We invited our co-chair, Susana Fried, to share some reflections on our founding mothers for this year’s Mother’s Day. Motherhood takes all shapes, from chosen family, to raising children, to starting impactful movements, motherhood is grounded in care, love, and freedom. 

This Mother’s Day, I would like to honor, respect, and celebrate The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice’s 45-year history, our founding mothers, and all those who created, continue to nurture, and grow the Astraea Foundation of today.

Because of the foresight of a small group of spirited and determined women, we can support queer movements around the world with flexible, unrestricted funds. These women made clear their dedication to ensuring that women’s movements prioritize the needs of lesbians and women of color by declaring that “if it is going to exist, we will need to fund it ourselves.” This groundwork now enables us to support queer, feminist, anti-racist movements worldwide. Indeed, we are proud to be one of the first women’s funds in the world and the only one wholly devoted to advancing the rights of LGBTQI+ people globally. When we, as a community, consider the steps that come after this one, it is vital to be anchored in our history in order to plan for our future. Today, when we think about the next steps, we are thinking about the Astraea Foundation’s founding mothers.

This work is urgent – now more than ever. With anti-rights/anti-gender movements increasingly well-financed and globally networked, we’re seeing a proliferation of discriminatory laws, policies, and practices that normalize and advance criminalization and violence against LGBTQI+ communities and restrict reproductive rights and health. The growth of authoritarian, conservative forces especially target structurally excluded women, girls, trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people, and reinforces the most restrictive and punitive structures of power and privilege. In this context, the Astraea Foundation’s work and the work of our grantee partners is critical.

Today, we especially remember Achebe (betty) Powell. Achebe was one of the spirited and determined women who, sitting around a kitchen table in 1977, brought the Astraea Foundation into being. We very recently lost Achebe to COVID-19, which serves as a harsh reminder that COVID-19 is still killing us – and that it is killing some communities more than others. Achebe was formidable: she was the first Black lesbian to serve on the board of directors of the National Gay Task Force and was co-chair of that board for several years. She attended the historic meeting of lesbian and gay leaders at the Carter White House in 1977. She was a highly sought-after trainer on diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism in the United States. And she was also “a pioneer in connecting United States work on intersectionality, inclusion, and diversity to transnational conversations on gender, race, class, and culture.” https://www.middlechurch.org/honoring-achebe-powell/

With her roots in the civil rights movement, Achebe was full of insight, love, critical awareness, and keen humor. She had a profound passion for nurturing vibrant, inclusive, queer, anti-racist feminist groups that operate with an intersectional perspective. For me, Achebe was not just a close friend but also an integral member of my chosen family. It is still difficult for me to imagine life without her, so whenever I think about her, I envision a bright new star emerging in the night sky. It is a privilege for me to serve as a co-chair, with Bookda Gheisar, on the Astraea Foundation’s board of directors, and I do it in her honor and loving memory.

Achebe was also fluent in French; I’ll pay tribute to her vision and commitment by closing with, “la lutte continue.”

In Solidarity,
Susana Fried, Board Co-Chair

As February ends and we wrap up Black History Month, we want to take a moment to honor and uplift Black leadership and Black communities across the U.S. and around the world. We also want to acknowledge that one month is never enough and is not representative of the profound impact that Black organizing has on our collective liberation. 

Astraea was founded on the principles of intersectionality. Today, Black LGBTQI+ movements continue to organize under dangerous and violent conditions but continue to fight structural barriers. We are honored to be grounded in our imperative to identify and resource radical movement leaders pursuing freedom and equality.  

As an institution, we remain committed to our anti-racist journey. It is our commitment to center Black leadership not only in our grantmaking but in how we operate internally and how we advocate in philanthropic spaces. 

This month we celebrated the work of six incredible grantees and activists. Check out some highlights below and follow the links to learn more about our grantee partners leading this incredible work. 

This is, of course, only a small sample of leaders on whose shoulders we stand. 

• Achebe Powell – We are deeply saddened to share that one of our founding mothers, Achebe Powell, passed away this month. Achebe was a Black, lesbian, feminist, social justice activist, educator, and friend. Achebe was among the small group of multi-racial, multi-class, feminist activists who came together in 1977 to create a new way of bringing resources to movements led by lesbians and women of color, to, in her words, “generate the justice that our communities need, right here, right now.”
• ZAMI NOBLA (National Organization of Lesbians on Aging) is a Black-led and founded organization, deeply rooted in Atlanta, Georgia. Their programming and campaigns highlight the unique intersections of being Black, elder, and disabled. 
• House of Tulip is one of our many incredible grantee partners doing vital community-building work. They provide zero-barrier housing, case management, linkage to care, and community programming to trans and gender non-conforming people in need of a safe place to stay while growing the supply of affordable housing in New Orleans. Beyond this, members of HoT staff also created the TGNC Peoples COVID Crisis Fund of Louisiana to help trans and gender non-conforming people in Louisiana pay for food, medication and housing during the pandemic.
• Baltimore Save Haven (BSH) is a Black trans, former sex worker, and LGBTQ- led organization that focuses on supporting the trans community, specifically those who are low-income and poor, engage in sex work, substance use, and currently face housing insecurity. They believe that every trans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (TLGBQ) person should be able to live healthy, self-determined, and self-sufficient lives free from stigma, violence, and oppression. They achieve this by providing compassionate harm reduction and upward mobility services, advocacy, and community engagement that is respectful, non-judgmental, and affirms and honors individual power and agency. 

