This Pride month, we’re grateful for all the grantee partners, staff, board, and supporters who are an integral part of the work for collective liberation.
This Pride month, we’re grateful for all the grantee partners, staff, board, and supporters who are an integral part of the work for collective liberation.
Check out the video above for recent highlights from Astraea and our grantee partners–know that you are an integral part of the work for collective liberation.
Read our most recent Annual Report to find out even more highlights from our grantee partners and supporters!
We’re thrilled to announce this year’s U.S. Fund grantee partners. These are some of the fiercest organizations in the country using transformative strategies to combat criminalization, resist state violence and white supremacy, and build collaborative, sustainable LGBTQI movements where gender, reproductive, racial, migrant and economic justice is not an ideal, but a lived truth for us all.
We’re thrilled to announce this year’s U.S. Fund grantee partners.
Astraea awarded $1M in grants, to 32 organizations, in 13 states! These are some of the fiercest organizations in the country using transformative strategies to combat criminalization, resist state violence and white supremacy, and build collaborative, sustainable LGBTQI movements where gender, reproductive, racial, migrant and economic justice is not an ideal, but a lived truth for us all.
Many of our grantee partners are using multiple and diverse strategies to achieve their aims, and are engaging in cross-issue collaborations that build power at the local and national levels. Organizations are:
We are committed not only to resourcing movements via grantmaking, but also to supporting and strengthening cross-collaborations. In January 2018 we hosted a lively and intimate convening with twenty U.S. Fund grantee partners in Washington D.C. Throughout the day, conversations centered around vulnerability, safety, sustainability, and the need for innovative strategies in this intensified moment of white supremacy, racism, and violence; from politicizing direct service provision, engaging in interfaith organizing, to building cross-movement visions and collaborations. Our partnerships with groups like these underscore why we are meeting this political moment with a renewed sense of urgency—and hope. Please join us in celebrating the work of these formidable grantee partners and read more about their work in the links below. Audre Lorde Project // Black Alliance for Just Immigration // Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project // Black Youth Project 100 // Blackbird: Fueling Innovation into Black Organizing // Black and Pink // BreakOUT! // Center for Media Justice // Community United Against Violence, Inc. // Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) // El/La Para Translatinas // Ella Baker Center for Human Rights // Enlace // Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement // FIERCE // Freedom, Inc. // Girls for Gender Equity // Immigrant Youth Coalition // Law for Black Lives (L4BL) // Mariposas Sin Fronteras // Mijente // National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network // New Voices Pittsburgh // Power Inside // Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM) // SisterReach // SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective // Survivors Organizing for Liberation (SOL) // SPARK! Reproductive Justice NOW // Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) // Trans Queer Pueblo // Young Women United (YWU) By supporting Astraea you are creating ecosystems of resistance that are smart, effective, and unique. We are answering the call of this moment. We will win. And we will do so because of your support. Join us, donate now and sign up to our emails or social media.
About the image: Freedom Cities is a movement for safe, healthy and thriving neighborhoods and local communities led by Astraea grantee partners Ella Baker Center, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, and Enlace. Credit: Ella Baker Center
Astraea and TGEU are proud to release a new report, Mapping Digital Landscapes of Trans Activism in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
Astraea and TGEU are proud to release a new report, Mapping Digital Landscapes of Trans Activism in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The report provides a regional overview of digital organizing by trans activists* in 26 countries of Central Asia and Eastern Europe (CAEE)**, emphasizing shared patterns of digital usage, barriers to free and safe use of the internet, and resistance strategies to homo/transphobic-motivated censorship, surveillance, and online attacks. It also presents recommendations for funders and tech communities, social media corporations, and government entities.
In CAEE, trans lives are endangered not only by homophobic and transphobic legislation, but also by governments seeking to exert stricter surveillance over civil society by controlling and monitoring internet usage. Restrictions on internet freedom have a disproportionate effect on trans communities in the region who rely on the internet for their activist, personal, and professional lives, making it a critical tool for connecting and movement building.
Trans communities in the region are resisting these challenges using digital tools in creative ways:
“With the growing importance of digital organizing for trans movements coupled with crackdowns on internet freedom and civil society, there is an urgent need to invest resources in trans movements in CAEE,” says Mariam Gagoshashvili, Senior Program Officer at Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. Investment in digital infrastructure alongside funding of trans-led groups is crucial to supporting the continuing fight against oppressive power structures and essential for the human rights of trans people in the CAEE region.
| Read the report |
To access a version of the report translated into Russian, click here.
