people like that.

And then we did something else. I didn’t start this, but I helped do a couple: We hosted events called, the Women Money and Social Responsibility Conferences.

These were workshops for people of wealth who were concerned about investing their money in good things. The workshop was very technical. It was really about how to invest properly. But, as a result, they got to know us, and many of them became individual donors of ours as well.

We had women investment counselors, who specialized in socially responsible investments, lead the workshops. So, they got some airtime, and at the same time, everybody benefited. There were women out there who were like us, feminists, they just happened to be wealthy. We were able to tap into a lot of that.

Well thank you again, Hayat, for offering your time to chat today! This has been really rich for me. I really appreciate it!

You are most welcome. It was a pleasure for me, too!

After Hayat Imam left the Boston Women’s Fund, she worked with the feminist community in the Philippines on a National Family Violence Prevention Campaign; and as a Consultant to the UNDP. She was on the Board of Grassroots International for seven years, and its Chair for 5 years. Presently she is on the Board of Mass Peace Action.