OVERVIEW: The Third Wave Fund makes grants for women and girls, LGBTQ causes, movement building, disability causes and justice reform, and, to a lesser extent, civic engagement and democracy.
IP TAKE: Third Wave Fund is a fiscally sponsored, “by-and-for” intermediary supporting youth-led, intersectional gender justice movements across the United States and its territories. Its grantmaking centers young Black, Indigenous and other people of color—especially queer, trans, intersex, disabled and sex-worker communities—who are organizing against the systems that shape their lives. Proteus Fund serves as its fiscal sponsor.
Third Wave backs small, grassroots and community-accountable organizations, often with budgets below $500,000. Its six funds support rapid response, capacity building, disability justice, sex-worker organizing, transformative justice and long-term movement infrastructure. Grants may fund organizing, advocacy, mutual aid, healing justice, cultural work, research, leadership development and general operations.
As former co-director Morgan “Mo” Willis told Inside Philanthropy, Third Wave is positioned to support organizers “so marginalized and kept at the gates of philanthropy,” including disabled people, sex workers, young people and organizers for whom English is not a first language.
Access varies widely by program. For invitation-only funding, a warm connection through current grantees, movement networks or another Third Wave program is more useful than a generic inquiry. Strong candidates are small, BIPOC-led, youth-led or intergenerational groups whose leadership genuinely reflects the communities they serve. Large institutions and conventional direct-service organizations without an organizing or movement-building component are generally weaker fits.
PROFILE: The Third Wave Fund‘s roots date to 1992, when Rebecca Walker and other young feminist activists established the Third Wave Direct Action Corporation. A separate Third Wave Fund launched in 1995 in response to the scarcity of philanthropic funding for young women and girls. The organizations later combined as the Third Wave Foundation, which restructured as Third Wave Fund in 2013. Its mission and constituencies have expanded over time to explicitly include transgender, queer, intersex, sex-worker and disabled communities.
Third Wave describes gender justice as inseparable from struggles against racism, capitalism, classism, ageism and ableism. Its “by-and-for” model places people with direct experience of oppression in organizational leadership, grantmaking and philanthropic decision-making roles. The fund centers work led by and for people under age 35 while also supporting intergenerational organizations in which young people exercise meaningful authority.
Third Wave organizes its grantmaking into six programs: Mobilize Power Fund; Grow Power Fund; Own Our Power fund; the Sex Worker Giving Circle; the Accountable Futures Fund; and the Disability Frontlines Fund.
Grants for Women and Girls: LGBTQ, Gender Justice, Reproductive Health, Equity and Disabilities
The Third Wave Fund funds women and girls’ causes across all of its giving programs. Recent grantmaking has focused on women of color, LGBTQ and reproductive rights, youth activism and women who are marginalized by immigration status, sexual orientation or religious or cultural affiliations.
The Fund conducts grantmaking for both LGBTQ and Women through a variety of means, currently organized into six distinct grantmaking programs:
Mobilize Power Fund provides rapid-response funding to gender justice organizations and groups confronting an unexpected, time-sensitive threat or opportunity. The incident or change in circumstances generally must have occurred within the previous six months and require the applicant to substantially pivot from its planned work.
- Grants are available for up to $10,000 for individual organizations and up to $20,000 for partnerships or coalitions of two or more groups. Eligible organizations must be based in the United States or U.S. territories and have annual budgets below $500,000.
- Third Wave prioritizes groups accountable to communities directly affected by gender oppression, particularly young women of color and trans, queer, intersex and gender-nonconforming people of color under age 35. Groups do not necessarily need independent 501(c)(3) status or an existing fiscal sponsor.
- Mobilize Power generally does not prioritize routine operating shortfalls, regularly scheduled programs, fundraising, start-up costs, preplanned events, projects led by individuals or campaigns expected to extend beyond six months.
Grow Power Fund makes long-term investments in emerging, youth-led and intergenerational feminist, queer and trans reproductive- and gender-justice organizations.
- It provides up to six years of general operating support, capacity-building resources, organizational-development coaching and annual convenings.
- Grants are currently $35,000 per year for a six-year cycle, representing a potential commitment of $210,000.
- Funded issues include reproductive justice, racial and economic justice, immigrant justice, HIV/AIDS, queer and trans justice, abolition and anti-carceral work, anti-imperialist organizing and efforts to end interpersonal and state violence. A grantee may be fiscally sponsored and does not need its own 501(c)(3) designation.
- Application for this grant program is by invitation only.