P.S. Mapping Digital Landscapes of Trans Activism in Central Asia and Eastern Europe is part of a wider series of Astraea’s country-specific research reports mapping out the landscape of political, economic and social conditions for LGBTQI activism around the world. To read reports covering other regions of the world, including Southern African and Latin American countries, please visit our publications section. This is the first report to focus exclusively on the state of digital organizing and LGBTQI activism.
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*In this report, the term “trans activists” refers to trans people who are actively working towards empowering trans communities and fighting for trans rights either in formal structures such as trans rights NGOs or LGBTQI NGOs, or in less formalized settings such as initiative groups, or as individual voices visible and known to trans communities within their respective countries.
**We use this acronym to include countries in Central Asia, Caucasus, Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, South-East Europe and Central Europe; countries under review are Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, FYROM/ Macedonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
Hear Astraea founding mother Achebe Powell and Astraea’s first Executive Director Katherine Acey share what it took to make their vision of a foundation that left no one behind a reality.
More than 40 years ago, a small group of women came together to address the needs of lesbians, women of color, and grassroots feminist organizations. They prioritized inclusivity and worked tirelessly over the years to ensure that they were leaving no one behind.
We recognize the formidable legacy of our founding mothers. Four decades later, and their vision still burns bright! Thank you, Stella Alvo, Audrey Barnes, Nancy Dean (d), Barbara Grant, Joyce Hunter, Roberta Kosse, Cynthia Long, Achebe Powell, Joan Watts and Leslie Kanes Weisman.
In the video above, hear Astraea founding mother Achebe Powell and Astraea’s first Executive Director Katherine Acey share what it took to make that vision a reality.
#GiveToAstraea because as Achebe says, “What we can never forget is there is so much more work to be done.”
| Donate |
Our program team continues to grow and reflect a global feminist diaspora in the leadership of philanthropy.
Our program team continues to grow and reflect a global feminist diaspora in the leadership of philanthropy. We welcome the breadth and knowledge of U.S. Southern movement organizer Shaena Johnson, our new RJF Program Officer, and the powerful leadership of Courtney Okeke, our new Program Associate. Former RJF Program Officer Miabi Chatterji also now brings her depth of experience in racial justice philanthropy and her sharp analytical mind to her new role as our Senior Grants Manager.
Importantly, we want to lift up Namita Chad in her new role as Associate Director of Programs. In her eleven-year tenure at Astraea, she continues to be a transformative leader for the Program team and Astraea Foundation.
Our team will continue to uplift Astraea’s tenets of advocacy; to resource and be thought partners with LGBTQI global movement leadership as we resist and build collective power and liberation.
Born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Shaena Johnson brings over 15 years of organizing and advocacy experience as well as her extensive work in the community focusing on issues facing LGBTQ youth in the juvenile justice system. Shaena is also the former Co-Director of BreakOUT! [Read more]
Courtney Okeke joins Astraea’s Programs Team with a wealth of experience leading youth wellness and social justice programming; facilitating healing, power, and oppression sessions; and organizing within Black queer feminist and youth-led movements. [Read more]
Namita Chad is Astraea’s Associate Director of Programs. She is a queer South Asian activist with over 10 years experience in social justice philanthropy and over 15 years of experience working with grassroots, LGBTI, immigrant and feminist groups as a board member, staff and in advisory roles. [Read more]
Miabi Chatterji has been participating in and supporting cross-issue movements for justice for more than a dozen years. In the past she has been Co-Director of Grants at Resist, a public foundation with a 45+ year history of funding intersectional social movements, and Senior Program Officer for Astraea’s LGBTQ Racial Justice Fund. [Read more]
Astraea is thrilled to have our grantee partner, Pidgeon, joining us from Chicago as part of our Why We Fund event series
Astraea is thrilled to have our grantee partner, Pidgeon, joining us from Chicago sharing their incredible work. Pidgeon is an American activist, writer, artist, and consultant who has presented across the nation and internationally. They are an advocate for intersex human rights and against nonconsensual intersex medical interventions.
