Photo credit: Lerman Montoya
It is with great excitement that we announce our first Fertile Ground Fund grantee partners!
Our first Fertile Ground Fund (FGF) cycle supported 43 organizations in the United States and around the world with grants totaling $212,000. The Fertile Ground Fund is a flexible funding source that provides resources based on the shifting needs and desires of Astraea’s grantee partners, giving them the ability to be more nimble and responsive. It supports activists to seize opportunities to seed and grow movement visions, ensuring organizations can prioritize collective liberation & sustainability towards building long-term movements.
Closing civil society spaces, increased violence against organizers & human rights defenders, heightened discrimination, and police violence against LGBTQI, Black, Brown, Indigenous, migrant, and other communities across the world make this an extremely challenging political time for grassroots activists. This first round of grants were an opportunity for us to resource and bolster groups’ capacity to respond to and strategize ways to resist oppressive state policies and practices quickly, strategically, and effectively.
The grants awarded in this first cycle support resistance strategies from projects intervening on the violence of policing to deepening cross-movement collaborations, ultimately generating local, national, regional, and global opportunities that strengthen organizational and movement capacities.
Our bold, brilliant Fertile Ground Fund grantee partners are:
- Designing forums exclusively to strengthen LBQ women and movements around the world: The first Global Feminist LBQ Women’s* Conference is being organized in South Africa in July 2019 by a collective working group of 22 LBQ women* activists from across all regions of the world. It aims to create a space for activists and advocates to come together, share knowledge, exchange strategies, strengthen connections, mobilize resources, and take the lead in building a global LBQ women*s movement with the capacity to influence the world agenda on human rights, health, development.
- Creating spaces for activists to strategize around the lived experiences of LGBTQI people, as well as around resource development and mobilization of movements: Tajassod-Qorras, a Lebanese queer trans embodiment initiative, will be collaborating with Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR) to organize the ‘Tajassodat: Conversations to Advance Trans Rights and Justice across Muslim Societies’ convening in Nepal in May 2019, which hopes to increase resources and raise awareness around nascent trans rights and justice movements in the Middle East, North Africa (MENA) and South Asia & Southeast Asia (SSEA). The convening will break silos for trans Muslim activists often working in isolation, help them build formal relationships, and advance collaboration with other activists, as well as deepen critical analysis of successful approaches to advance trans justice in Muslim societies.
- Combatting state criminalization efforts and fighting back against racist, homophobic, transphobic, nativist, and capitalist aggression from state forces: The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance/La Alianza para Mobilizar Nuestra Resistencia (AMOR) is a rapid response network created by a coalition of People of Color-led organizations. The Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), in Rhode Island (USA), supported the founding of AMOR to respond to instances of “state hate” stemming from law enforcement and immigration. They are collaborating across Black, South Asian, Southeast Asian, undocumented, Indigenous, and refugee organizing to build up this alliance, which will provide communities with emergency legal services, culturally competent psychological services, and support for victims violence and for tracking incidents of hate crimes.
Please join us in celebrating the work of all our incredible grantee partners, and read more about their work in the links below.
Fertile Ground Fund Grantee Partners*
*Note: We do not publicize a number of our courageous grantee partners because of security threats they face in their local contexts, so organizations may be missing from this list.
#AbolishICE National Gathering of Queer and Trans Organizers
United States
Afritude
Dominican Republic
Aireana
Paraguay
Asociación Organizando Trans Diversidades (OTD)
Chile
Association Okvir
Bosnia & Herzegovina
Audre Lorde Project
United States
Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project
United States
BYP100
United States
Circuito de Innovación y Resiliencia Queer (CIRQ)
Puerto Rico
Colectiva Mujer y Salud
Dominican Republic
Colectivo No Tengo Miedo
Peru
Communities United Against Violence (CUAV)
United States
Communities United for Police Reform (CPR)
United States
Corporación Promoción de la Mujer/Taller de Comunicación Mujer
Ecuador
El/La Para Translatinas
United States
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
United States
European Lesbian* Conference
Europe – Regional
Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement
United States
Freedom Inc
United States
Freedom to Thrive (formerly Enlace)
United States
Fundación de Desarrollo Humano Integral CAUSANA
Ecuador
Girls for Gender Equity (GGE)
United States
Global Feminist LBQ Women’s* Conference
Netherlands
Humanity First Cameroon
Cameroon
Immigrant Youth Coalition
United States
Kohl Journal for Body and Gender Research
Lebanon
Las Nietas de Nonó
Puerto Rico
Law for Black Lives
United States
Mijente
United States
Movimiento Lesbia
Peru
Mujer y Mujer
Ecuador
Mujeres al Borde
Colombia
National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network (NQTTCN)
United States
Pakasipiti Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe
Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM)
United States
Rainbow Identity Association
Botswana
Red Multicultural de Mujeres Trans de Guatemala (REDMMUTRANS)
Guatemala
Sayoni
Singapore
SisterReach
United States
Spark Reproductive Justice Now!
United States
Tajassod-Qorras
Lebanon
Dynamic Initiative for Healthcare & Human Rights (DIHHR),
Nigeria
Trans Queer Pueblo
United States
Voice of the Voiceless (VOVO)
Zimbabwe
West Africa Trans Forum (WATF)
Liberia
WHER Initiative
Nigeria
Young Women United
United States
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