Pictured: Astraea staff during our pre-pause video chat retreat

Hello!

Astraea will be taking an organization-wide pause from July 1 – July 15, 2020. As we continue our culture change and organizational transformation work, we are mindful of the importance of slowing down and making intentional time and space to reflect. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have made this need to pause and replenish our minds and bodies all the more urgent and necessary, so that we are able to return to Astraea, to our grantees, and our supporters rested, rejuvenated, and ready to continue the joyful struggle.

Astraea staff will not be working between July 1 – 15, 2020. We will resume our regular working hours on July 16, 2020.

As the pandemic continues to impact communities already affected by systemic inequalities, we are called upon to deepen our support for grantee partners working to care for their people. COVID-19’s impacts are exacerbated by the longstanding pandemic that is anti-Black racism and white supremacy. Astraea stands in solidarity with the recent powerful uprisings against the racial injustice that threatens Black lives, and we continue to fuel LBTQI BIPOC activists whose visions and labor are building more just futures for us all.

We opened our pause this afternoon with a session led by Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams, a Black writer, activist, Zen priest, and trusted friend to Astraea. Reverend Angel will be joining us again at the end of the pause, guiding us into reflections and practices to consider the Astraea we want to become.

This pause period is an opportunity for Astraea staff to step away from our desks, and reflect on how we can step more into “being” as opposed to “doing.” It is also a time for us to examine our own practices as we work to be an anti-racist organization and vision the Astraea we know is possible—one that is truly anti-racist, intersectional, feminist, queer, and international. As a queer feminist fund, we owe everything to Black, Indigenous, Women of Color and Global South feminists who built the intersectional vision of liberation that is at the very core of our mission.

Ultimately, we hope that this pause will enable us to show up at Astraea, in philanthropy, for our grantee partners, and in our communities in even more powerful ways.

In Solidarity,
The Astraea Staff

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Astraea’s blog, Collective Care Blog: Building the Power & Resilience of LBTQI Movements Now & for the Long Haul, is Astraea’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. As a feminist LBTQI funder, we believe it is our responsibility to shed light on the ways our communities are particularly impacted by the crisis, share insights around the criticality of healing justice and collective care, as well as the ways in which we’re digging deep to keep shifting power to the grassroots in meaningful and sustainable ways.

Want to read more from our Collective Care Blog? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to stay up-to-date on the latest posts!

Astraea’s blog, Collective Care Blog: Building the Power & Resilience of LBTQI Movements Now & for the Long Haul, is Astraea’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. As a feminist LBTQI funder, we believe it is our responsibility to shed light on the ways our communities are particularly impacted by the crisis, share insights around the criticality of healing justice and collective care, as well as the ways in which we’re digging deep to keep shifting power to the grassroots in meaningful and sustainable ways.

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On Tuesday, we issued a statement supporting the anti-racist resistance taking place in the United States and around the world right now, and condemning racism, white supremacy, policing, transphobia, and state violence that would have Black people erased. As a queer feminist funder based in the United States, we owe our existence to the civil and human rights activism of the Black, Indigenous, People of Color, trans, and queer movements that have come before us. We are reminded this June that Pride itself began as a riot against policing led by trans women of color, for our collective liberation. These are our foundations, the legacy on which we build to ensure Black liberation, and indeed the liberation of all peoples and the healing of our planet. 

In this week’s blog post, we’re sharing: healing resources for Black communities and political education resources on Black and queer liberation for the moment. We’re listening to and uplifting meaningful ways to collectively care for our Black communities. 

Some of these resources are for non-Black people and uplift the importance of anti-racism, abolition, intersectionality, and inter-community solidarity – tools and strategies we collectively need to lean into if we are to dismantle deeply embedded systems of white supremacy.

At the same time, it is absolutely necessary that Black folks have the opportunity and access to resources to be able to rest, heal, and grieve as state-sanctioned anti-Black violence continues. 

In that spirit, we’re delving into and delighted by some powerful reading on the interconnected struggles for Black and queer liberation in this moment, and healing resources that we hope are helpful to members of the Astraea community. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and we encourage you to seek out other important anti-racism resources as well. We share these as one act of care and hope that if you find them helpful, you will pass them and others on to your own communities. 