Thanks to Flatiron Hotel for their generous support of this Why We Fund event. We’re happy to partner with them!
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Thanks to everyone who attended the event! We were grateful to have everyone in the room.
| View event photos |
Astraea is honored to be one of 11 organizations selected to host a Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow in 2018.
Astraea is honored to be one of eleven organizations selected to host a Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow in 2018.
About the Program:
Backed by Ford and Mozilla, the program partners emerging technologists with civil society organizations for 10 months of collaborative and creative work to support public awareness around online policy, defending digital rights, and championing internet freedom. In turn, the host organizations mentor their fellows to tackle challenges to the open web: digital inclusion, online privacy and security, transparent policy, and human rights advocacy.
Why Astraea?
Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice is the only philanthropic organization working exclusively to advance LGBTQI rights around the globe. We support hundreds of brilliant and brave grantee partners in the U.S. and internationally who challenge oppression and seed social change. We work for racial, economic, social and gender justice, because we all deserve to live our lives freely, without fear, and with profound dignity.
QTPOC communities exist at the intersections of oppressions and have long experienced government restriction. As a LGBTQI funder, Astraea has always worked to resource marginalized groups working in restrictive environments. Our work includes internet freedom because digital terrain mirrors the physical world’s marginalization of LGBTQI communities, especially those with the least access to power: women, trans and intersex people, and people of color. Our activist partners are working across movements and advancing myriad rights issues; to support them, we too work beyond silos and aim to ensure the cross-pollination of internet freedom/governance issues with their broader human rights advocacy. Our work presents an important opportunity for an emerging technologist to directly support frontline activists working at the intersections of issue areas like racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, and reproductive justice all over the world so they can be more safe, secure and technologically innovative in their organizing.
Fellowship Areas of Focus:
We’ve selected 3 focus areas that would contribute to Astraea’s mission while advancing the fellow’s experience:
More generally, we hope to work with a fellow who has experience in designs/systems thinking, communications project management, security research, tech issue analysis and/or community organizing. The fellowship will be based in our office in New York City, but there will be ample space and opportunity for the fellow to travel and/or to work remotely from alternate locations.
Fellows will receive a $60,000 USD stipend paid in monthly installments, and will also receive childcare and healthcare benefits.
Interested in becoming one of this year’s Ford-Mozilla Fellows and working with us or one of the other great organizations selected for 2018? Applications are due April 20! Please make sure to select “Open Web” in the application form to apply for this particular fellowship.
Have any questions about the application? Please contact Mozilla directly at fellowships@mozilla.org.
Astraea is an equal opportunity employer committed to a diverse, multicultural work environment. People of color, people with disabilities and people of diverse sexual orientations, gender expressions and identities are encouraged to apply.
This International Trans Day of Visibility, join us as we celebrate the power and vitality of Trans Movements worldwide.
This International Trans Day of Visibility, join us as we celebrate the power and vitality of Trans Movements worldwide. Watch the video above to find out how Astraea grantee partners like Trans-Fuzja in Poland, S.H.E. in South Africa, and Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project in the U.S. are seeding deep and lasting change and challenging discrimination, stigma, and violence against Trans people all over the world. Trans people face serious human rights violations in every region of the world. In philanthropy, we see that Trans groups internationally are severely underfunded—they receive less than 1% of all foundation money dedicated to human rights, and according to our recent report on The State of Trans Organizing, more than three-fifths of Trans groups worldwide have budgets of less than USD $10,000. Despite the lack of funding, Trans Movements are growing rapidly in the U.S. and all over the world—and Astraea is proud to be a longtime supporter, having supported Trans organizing since as early as 1994. Build Trans power with us this TDOV:
*** Video transcript:
[Ruby Corado (Casa Ruby):] “We are here to speak for the hundreds of transgender people…”
[Ruby Corado (Casa Ruby):] Number one as a transgender woman, I experience a lot of barriers, a lot of obstacles. Many times it felt like people really wanted to delete me from the face of the earth. As I started Casa Ruby, it felt the same way. And receiving the grant from Astraea, it really says that our work is worth it. That our lives are worth it.
