Model and Strategy
Established immediately after the 2016 election, Emergent Fund was built to help move resources quickly, with no strings attached, to communities that were and continue to be under attack by federal policies. The Fund focuses on resourcing grassroots organizing and power building in Indigenous communities and communities of color who are facing injustice based on racial, ethnic, religious, and other forms of discrimination.
At every turn, since Emergent Fund’s inception, we have supported grantees at the precipice of great momentum and change. The Emergent Fund awarded its first grants in January of 2017. Since then, the Fund has moved $5.5 million to nearly 500 projects. Our rapid-response fund moves money to organizers when they need it most — often is as little as one week, to ensure we can respond quickly to the most emerging challenges of our time.
Impact
We’re seeing people freed from jail and detention, and we’re expanding conversations about healing and disability justice; affordable childcare; universal sick leave; healthcare for all; living wages for childcare workers; eviction, utility and foreclosure moratoriums; universal emergency shelter; increased resources to Indian Health Services; extensions and expansion of census data collection; and voter protections. Our focus is funding grantees whose organizing will hold and expand these wins for the long term and lead us toward a powerful vision of what comes next.
We are leaning into risk-taking, flexibility and the core of our work; deep trust for Indigenous, Black and people of color organizers and the folks closest to the harm. Over the next year, we are ensuring that we fund organizers on the front lines of movements to rethink our relationship to policing and the carceral system across the country, voter justice projects centering marginalized communities, responding to the ripple effects of public health threats and investing in continued organizing and power building for the long haul. Our priority is funding the movement-building that will ensure we come out on the other side of this crisis closer to justice.
We are unclear just how long the COVID-19 crisis will last, and even less clear about what rebuilding and transition will look like. However, what we have learned from local, national and international organizers in moments of crisis and transition, is that this is the time to utilize the momentum and change occurring to make bold asks that can radically change the world, ensuring that we never return to business as usual.
Leadership
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alicia sanchez gill
Executive Director