Essential reading on Black and queer liberation in this moment

1. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics – Kimberle Crenshaw 
2. Racism is exhausting Black people. Here’s what we need. – Derrick Clifton
3. How to Support Black Trans People Right Now – Jael Goldfine
4. Mother Jones: The Police Killing you Probably Didn’t Hear About this Week – Laura Thompson
5. Black Trans Men Face a Constant Threat of Police Violence – Ash Stephens
6. Black LGBTQ+ Leaders and Allies Address the Rage Against Racism – Advocate.com Editors
7. Queering Prison Abolition, Now? – Eric A. Stanley, Dean Spade, and Queer (In)Justice
8. 26 Ways to be in the Struggle Beyond the Streets
9. Black and Asian American Feminist Solidarities: A Reading List – Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective
10. Of course There are Protests. The State is Failing Black People – Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
11. Pride is and Always Was About Rebellion, This Year More than Ever – George M. Johnson

Healing resources for Black communities

1. Healing Offers – Harriet’s Apothecary
2. Rest for Resistance – QTPoC Mental Health
3. Talking Back – bell hooks
4. 7 Virtual Mental Health Resources Supporting Black People Right Now – Jesse Sparks
5. 10 Wellness Resources and Relief Funds for Black individuals to find some respite – Kells McPhillips 
6. Circle of Mothers: Trayvon Martin Foundation
7. The Well
8. Healing Packet – Women of Color in Solidarity
9. National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network
10. Healing Resources for BIPOC Organizers & Allies Taking Action for Black Lives – Irresistible

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Want to read more from our Collective Care Blog? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to stay up-to-date on the latest posts!

Astraea’s blog, Collective Care Blog: Building the Power & Resilience of LBTQI Movements Now & for the Long Haul, is Astraea’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. As a feminist LBTQI funder, we believe it is our responsibility to shed light on the ways our communities are particularly impacted by the crisis, share insights around the criticality of healing justice and collective care, as well as the ways in which we’re digging deep to keep shifting power to the grassroots in meaningful and sustainable ways.

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by Sabrina Rich, Communications Team

As a queer feminist foundation that has been around for over four decades, we know what it is that allows us to survive, thrive, and heal: being in community.

As the impacts of COVID-19 continue to take a toll on our bodies, our psyches, and our everyday lives, we’re reflecting on what it means to truly stand in those communities. This post is an offering in that service. In these uncertain times, we know that caring for community—neighbors, friends, chosen family, and ourselves—is vital and necessary for supporting our collective healing. 

To quote our Healing Justice Report,

 “Over the last decade, we at Astraea have witnessed and been moved by the emergence and rise of healing justice work—resiliency and survival practices that center the collective safety and wellbeing of communities—as an integral part of our fight for collective liberation. We have learned from our grantee partners how these practices and traditions can be tools for building power, and how they can deepen and sustain the long and hard work of movement-building. Rooted in their wisdom, we continue to work to integrate healing justice as a core aspect of our grantmaking and accompaniment to organizations and movements, both in the U.S. and globally.” 

In that spirit, we’re uplifting some powerful healing justice resources that have moved us recently for their social justice and community focused approaches to healing. These resources come from movement leaders and healing justice practitioners who have and continue to prioritize collective care as integral to our freedom, and to achieving justice for all. We hope they will be helpful to you and your communities as you seek to find ways through this moment and beyond.

Some highlights!

• “Healing, as opposed to healing justice, often gets stuck in supporting self care when that is only one impact.”
  • coronavirus and community care… a few weeks in by Susan Raffo
• “We all have a responsibility to protect our cherished elders and those who are also vulnerable and valuable members of our communities.”
  • Decolonizing Community Care in Response to COVID-19 by Jade Begay
• “We are made of communities with deep collective knowledge on how to care for each other and the earth around us. Together, we can survive and build interdependent communities of resistance.” 
  • Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus by Salonee Bhaman, Rachel Kuo, Matilda Sabal, Vivian Shaw, & Tiffany Diane Tso

Healing Justice Resources:

• Prentis Hemphill – Contagion Consent and Connection
• Susan Raffo – coronavirus and community care… a few weeks in
• Auburn Seminary – Fortification Podcast COVID-19 Edition
• AirGo – On the Line with Antonio Gutierrez Podcast
• Una Lee – Care-Based Approaches to Remote Work
• Jade Begay – Decolonizing Community Care in Response to COVID-19
• Mijente – La Cura Podcast 
• Asian American Feminist Collective – Asian American Feminist Antibodies
• Faith Matters Network – Community Care Office Hours 
• Irresistible Podcast
• Adrienne Marie Brown – additional resources for facing Coronavirus
• Maryse Mitchell-Brody – Caring Across Distance: Some Things to Consider Before Movement Gatherings during COVID-19

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Want to read more from our Collective Care Blog? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to stay up-to-date on the latest posts!