[Kristian Randjelovic (XY Spectrum)]: Being a inter and trans person, it’s very hard…It used to be very hard for me in Serbia. I didn’t want to share that. I didn’t want to talk about it. I was, for a long time, pretty embarrassed about it. And when I reached that point, I don’t want to be embarrassed anymore. I just want to be myself.
[Leigh Ann Van Der Merwe (S.H.E.)]: Trans women is the last population ever to be thought about. We are very invisibilized in feminist spaces. It’s like we don’t have the same legitimacy as other women to be in feminist spaces. That’s one of the reasons we started S.H.E.
[Wes Ware (BreakOUT)]: When we started, we had very little funding. We were a project of another organization and Astraea was one of our very first funders. So from there we’ve gotten Astraea’s support every year since we started.
[Jennicet Gutierrez (Familia TQLM)]: I have been working to end trans detention. We believe as an organization that uplifting the voices of the LGBT community, specifically Latino/Latina and also transgender women who have often been left out, it’s important and critical for the work.
[Wiktor Dynarski (formerly of Trans-Fuzja)]: My work in trans rights is not something that I planned from the very beginning, ’cause I was really afraid of coming out. There was almost no trans visibility. Trans people didn’t have a voice, didn’t have faces that could be identified. So it was an issue of shame rather than pride. So we as an organization try to make trans a proud thing. We have trans YouTubers now, trans vloggers. A lot of things have shifted. And I think one of the reasons for that is the huge amount of work that we did as an organization, that we pushed a lot of people to share their stories and be visible.
[Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (formerly of TGIJP)]: The only difference between now and…when I was growing up, and young girls that are here today, they at least have the opportunity to stand in their own right. The girls can go out in the daytime now. My generation could not even think about sunshine and being in a dress, that was not in the equation. And so, as things progressed and the girls, they’re getting out, and they’re jumping on buses and planes, getting their stuff. That’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.
[Ruby Corado (Casa Ruby)]: There’s a reason why you’re in this world. And if nobody tells you, you need to speak it to yourself. And I can tell you it gets better. It gets better because we make it better.
In this month’s Why We Fund event, activists from regions thousands of miles apart will discuss the current political climate in their regions and globally, their hopes for the future, and what solidarity looks like both in their local contexts and across issues and borders.
UPDATE: Due to today’s snowstorm in NYC, we will be canceling today’s Why we Fund event.
We apologize for any inconvenience our same-day cancellation may cause. Please stay tuned as we keep you posted on how and when the event will be rescheduled.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact our Development Officer of Special Events, Sally Troncoso, at stroncoso@astraeafoundation.org.
Stay warm!
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Please join us March 21st, 2017 from 5:30-7pm for Queer Feminist Leadership from Margins to Center: A Conversation With Kohl, Lebanon and DIVA for Equality, Fiji, part of our series of “Why We Fund” salons about who, where and why we fund.
At this month’s event, activists from regions thousands of miles apart will discuss the current political climate in their regions and globally, their hopes for the future, and what solidarity looks like both in their local contexts and across issues and borders.
Location:
Astraea offices
116 East 16th Street, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10003
This International Wom*n’s Day, we celebrate the lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, and intersex women and gender nonconforming people around the world who are helping #PressforProgress by challenging oppression in all its forms and creating a future that is self-determined, sex-positive, safe, welcoming, and inclusive.
This International Wom*n’s Day, we celebrate the lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, and intersex women and gender nonconforming people around the world who are helping #PressforProgress by challenging oppression in all its forms and creating a future that is self-determined, sex-positive, safe, welcoming, and inclusive.
40 years ago, a group of mostly queer women of color founded Astraea to address the lack of funding for progressive women’s organizing, particularly organizing led by lesbians and women of color. Ever since, we’ve been dedicated to funding LBQTI activists who are often forgotten and underfunded by mainstream women’s and LGBT rights donors. Not only that, but we prioritize support to groups led by LBQ women, trans and gender-nonconforming people, intersex people, and people of color.
Today, the activists, organizers, and artists we support are standing up to oppressive forces like misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia, xenophobia, and transphobia. For example, this past year:
Watch our video above to hear from grantee partners like WISG and Sappho for Equality and to learn more about our support for LBQTI women and gender nonconforming people.
#PressforProgress today and support organizations standing up for LBQTI and gender nonconforming people:
