It’s a well-known fact that philanthropy has long underfunded organizations that serve women and girls. The most recent figures show that less than 2% of all philanthropic dollars are earmarked to support women, girls and gender-expansive people, with women and girls of color receiving even less support at only 0.5%. What’s less discussed are geographic disparities in funding for women and girls.
A 2020 report by the Ms. Foundation for Women found that the least-resourced region in the U.S., in terms of philanthropic funding for women and girls of color, is the South, which received only $2.36 for every woman and girl of color. But the Midwest didn’t fare much better — women and girls of color there only got $2.99.
In response to these findings, the Ms. Foundation — a longtime progressive, feminist touchstone in the philanthrosphere that counts Gloria Steinem as one of its founders — launched the Ms. South program to fund organizations serving women and girls of color there. The program made its first grant in 2021 and has moved a few million dollars to date.
Now, the foundation is turning its attention to the Midwest with the recent launch of its Ms. Midwest program. The aim is to address chronic underinvestment in the region’s women and girls of color, and to serve as a model for funding intersectional movement-building led by those who have been most impacted by racial and gender injustice.
“[The program] is a regionally specific continuation of the foundation’s overall strategic response to center and invest in women and girls of color and gender-expansive folks of color,” said Ms. Foundation Senior Program Officer Samantha Franklin. “What the foundation really wanted to do was go where philanthropic underinvestment in women and girls and gender-expansive people of color is most pronounced.”
For the program’s pilot year, the Ms. Foundation awarded multi-year grants totaling $660,000 to seven grassroots organizations working to advance racial justice, reproductive justice and voting and civic engagement, among other causes. These are the Ohio Women’s Alliance (Ohio), Transformations Youth Group (Missouri), Ayada Leads (Minnesota), African American Roundtable (Wisconsin), Native American Community Board (South Dakota), Mothering Justice (Missouri) and OPWAL (Ohio). The Chanel Foundation helped support Ms. Foundation’s programmatic expansion.
“We also know that some of the biggest social justice, racial justice movements in this country have started in the Midwest, and so it made a lot of sense for us to invest in women and girls of color and gender-expansive people in the Midwest that were doing movement-building work, that were speaking up against injustices and that were completely underfunded,” said Teresa Younger, president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation. “That’s how we decided we would go to the Midwest next after really trying to define the South, and hopefully move philanthropy to more broadly look at some of the states as places of making change.”
“A really critical time”
In addition to its original “Pocket Change” report and its follow-up report, “Living With Pocket Change: What it Means to do More With Less,” the Ms. Foundation also conducted a landscape analysis and spoke with movement leaders in the Midwest to better understand what women and girls-serving organizations in the region need.
According to Younger, leaders reported not only needing more support, but for that support to be consistent. The Midwest is often derided as “flyover country,” and, as has been the case with rural areas, the region often goes ignored by large, national foundations — and when it does receive funding, it’s often inconsistent.
“People go to where they instantly think there are women and girls of color, so the South makes a lot of sense. And then we go to the coastlines because that’s where we recognize there are great levels of diversity,” Younger said. There are, nevertheless, a significant number of women and girls of color living in the Midwest, including those in Indigenous communities, which have long been underfunded.
The Midwest, the foundation notes, is also a strategically important region for the future of progressive movements. “This expansion is coming at a really critical time in our nation’s political context, in terms of what’s going on with national issues movements such as racial justice, reproductive justice, environmental justice… and many more issues,” Franklin said. “The Midwest — we acknowledge that it’s long been at the center, in the forefront of some of these social justice movements that have shaped the country with a lot of organizing wins being led and fueled and spurred on by women and girls of color and gender-expansive people of color.”
Some of the biggest recent racial justice protests have come out of the Midwest, notably in Ferguson, Missouri, after police officers killed Michael Brown, and in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after officers killed George Floyd. The protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline that took place on the Standing Rock Reservation also drew attention to progressive politics in the region. Meanwhile, the Midwest has seen its share of regressive legislation and other troubling developments. Younger noted the recent “vilification of communities of color” in Springfield, Ohio — though not, it should be said, by people actually living there.
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Supporting multi-issue work
The Ms. Foundation’s Ms. Midwest strategy stems from findings that organizations doing multi-issue, intersectional movement-building work in the region have limited opportunities to obtain funding from foundations, Franklin said. There are also few resources to help organizational leaders build relationships with other organizations, which leaves people feeling like they are working in isolation or in silos.
According to Franklin, the foundation prioritized selecting organizations that were best positioned to engage in long-term power-building, build strategic partnerships, and strengthen their organizing, advocacy and civic engagement efforts. The foundation also sought to support organizations that “deliberately and explicitly” centered those most impacted by gender and racial injustice. That includes organizations led by and for trans people, Indigenous people and rurally situated organizations doing rural-based work, all of which tend to face additional challenges when it comes to finding philanthropic support.
Crucially, all the organizations the Ms. Foundation selected for its first round of grants engage in multi-issue work. “They don’t do any one issue. They do multiple issues and have multiple strategies,” Younger said. This tracks with the Ms. Foundation’s own moves to de-silo its grantmaking.
“We don’t fund in any one specific area. We recognize that in order to have the impact, you need to be funding in all of these areas,” Younger said.
This intersectional, multi-issue focus is readily apparent in the Ms. Midwest grantees. The Ohio Women’s Alliance, for example, is a power-building reproductive justice organization that provides programming, resources and education for women, femmes, gender-expansive people and youths in Ohio. It also works to advance healthcare for all, decarceration and rehabilitation, equitable education, economic prosperity and an inclusive democracy.
Another grantee, Transformations Youth Group, which is based in Kansas City, Missouri, is a trans-led organization dedicated to building leadership and empowering trans communities of color in Kansas, Missouri and Northwest Arkansas. It seeks to address intersectional issues facing trans people of color, including colorism, anti-Blackness, sexism, transmisogyny and immigration status.
Based in South Dakota, the Native American Community Board works to protect the health and human rights of Indigenous peoples through cultural preservation, education, community organization and environmental and natural resource protection, while also working to create safe communities for women and children. The grant from the Ms. Foundation will be used to support its work with Indigenous women, girls and gender-expansive people and empower them to advocate for themselves.
In addition to the individual grants, the Ms. Foundation will help grantee organizations convene so that they have the opportunity to come together to form relationships, find support and be in community with one another. The organizations will also have the opportunity to opt into receiving capacity-building support from the foundation.
The Ms. Foundation is hoping to expand to other states in the Midwest. “We [are] definitely excited to expand that geographical footprint,” Franklin said. “We’re also hoping to grow… the number of grant dollars in subsequent years.”
A call to funders
Both Younger and Franklin hope that the Ms. Midwest program will inspire other funders. “I hope that philanthropy writ large starts taking a look at the Midwest states as places to invest in movement-building and social change, and that they see the dynamics and the power that are coming out of those states,” Younger said.
Franklin noted that the Ms. Foundation wants funders to ask themselves what a winning strategy is, to think about an intersectional movement built by and for women and girls of color, and consider how to execute it in a trust-based way. This, she added, not only has implications for the Midwest, but for the nation, as well.
“The Midwest is such a timely place to be investing. It has always and will always deserve investment, but the conversation right now is incredibly timely,” Franklin said. “We’re just excited to continue the work and are excited to champion the Midwest, and we invite other funders to be in conversation with us and to move even more dollars to the region because the time is now.”