Astraea’s blog, Collective Care Blog: Building the Power & Resilience of LBTQI Movements Now & for the Long Haul, is Astraea’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. As a feminist LBTQI funder, we believe it is our responsibility to shed light on the ways our communities are particularly impacted by the crisis, share insights around the criticality of healing justice and collective care, as well as the ways in which we’re digging deep to keep shifting power to the grassroots in meaningful and sustainable ways.

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by Astraea’s Development Team

Last week, we officially launched our blog and wrote about some of the immediate steps Astraea has taken to address the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on our grantee partners around the world. 

This week, we want to take a bigger picture approach and share with you Astraea’s COVID-19 Collective Care Response: Building the Power & Resilience of LBTQI Movements Now & for the Long Haul. We recognize that the health, economic, social, and political repercussions of the pandemic are going to stay with us for a long time to come, and we know that the communities Astraea exists to support – LBTQI, Black, brown, migrant, poor and working class – will continue to be those hardest hit by COVID-19. Astraea’s response aims to bolster our grantee partners now and for the long haul as they care for their communities and confront the pandemic’s impacts across the globe.

In Guayaquil, a city in Ecuador that lacks the public health infrastructure to handle its extensive COVID-19 outbreak, Astraea grantee partner Mujer y Mujer is providing food and money to sex workers, LGBTQI people, survivors of gender-based violence and individuals with limited mobility. In the U.S., grantee Southern Vision Alliance is offering financial support for coronavirus-related organizing in North and South Carolina, with priority given to efforts led by LGBTQ people, workers, youth, rural communities, Black people and people of color (POC), migrants, dis/abled people and families. In Botswana, grantee Rainbow Identity is supporting its constituents with mental health referrals and food packages. These strategies represent a massive collective care response for and by those excluded from mainstream systems. Astraea grantee partners are also continuing their advocacy to prevent further human rights violations, violence and criminalization caused by the pandemic, as well as seizing new opportunities to advance their agendas.

As a queer feminist fund that prioritizes organizations working at the intersections of multiple identities and oppressions, Astraea provides long-term, flexible, and accessible support to some of the most under-resourced communities around the world. Grounded in our Feminist Funding Principles and Healing Justice framework, we have been moved to launch our COVID-19 Collective Care Response. 

Many emergency funds have blossomed to address immediate needs, and these are an imperative part of philanthropy’s efforts. However, grassroots organizations need long-term resources to care for their people, transform their strategies to meet the moment, and bolster their resilience for now and the next ten years. Astraea’s role is to do what we have always done, but more deeply. 

In order to support our grantee partners to respond to emergent needs now and continue their critical work for years to come, Astraea’s COVID-19 Collective Care Response has two goals:

• Raise at least $1 million from institutional and individual donors to provide increased flexible, unrestricted support for our grantee partners and build on Astraea’s close grantee accompaniment. We are glad to be halfway to that goal already. Our program team is already granting out new funds raised and as we are able to secure additional funds, we will continue to move resources to grantee partners for the short-, medium- and long-term unfolding of this crisis. 75% of the funds will be immediately regranted to our partners, with 25% resourcing Astraea’s ability to partner with movements for the long haul.
• Amplify the importance of resourcing grassroots LBTQI and POC-led organizing, through our philanthropic advocacy and communications (including this blog!) Our communities are too often excluded from mainstream philanthropic and government responses to emergencies like this pandemic. Astraea is fiercely committed to doing all we can to center the grassroots movements who have the solutions we need to emerge from COVID-19 into a more just world. 

COVID-19 is both an unprecedented crisis and, in terms of its impacts, a foregone conclusion. Without access to sustainable, flexible resources, grassroots movements are vulnerable: when conditions change and harms increase, requiring infusions of cash and capacity, activists struggle to keep organizations open and their members safe as they try to pivot and respond. This pandemic pulls back the curtain from years of undervaluing the organizing efforts of those most impacted by dire crises. 

Astraea’s coronavirus response recognizes that now is the time for philanthropy to make good on our knowledge that long-term, flexible, general operating support and much more of it, is what our communities have long needed. Those who are closest to the problems that need addressing are best positioned to set their own priorities and determine where resources should go. 

