Pictured (L to R): Aireana (Paraguay) and Forum for the Empowerment of Women (South Africa)

We are delighted to announce this year’s Jeanne Córdova Fund grantee partners.

This year, Astraea’s Jeanne Córdova Fund awarded $130,000 in grants to 10 visionary grassroots organizations across Latin America and Southern Africa dedicated to sustaining lesbian and queer feminist movements. These groups are furthering intersectional, intergenerational movement-building, creating new forms of resistance, building power, developing cultural activism among lesbian, butch, feminist, and gender nonconforming communities and imagining new futures into being. Grantee partners are centering black, indigenous, and working-class voices, and following lesbian and queer feminist principles, which emphasize the importance of cross-issue organizing and collaboration. Organizations are:

• Responding creatively to violence and threats against LGBTI+ communities: In Ecuador, Mujer y Mujer organized a self-care retreat this year, convening 11 LGBTI+ activists from 4 different regions to recharge and reflect on their strategies and activism against increased attacks from conservative and religious movements.
• Providing critical safe spaces for resistance and the production of feminist cultural content: In Paraguay, Aireana’s vibrant cultural community center, “La Serafina,” provides a unique space for merging theater, cultural activism, and political education aimed at challenging stereotypical gender roles and supporting the leadership of LBQ communities.
• Developing rights literacy, advocacy, and communications training: In Zimbabwe, PaKasipiti will host an LBT advocacy symposium that will serve as a forum for growing activism and address the demands of national and regional LGBTQ and feminist coalitions.
• Creating sustainable LGBTQI networks and alliances: In South Africa, Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) has developed the Rainbow Activist Alliance (RAA), a network of 15 community-based LGBTI organizations across the country that work collectively to secure greater access to public health care, reform discriminatory policies within the criminal justice system, and build black lesbian leadership.

Before she passed away in 2016, Jeanne Córdova announced that her estate would donate $2 million over 10 years to Astraea to help sustain the very movements that supported her as a young Chicana-lesbian activist. Through the Jeanne Córdova Fund, she created decades of possibility for Astraea, for our movements, and for our people. Please join us in celebrating the work of these powerful grantee partners and read more about their work in the links below.

Aireana – Grupo por los Derechos de las Lesbianas // Colectivo No Tengo Miedo // Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) // Fundación de Desarrollo Humano Integral CAUSANA // GLEFAS- Grupo Latinoamericano De Estudios, Formacion Y Accion Feminista // Lesbianas Independientes Feministas y Socialistas (LIFS) // Limpopo LGBTI Proudly Out // Mujer y Mujer // Mujeres Al Borde // PaKaspiti Zimbabwe

P.S. Join us in supporting LGBTQI activism all over the world by donating or following us on social media!