You can read the original article in Ms. Magazine HERE.

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While we recognize and applaud how women are poised to shape a new type of philanthropy, it is imperative that in this effort girls —and in particular girls and gender-expansive youth of Color, receive a robust and intentional investment. These young people are at the forefront of all social justice movements, and yet their contributions go overlooked and erased. As we move funds to women-serving organizations, we must also move money explicitly to organizations that center and are led by girls of Color. That is how we can combat the erasure of Black girls and girls of Color, and create opportunities for their courageous activism and leadership to thrive.

The most marginalized are also the least resourced. Today, less than 2% of philanthropic giving, or $8.8 billion, goes to women in this country (Women’s Philanthropy Institute). That is a miniscule amount when we consider the $471 billion in charitable giving. That amount is abysmally worse for women of Color —and almost nonexistent for girls of Color. In the U.S., less than .5% of philanthropic giving goes to women and girls of Color, and around the globe a mere 0.1%-0.35% of foundation giving goes to Black women, girls and trans people.

Even in larger conversations about investing in gender justice, girls under the age of 18 continue to be overlooked. When people see the headlines about money being invested in women, the assumption is that these funds are going to trickle down to girls. But let’s not adultify girls in our philanthropic strategies. Without intentional, robust, and explicit investments in girls, the harmful structural challenges persist, and will continue to harm girls as they enter adulthood. That includes pay inequity and the enduring grip of the gender pay gap that afflicts girls and young women more, since they enter the workforce early but don’t get considered in pay equity initiatives. We recognize the leaders who understand the implications of erasing girls and young women, and who respond with resources and commitments. One example is UKG’s Close The Gap Initiative who partnered with Grantmakers for Girls of Color (G4GC) to explicitly resource organizations that center girls of Color in their larger effort to support organizations working to close the gender pay gap.

Although under-resourced, many feminist funds are organized to address and support the specific needs of communities blocked from opportunity. These funds are impactful, effective, and sophisticated in their approach to engage grantee funders and catalyze funds and investments into profound change. At G4GC, we see everyday how girls of Color are at the forefront of shaping a more just future for us all. They are leading in their schools, peer groups, homes, and communities, from contributing to their families with sibling care to financial support, balancing homework and minimum-wage roles, and also as entrepreneurs. They are advocating for just structures and challenging inequities as social justice leaders and community advocates, and they are leading the way for a more just, safe, and environmentally protected future. And yet, there is little recognition of their wisdom, leadership, contributions, and potential. There are few structures that welcome their insights, and apply their ideas.

As a significant transfer of wealth puts more economic power in the hands of women, we have a unique opportunity to engage women as champions and advocates on behalf of young people who are too often overlooked. Girls and, more explicitly, girls and gender-expansive youth of Color, must be considered essential elements of any strategy seeking to advance gender justice in our society, and our investments must reflect that.

We invite those in positions to move money to recognize the important contributions of girls in their communities and families, and how resourcing them now is an investment in a stronger future as they become adults. As efforts are in play to migrate funds to support women-led movements, let’s recognize that the transfer of wealth is largely going into trusts vs. directly to women, and even less is going to girls of Color. When we abundantly fund organizations and intermediaries focusing on girls and gender-expansive youth of Color we can ensure that distributions of resources actually reach all girls and women.

Investing in girls and young people is necessary –and not just because it is the right approach, but also because we are relying on their labor, their activism, and their impact across every aspect of our society now.

You can read the op-ed in Philanthropy Women HERE.

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Watch the IG Live on American Urban Radio Networks’ Instagram here.

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Azariah, an 18-year-old artist and activist working with Chicago’s A Long Walk Home, collaborated with a dozen neighborhood teens to transform an abandoned liquor store into a fresh produce market. Austin Harvest, as it is called and where Azariah also works, now sources fruit, healthy food, and flowers from local suppliers across the city and provides nutritious and healthful choices for her community.

Azariah and her peers are an example of what we can accomplish when we trust and abundantly invest in the leadership of girls and gender-expansive youth of color. Research reveals young Black and Latinx girls are more likely than others to identify as leaders and yet, women and girls of color collectively receive less than 1 percent of all philanthropic investments.

Meanwhile, girls youth show us every day the transformative power of their leadership. Young people like Emma, Maria, and Cielo served as youth consultants and facilitated a healing retreat for queer and trans youth of color in the South. They collaborated with Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement and created a safe space for young people to heal and step into their full potential through the lens of rest and play.

Young people are pushing our communities and leaders to expand our visions of justice and equity. This includes developing a gender analysis that includes girls and femmes as they articulate the dynamic nature of their identities. To fully elevate and amplify girls’ leadership, we must invest in their wellbeing. This means we must recognize how girls youth show up in leadership — this requires adults to both cede power and seed power.

To cede power is to release it. To seed power is to leverage our own resources to grow opportunities for leadership. This is the commitment of many adult community leaders, liberatory educators, advocates, and others who understand that only when we release some of the power that adults inherently hold, are we able to co-construct the type of communities that fully appreciate and develop the power of young people. When we lean into their wisdoms —and their leadership— we’re able to bring to life their visions for justice and freedom.
Because if we look around, we start to notice the leadership skills young people like those in G4GC’s community named above, and their colleagues, have already shown.

It looks like the work of the young leaders at The International Mayan League, which promotes, preserves,and transmits the cosmovision, worldview, culture, history, and ancestral contributions of Maya people. Some of these Maya youth have courageously challenged injustice at great personal risk— they were forced to flee Guatemala due to the defense of their peoples and land. Still, they are steadfastly working intergenerationally to engage in practices that restore their cultures and languages, which create healing spaces through relearning their cultures and ceremonial practices. Through interpretation training programs for Maya peoples, these youth are revitalizing their languages, preserving oral traditions, and enforcing the fact that Indigenous communities have specific needs, knowledge, and solutions we must center.

Leadership also looks like the young people at Freedom Inc. in Madison, WI,who successfully organized to remove the Madison Police Department off of Madison Metropolitan School District campuses, and continue to advance justice in schools and communities for Black and Southeast Asian youth. These youth are working to make schools truly safe for all students. As part of their work, they launched the Black Sanctuary Pledge to ensure that schools are sanctuaries for Black students, which expands my own work and the work of others to facilitate schools as locations for healing.

Organizations that support women and girls receive only 1.9% of philanthropic giving in the United States. Girls receive only a portion of that. If girls and gender-expansive youth can make this level of transformative impact with the scarce resources to which they currently have access, imagine what they could accomplish if we committed to a daily practice of ceding power where necessary, and seeding power by pouring into the financial, human, and institutional resources that will help them realize their full potential. As we celebrate the International Day of the Girl, let’s make this day mean more than just visibility. Now, more than ever, it is time to invest in the transformative power of girls.

Dr. Monique Couvson is the President and CEO of G4GC and the author of six books, including Charisma’s Turn (The New Press, 2023), a graphic novel about girls and their gifts.

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I still remember the day I met Tina Turner at Tower Records as a 5-year-old Black girl. She filled the room with her lovely laugh, big smile and even bigger energy. It was exhilarating to see her, a Black woman artist owning the entire store. I was in awe of the presence of this powerful example of a Black woman artist.

As I got older and my world became bigger, I grew to even more deeply appreciate the power of Black artists and innovators and what they offer to Black people living in a world that is not built for us. This is why I now work to move institutions and donors to invest in the artistic visions, innovation, health, safety, research, brain trust and joy of Black girls and gender-expansive youth. Black Girl Freedom Fund, an initiative of Grantmakers for Girls of Color, is one example of that work. In addition to mobilizing investments, BGFF and the #1Billion4BlackGirls campaign co-host the Black Girl Freedom Week, a weeklong space where Black girls, femmes and gender-expansive youth across the country can see themselves and be celebrated.

The theme of this year’s series of events centers on the artistic vision, activism and innovation of Black girls and gender-expansive youth. From Feb. 13 to Feb. 19, we will gather virtually to spotlight Black women, girls and gender-expansive youth, including award-winning director, writer and producer Gina Prince-Bythewood, who most recently directed the blockbuster hit “The Woman King,” and Leila Mottley, author of the New York Times bestseller, Oprah’s Book Club pick and Booker Prize nominee debut novel “Nightcrawler.”

These luminaries not only light the way for the next generation of Black artists and innovators, but they are the cultural influencers who help us see the full embodiment of Black girls’ and Black people’s lives, beyond tropes of tragedy and sadness, to include the infinite possibilities that await them and the liberated futures they are creating. They help shift the narrative and change hearts and minds about Black girls, femmes and gender-expansive youth, who are essential to achieving a more just world. Yet, we know that Black girls, femmes and gender-expansive youth are the least seen, recognized or invested in. Research shows that less than $15 million, about 4.2%, of philanthropic giving was specified for Black women and girls in 2017, the most recent figures available. Black women and girls received $17,000 less in grant support compared to a median of $35,000 for all foundation grants.

The Black Girl Freedom Fund and the #1Billion4BlackGirls campaign aim to change that. Since 2021, the Black Girl Freedom Fund has invested more than $7 million into over 80 organizations across the United States. From cultivating educational opportunities in STEM to deep healing, leadership development and beyond, the work our grantee partners are doing is not just changing the lives of Black girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth — they are fundamentally changing how others understand the role of Black girls in our communities and the world.

The #1Billion4BlackGirls campaign is the first-of-its-kind movement to mobilize a $1 billion investment in Black girls, femmes and gender-expansive youth. The eight co-founders of the #1Billion4BlackGirls campaign drive the strategic direction and priorities of the campaign, and they continue to advocate for investment in Black girls and gender-expansive youth through each of their respective organizations and personal advocacy work.

“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible,” goes the saying from legendary cultural and community worker Toni Cade Bambara. We know that art, culture, innovation and ingenuity are integral parts of a continuum of social justice, advocacy, and healing. We get to invest in our Black girl, femme and gender-expansive creators because they deserve it. They are the light of possibility that is so necessary in these turbulent times.

This commentary was originally published in TheGrio.

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Trans girls and gender-expansive youth of color deserve to be safe, free and thriving.

But today, trans and gender-expansive communities are facing multiple, interlocking systems of oppression. Across cities and states, trans communities are under attack from anti-trans legislation that aims to direct physical, psychological and spiritual violence in homes, schools, facilities and communities. This includes legislation that specifically targets youth, as well as trans folks who are Black or come from other communities of color.

In 2022 alone, there have been more than 100 bills introduced in state legislatures across the country targeting young trans people. Beyond political targeting and systemic discrimination, too many young people coming into their trans and queer identity find themselves on the streets compared to their cisgender counterparts.

One year ago, Grantmakers for Girls of Color and the Black Trans Fund, incubated at Groundswell Fund, created the Holding a Sister Initiative, the first national fund explicitly dedicated to resourcing and uplifting trans girls and gender-expansive youth of color. We created this necessary space for cis and trans girls of color to build solidarity and community with one another. To date, we have invested $2 million in more than 20 organizations serving, and led by, trans girls and gender-expansive youth of color through this initiative alone.

Our incredible grantees work every day to ensure that trans girls and gender-expansive youth of color have access to gender-affirming care, which includes hormone replacement therapy, mental health support, as well as affirming clothing and spaces, all of which serve as healing tools. They work to ensure trans youth can meet their basic survival needs including help with securing short- and long-term housing, food, and other necessities. Our grantees do the important work to shift and dismantle the systems that continue to perpetuate violence on trans youth of color. They are engaged in work to advance research, respite and healing, activism toward liberation, policy work, and — most importantly — joy, play and power.

This is why the Holding a Sister Initiative was created: to resource places to heal, find joy, and to co-create a world in which trans girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth of color thrive. Through our work of deep listening and relationship building with our grantee partners, we affirmed two critical and primary needs we need to fulfill to achieve this goal.

First, we need to create and hold dedicated spaces for our trans girls and gender-expansive loved ones to heal from the layers of trauma they have accumulated throughout their lives. Second, trans girls and gender-expansive youth need to feel safe in their own bodies and in all aspects of their lives. They need connection among one another so they can build a community of care, affirm their own humanity, advocate for themselves and their rights, and have access to opportunities for growth and development. They need their own spaces to celebrate their authentic and unapologetic selves.

Trans people deserve to exist as the artists, healers, visionaries, caregivers and builders that they are and have always been. When we look back to history, trans people were held up as divine keepers of deep knowledge that exists beyond masculinity and femininity. In Native culture, two-spirit identity was widely believed to be the result of supernatural visions or dreams. In many Native Nations, two-spirit people filled special religious roles as healers, shamans and ceremonial leaders. And in the Hijra community in South Asia, they are considered to be a third gender and have been revered throughout history.

Trans girls and gender-expansive youth of color are their own examples of people leading successful, happy, loving lives. They have a depth of knowledge and wisdom that we can all benefit from if only we let them. By centering the leadership of Black trans women and girls, we can secure all of our safety and vitality.

As funders, those of us who support racial and social justice must also resource our trans, femme, and gender-expansive youth of color siblings, niblings and cousins.

Philanthropic organizations and leaders can invest deeply into and partner with existing funds and foundations created by and for trans people, especially those led by and serving Black trans and other trans people of color. They can invest in queer- and trans-led intermediaries and philanthropic serving organizations like the Black Trans Fund, Third Wave Fund, Funders for LGBTQ issues, Fund for Trans Generations, and our own Holding a Sister Initiative. They can take the GUTC pledge and begin the journey to meaningfully increase and track their investments in trans communities, and ensure that trans girls of color are included in those investments. Finally, they can help influence their philanthropic colleagues to follow their example of centering trans communities.

As we commemorate this year’s Trans Week of Awareness and Trans Day of Remembrance, let us memorialize our Black and brown trans femmes and folks. Let us keep creating and expanding space for trans joy, and working toward a world where trans girls and gender-expansive youth of color are robustly invested in — and loved.

This commentary was originally published in TheGrio.

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Black women and girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth of color deserve abundant investments in supporting our liberated futures. Tragically, philanthropy has always underfunded us.

In 2018, just $15 million out of almost $428 billion in philanthropic giving in the United States reached Black women and girls. That means less than 1 percent goes toward supporting the voices, visions, and experiences necessary for the liberation of Black girls and all people. The lack of funding in the Global South is even more dire: Funding for Black women, girls, and trans people constitutes roughly 5 percent of funding designated for human rights efforts—both in dollars and number of grants.

In the past two years, a growing movement of Black women leaders have been working to transform this inequality. In September 2020, we partnered with a collective of other outstanding Black women leaders to launch the #1Billion4BlackGirls campaign. Our goal was to mobilize robust investment in Black girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth’s leadership, genius, wellness, power, and capacity to thrive. The campaign was launched on the anniversary of the racist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four Black girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley–and wounded another, Sarah Collins.

Black girls and young women must play a central role in discussions about discrimination in education, health care, sexual assault, and policing. Yet, our stories are notably absent from public narratives, policies, and justice movements most crucial to addressing inequality and racial trauma. A bold call for investing $1 billion over 10 years in organizations and movements focused on supporting the liberated futures of Black girls, femmes, and gender-expansive youth shows us the way forward.

The $1 billion goal is not only achievable; it is also an intelligent and essential investment. We established two signature funds—the Black Girl Freedom Fund and the Black Feminist Fund—that have demonstrated how investments in Black girls and gender-expansive people not only remains an urgent need, but produce direct and residual outcomes for others in their homes and neighborhoods. This return on investment makes these funds essential agents for community economic development, and we know that Black women and girls are worthy of investment even without such evidence.

In the two years since we launched those funds, other essential initiatives centering Black women and girls have emerged and/or expanded, including the Southern Black Girls and Women’s Consortium’s Black Girl Dream Fund, the Children’s Rights Innovation Fund, and the Black Women and Girls Fund at the Baltimore Community Foundation. Together, we have invested millions more into the brain trust, innovation, health, safety, education, artistic visions, research, and joy of Black women, girls, and their families.

While we celebrate this milestone and the necessary gains, we must keep this momentum going.

The same energy that led organizations in the philanthropic, public, and private sectors to pledge significant investments—more than $4 billion—toward racial justice efforts in recent years should also drive decisions to invest in Black women, girls, and femmes in this moment. Now is the time to fulfill those unmet commitments. Philanthropic efforts that lack an intersectional analysis, and those that deprioritize funding racial justice efforts at the intersections of our communities’ identities, contribute to the harmful narrative that Black girls and femmes do not require investment. This lack of intersectional analysis will only undermine efforts to grow funds that resource young people whose experiences are often the result of compounded traumas associated with race, gender, sexuality, and age.

Philanthropists who care about racial justice must realize that people who are closest to the problem must be part of the solution. Black women are political, social, and cultural leaders. We are power players shaping our country today despite being grossly underfunded, under-resourced and underestimated. We must keep giving abundantly to this community because we know that all social justice efforts benefit when we place value in Black girls’ and women’s lives and leadership. And we must center Black women-led funds.

Imagine what 2030 will look like if there is a significant investment in the lives and livelihood of Black girls and women’s leadership, innovation, wellness, and advocacy. We will be closer to our vision of collective freedom and liberation.

This commentary was originally published in Philanthropy News Digest.