We deeply appreciate our resource partners who have already joined our COVID-19 Collective Care Response, and we applaud those in philanthropy who are increasing flexible funding to frontline groups. As we see what it is possible for philanthropy to do when confronted with a crisis, we know that this moment is ripe for transformation. Philanthropy must move as much unrestricted funding to the ground as we can, into the hands of those who are now and will be most impacted by COVID-19 for many years to come. Join us.

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Want to read more from our Collective Care Blog? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to stay up-to-date on the latest posts!

Astraea’s blog, Collective Care Blog: Building the Power & Resilience of LBTQI Movements Now & for the Long Haul, is Astraea’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. As a feminist LBTQI funder, we believe it is our responsibility to shed light on the ways our communities are particularly impacted by the crisis, share insights around the criticality of healing justice and collective care, as well as the ways in which we’re digging deep to keep shifting power to the grassroots in meaningful and sustainable ways.

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by Mihika Srivastava and Kyli Kleven

In the last few months, we have all watched our world change dramatically around us. For Astraea’s 190+ grantee partners, the pandemic has deepened the challenges that they face, including surveillance, criminalization and violence, limited access to healthcare, economic hardship, crackdowns on civic space, and much more. We have taken this time to reach out to our grantees all over the world, and really tune into their needs at this time. We have been learning from the ways many grantees have rapidly adapted their strategies to meet the moment, and begun to shift our own so that they continue to be determined by grantees’ priorities.

As always, our grantees and LBTQI grassroots movements at large have put their communities first by organizing in powerful and critical ways. They stand on the frontlines of the pandemic caring for their communities. For them, collective care looks like providing basic necessities, offering healing support, facilitating connections to health care, participating in mutual aid, and ensuring holistic and digital security.

As a queer feminist fund that prioritizes organizations working at the intersections of multiple identities and oppressions, Astraea provides long-term, flexible support to some of the most under-resourced communities around the world. In 2019, 75% of our funding to grantees was in the form of general operating support grants. While this moment is an unprecedented one, it calls on us as a feminist funder to commit even more deeply to these core values and practices.

“Movement building must go on and we as funders have to do our part to keep grantees resourced and financially secure. We know that both funding and other kinds of non-financial support are critical, and so it is essential that we are sending our grantees on-time payments, extending proposal and submission deadlines where needed, changing convening dates and/or moving to virtual convenings, or other new solutions that need to become practice in the weeks and months ahead,” says Astraea Interim Program Director Kerry Ashforth.

As a first step, our Program Team worked to amend our Spring 2020 grantmaking cycle to relieve grantees of as many administrative burdens as possible, and prioritize their ability to access funding quickly and seamlessly. Here are some of the steps we have taken:

1. In March 2020, we communicated with renewal groups and waived proposal requirements for any who had not already submitted them.
2. We have made additional funding available to existing grantees where able, and we are raising new funding to be able to do so for even more grantees going forward.
3. We are working hard to move our current grants out more quickly, so partners are better equipped to weather the storm.
4. Program Officers have been checking in with grantees to support with any capacity building and other accompaniment needs they may have, beyond funding.
5. Realizing that many partners would struggle with internet access and costs, we sent offline versions of our application to as many grantees as possible. In some cases, program staff walked applicants through proposals over the phone and took notes for them.

Speaking to why it felt so critical to make these changes, our Senior Grants Manager Miabi Chatterji said, “Astraea already provides general operating support to most of our grantee partners because we believe that is the best way to support movement building. We were also already in the midst of accepting applications for our current grant cycle when the pandemic expanded globally. Our staff became incredibly aware of the need to do everything we could do to make things easier for grantee partners and try to get them their funds faster.

Above all, we are trying to use this time to question our assumptions and practices. What information do we have to collect from grantee partners, and why? What modes of communication are most accessible and genuine to grantees? What can we streamline? Can we make these practices permanent? In what ways can we create an even better future state of normal?”

We are remaining flexible and nimble in the coming weeks and months around our reporting and decision-making, particularly as we begin to plan for future grantmaking cycles. Creative solutions in grants management can often look like new metrics for tracking grantee partners’ work, or online systems for grantees to submit written materials but this moment calls for a different kind of creativity. Though many of these best practices are in place, we’re deepening and expanding our ability to weave compassion into grantmaking systems.

Throughout the coming months, we will be working to find creative solutions to these and many other questions that arise, with the ultimate goal of continuing to build power for our movements, now and over the long haul.

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