Black history is very much a part of our present. Which is why we are honored to be partnered with these incredible Black-led organizations who are continuously leading in our shared pursuit of justice and equality. Each of these grantees continues to create a lasting impact on our movement spaces and communities. We hope that you will join us in recognizing and supporting their work.

For this year’s Bi Visibility Day, Joy Chia, Astraea’s Executive Director, asked me to write a piece on what bi visibility means to me. Unlike most of my writing projects, where I marinate for a few days and then I can easily write it, this assignment had me stuck. I’ve been bi since my first girl crush in 1999. Before queer was common parlance and reclaimed proudly, bi was what felt right to me. I liked boys, I liked girls, and I had yet to meet people who identify as gender non-conforming. I quickly realized that bisexuality isn’t simple and that being constantly asked, “Are you really bi?” or “Are you dating a man, or woman or GNC person now?” is draining.

Through my coming out process, I figured out not only my sexual orientation, but also my gender. I’m high femme. For me, that means wearing clothes, jewelry, make-up and reclaiming physical trappings of femininity. The overlap of these two identities quickly left me with not more visibility, but with a kind of double invisibility. I quickly realized that “who I was” to others was being defined by who I was dating. It has taken me many years and a lot of support from my femme community – trans and cis – to push aside the bullshit and stand as myself.

Our movements are working to transcend binaries and break down these rigid boxes. but we continue to live in a world where who we are, and what rights are accorded us, is defined by litmus tests set by other people. We are asked to contort ourselves, shrink parts of ourselves, bend uncomfortably, just to be seen as being part of ill-fitting spaces. At Astraea, we fund organizations and movements that are breaking those binaries, that are helping people be seen as they are versus how others define them. Our grantee partners do this by changing the narrative, building power, and challenging normative assumptions.

Both the joy and challenge of feeling free to live outside of the boxes that people put us in is that we get to define who we are. We get to upend expectations and embrace fluidity. We get to choose what is important to us, choose our kin, and choose how we live our lives. Yet, it’s also a lot easier for us as humans to fall into the habit of using boxes (for ourselves and others). It’s easier to define ourselves by what we are opposed to, rather than what we stand for and who we are.

Bi visibility means celebrating my queerness, my bi-ness, my femme-ness, regardless of who I am in love with or in bed with. Bi visibility matters to me, not only because it’s how I see myself, but also because it’s how I want to be seen. Not just parts of me, but all of me.

In solidarity,
Rebecca Fox
Vice President of Programs

Dear Friends,

If I’m to be completely honest (and vulnerable), this reflection has not been an easy one to write. After seven years, I have decided it’s time to leave Astraea Foundation and my role as Deputy Executive Director.

At the very core of all that I am proud to have achieved at Astraea — and even the choice I have made to leave – is this: reimagination. The audacity to believe that we could build a partnership with governments without compromising our values and integrity, the seismic shifts in our operations and culture, and a deepened investment in our people. Looking back, I’m sure I couldn’t have even imagined what we would do together so many years ago.

In truth, reimagination has been at the very foundation of Astraea. Our Founding Mothers had to envision a world where feminists, lesbians, queer folks of color would dare to raise the resources we needed to support each other, to trust each other, and to believe that we could indeed make the world a more just place for us to thrive. 

45 years later, Astraea is still committed to that world. In all my roles — as a staff member, executive leader, space-holder, Black queer immigrant cis-woman — I have borne witness to an organization grappling with how to remain accountable to and aligned with its feminist values, staff, peers, grantee partners, and to the LGBTQI movements that we serve. 

The work we do is hard, uncomfortable and, at times, messy. How could it not be if what we aim to do is step outside of systems and ways of being that no longer serve us? You see, reimagination isn’t always about rainbows and unicorns — to do it well also involves having the most difficult conversations, holding curiosity, grief, sadness, and anger as we release what we have been in service of what we could be and emerge on the other side renewed. 

This is the cycle of reimagination and, as I move towards my own sabbatical of rest and renewal, I know that the Astraea I leave today is far sturdier than the one I joined in 2015. Over the last few months especially, I sense a new horizon of hope that — while tenuous and precious — comes with dreaming about what might now be possible for Astraea and each of us finding our own place in that possibility. We are finding courage in our vulnerability, balance in our boundaries, and learning how to meaningfully build community across distance and difference.

There is much more to be done to get to where we want to be, but the path Astraea is charting to do it is more sure-footed, strategic, and overall stronger. I’m truly excited about what’s yet to come.

And so, I’d like to thank all our staff (past and present), grantee partners and supporters for sharing in my last reflection, and I hope if you remember nothing else, it is this: we are imagining a world where we can all thrive and the work we do to create that world is like planting trees under whose shade we may never sit. 

Until we meet again,
Kerry-Jo Ford Lyn

Deputy Executive Director