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.

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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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