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My family has always been philanthropic—from my grandparents hosting everyone on holidays, to volunteering with our church for back-to-school fairs and holiday drives, to the ways we show up for each other in both celebration and crisis. But it wasn’t until I became a youth organizer that I first learned about institutional philanthropy. I worked with a girls’ rights group on an education justice campaign, and we applied for and secured a grant from a youth intermediary fund. It was the first time I started to grasp how philanthropy can both honor and resource girls’ activism, and how adults can share power with young people.

So as we prepare to celebrate International Day of the Girl on Monday, a global campaign to advance girls’ rights, let’s lift up girls of color as leaders rather than just as beneficiaries. Those of us in philanthropy can better engage girls and gender-expansive young people of color. We can start by acknowledging the powerful breadth and history of girls’ activism, examining the current funding landscape, and reflecting on how we as funders can be more responsive and accountable to young people by resourcing their work and following their lead.

Girls and gender-expansive youth of color are visionaries and strategists. They mobilize movements across intersections and communities. We know girls of color have always worked to hold healing spaces, organize their communities and preserve their ancestral practices as storytellers. And over the last few years, we’ve witnessed young people working on the frontlines of the climate justice and immigrant justice movements, and using art to call out racist behavior.

Despite their efforts and impact, their leadership is not recognized. Girls, femmes and gender-expansive young people of color have been on the forefront of social, cultural, narrative and legislative change and transformation, and yet philanthropy has not responded by fully funding their leadership.

In Start From The Ground Up, a report from Grantmakers for Girls of Color (G4GC), researchers shared that while girls and philanthropists identify some of the same key issues, philanthropy often fails to fund what girls say is needed due to the lack of a shared political analysis. Girls of color stress the importance of dismantling structural inequities, but philanthropy often funds work that focuses on individual mobility rather than systemic transformation.

Girls of color are, at best, under-resourced, and at worst, expected to wait for trickle-down funding or support that doesn’t address the structural issues they are facing. According to the Ms. Foundation’s Pocket Change Report, the resources girls of color receive are miniscule compared to the total philanthropic dollars available. Less than one-half of 1% of the roughly $66.9 billion that foundations contributed in 2018 was specified as benefiting women of color overall, not distinguishing what amount went to girls of color, according to the report.

A world where girls of color are abundantly resourced is possible. As funders, we can honor girls’ leadership by co-constructing with them a philanthropic practice that centers them, their families and their wisdom. What would it look like for philanthropy to follow the leadership of girls of color and invest in their dreams and sustainability?

At Grantmakers for Girls of Color, I lead a youth engagement strategy that is co-constructed with girls and gender-expansive young people of color, and is anchored in their wisdom. Alongside young people, we are learning how we can be better partners in resourcing their work. From grantmaking, to operations, to communications, to culture, we are using participatory methods to ensure young people are centered as designers and leaders.

Participatory grantmaking

As a relatively new organization, we continue to learn from women’s funds, like New York Women’s Foundation, which has been practicing participatory philanthropy for decades. Earlier this year, Black Girl Freedom Fund designed a grantmaking process in which Black girls and gender-expansive youth defined the priority areas and made final decisions on which proposals would be funded. I witnessed the young people engaging with the proposals and assessing for inclusion and belonging in both organizational messaging and programming. This prompted me to revisit how I hold evaluation and learning in my own work. How might your institution’s grantmaking strategy and process engage the community as leaders?

Operations

We are aligning giving practices with internal operations by centering young people. We work with groups of young people of color who shape and inform our communications strategy and policies. They are steering G4GC’s adoption of social media platforms that engage younger audiences. I continue to learn from them about how to lean into creativity and prioritize accessibility. In a similar way, the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota launched #ShareTheMicMN, an initiative to elevate girls and their visions of policy change in the state. What role do your partners play in setting your communications and narrative change agenda?

Culture

Finally, shifting power and sharing leadership with young people boils down to co-creating the culture. Historically, philanthropy has tended to be an older, whiter, wealthier sector. In Dissonance and Disconnects, a survey report by Emerging Practitioners In Philanthropy, researchers found that many entry- and mid-level staff, and people-of-color staff, often feel discouraged about their future in the sector. In order for girls of color to see themselves in philanthropy, we in the sector must work with them to co-create a culture that welcomes them. If we want to engage them, we can and should ask young people what they need to show up authentically as themselves. And then we must respond to those needs, whether they ask for technology stipends or access to wellness practitioners.

For me, this means being mindful to not infantilize or adultify girls of color. I’m learning that I can both encourage intergenerational community-building that decenters adults, and prioritize and help organize youth-only spaces. How does the culture of your institution counteract the intersecting manifestations of ageism, sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia and class differences? What culture-building activities might you consider with your partners?

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Girls, femmes and gender-expansive young people of color are some of our sharpest and boldest leaders in the fight for social justice. On this Day of the Girl, let us choose to resource them abundantly, make space for them as strategists, and follow their lead and wisdom as they imagine and build new worlds of love, community, healing and self-determination.

This commentary was originally published in Inside Philanthropy.

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In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, state governments across the country have already instituted oppressive new restrictions and outright bans on abortion. One group is especially at risk from these draconian policies that are antithetical to our fundamental liberties: girls and gender-expansive youths of color who will be exposed to suffering as abortion services become illegal and harder to access.

We are all harmed by policies limiting abortion rights. These laws undermine our right to privacy and bodily autonomy while opening the door to higher levels of state surveillance, prosecution and criminalization, including for anyone who could conceivably be helping another person obtain an abortion. For girls and gender-expansive youth of color, the harms are even more profound. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 38 percent of legal abortions in the U.S. in 2019 were performed on Black women, compared with 33 percent on white women and 21 percent on Hispanic women. That same study found that 57 percent of abortions were performed on women between the ages of 20 and 29, and 9 percent were performed among young people under the age of 19.

Our country has a long and tortured history of criminalization and violence against women and girls of color, violence abetted by—and in many cases perpetuated by—the government. Government regulation of the bodies of girls and young women of color was central to the historical legacies of oppression associated with slavery and the colonization of the United States. Black women and girls’ bodies were once regarded as property, and the rape of Indigenous/Native women and girls was deemed a fundamental right and “privilege” of enslavers and settlers seeking to assert political and social control over entire communities. To subject young people of color to more state control and policy-induced pain is to turn back the clock to an era when their bodies were truly and certainly not their own.

Even today, we see how the legacy of state control and structural and interpersonal violence against young people of color in the United States continues to drive enduring inequities. Consider the pronounced disparities in infant and maternal mortality among Black and white Americans. And girls—and particularly girls of color—faced a disproportionate impact from the COVID-19 pandemic as they were burdened with added caregiving responsibilities at home and higher levels of learning loss, stress and trauma relative to boys.

Now, girls, young women and femmes of color will face the added burden of new laws depriving them of the right to safe and accessible abortion. Traveling to another state for an abortion is a considerable hurdle for many women and birthing parents—and an even bigger one for a young person. With laws requiring parental notification or restricting minors’ access to telehealth and medical abortion, the hurdles grow bigger still. Structural barriers also result in girls, young women and femmes of color having fewer resources and less medical coverage to find quality healthcare of any kind. The burden on emergency and urgent care are likely to skyrocket for younger birthing people of color if the only perceived option is one of desperation.

For young people who are left without access to safe abortion, there is also a greater risk of participating in underground economies that will further fuel their criminalization. Young people who already experience disproportionately high levels of surveillance and monitoring from the criminal and juvenile court systems, and young people in contact with the juvenile court and child welfare system, will inevitably experience an increased risk of forced pregnancy and/or criminalization from a ban on abortion. Tropes about Black motherhood rooted in misogynoir will continue to be leveraged as an excuse to remove children from the home so they can be placed in foster care. Formal and informal networks are already taking shape to protect women and birthing people, should they need to make the difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy. However, these networks are typically unavailable to Black girls and young birthing people of color.

President Joe Biden recently announced important policies seeking to protect access to abortion, and even in states where policymakers are intent on placing further limits on abortion, advocates and people are rallying for justice and access. More needs to be done at all levels. Local and state governments, for example, can and should do more to protect people seeking abortion services from states where abortion rights have been curtailed.  Philanthropic organizations must create and expand funds that help reduce the financial and logistical barriers for young people seeking abortions, especially the most vulnerable populations like girls of color. Philanthropic organizations and thought leaders who believe in racial justice and the fundamental rights of bodily autonomy for women and girls must join together in this critical moment and support activities to protect abortion rights.

Reproductive justice is racial justice. It is youth justice. Let’s make sure that women, girls and other young birthing people have equal access to safe and legal abortions nationwide.

This commentary was originally published in TheGrio.

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