- Past grantees include DecrimSexWorkCA, Detroit’s Trans Sistas of Color Project, Street Youth Rise Up of Illinois and the Immigrant Youth Coalition of Los Angeles.
Own Our Power grants focus on providing youth-led reproductive and gender justice organizations with growth-oriented grants for leadership development, strategic development and communications projects.
- The Own Our Power Fund makes capacity-building grants for projects that increase community control over organizational leadership, sustainability, research and public representation. The program supports organizations seeking to ensure that communities—rather than donors or foundations—retain ownership over their vision, values and strategies.
- The most recently published grant structure offered approximately 10 to 12 grants of $25,000 per year for two years. Organizations with annual budgets of up to $500,000 were eligible, with priority given to groups working in under-resourced regions or on issues that receive limited philanthropic support.
- Past grantees include Albuquerque’s Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, the Intersex Justice Project, Jahajee Sisters of Brooklyn, New York and Students for Educational Justice of Connecticut.
- Own Our Power is currently closed. Its last posted public application cycle occurred in 2023, and Third Wave has not announced a new deadline.
Sex Worker Giving Circle is a participatory grantmaking and donor-organizing initiative supporting movements led by and for current and former sex workers and people with experience in the sex trade. Fellows with direct experience in sex work receive grantmaking education and make the program’s high-level funding recommendations and decisions.
- The 2026 cycle offered at least $350,000 in new grants, structured as two-year general operating awards of $35,000 per year. Unrestricted funding.
- The giving circle supports community organizing, advocacy, coalition building, harm reduction, healing justice, mutual aid, leadership development, legal support and rights education, capacity building, cultural work, media and community-led research.
- Recent grantees include Best Practices Policy Project, Coalition for Rights & Safety for People in the Sex Trade, Colectivo Intercultural TRANSgrediendo, LIPS Florida, Oregon Sex Worker Committee, Proyecto Trans Latinas, Rio Grande Valley Harm Reduction, The Outlaw Project and Trans Women of Color Collective.
Accountable Futures Fund supports grassroots organizations developing transformative justice, restorative justice and community-accountability practices that reduce reliance on police, prisons and other carceral systems. The fund centers organizations led by young BIPOC cis and trans women and queer, trans and gender-nonconforming people, with a particular emphasis on Black people, trans people, sex workers and youth.
- Grants are are generally awarded in amounts up to $21,000.
- Application is by invitation only at this time.
- Funds may support training, leadership development, resource sharing, research, public education and infrastructure that strengthens communities’ ability to respond to violence and harm.
- Eligible organizations must have annual budgets below $500,000 and either independent 501(c)(3) status or a fiscal sponsor. Young BIPOC women and queer, trans and gender-nonconforming people should hold leadership, facilitation and decision-making roles, and the organization’s work should incorporate an analysis of gender-based violence.
- Past grant recipients include the Carolina Youth Action Project, the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective and Survived and Punished, “national coalition of defense campaigns and grassroots organizations committed to eradicating the criminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence and the culture of violence that contributes to it.”
Disability Frontlines Fund focuses on creating “impactful, intersectional and sustainable movements to address issues facing BIPOC disabled individuals and communities in an ableist world.”
- It prioritizes work rooted in and accountable to Black, Indigenous and other people of color who are disabled, Deaf, hard of hearing, blind, DeafBlind, chronically ill, neurodivergent or mad, with particular attention to youth age 35 and younger.
- For its 2026 grant cycle, the fund is offering four-year awards at three levels.
- The fund supports disability justice work involving collective access and care, mutual aid, community self-determination, cultural work, organizing and movement infrastructure.
- The program is unlikely to support organizations serving disabled people without meaningful disabled-community leadership, caregiver-centered programs, projects focused on curing or eradicating disability, conventional case management or healthcare services, or work disconnected from grassroots organizing and broader movements for justice.
- Past grantees include Autistic People of Color Fund, Disability Justice Culture Club, Fireweed Collective, Generation Patient, HEARD, Deaf Queer Resource Center, Los Angeles Spoonie Collective, Network for Long COVID Justice and the Disability Project at Transgender Law Center.
Important Grant Details:
The Third Wave Fund’s grants typically range from about $5,000 to $35,000. Third Wave reported distributing approximately $3.27 million through 122 grants to 111 grantee partners in 2024. Eighty-eight percent of its grantee partners were BIPOC-led.
- The South and Southeast received approximately $1.06 million, or 32% of the year’s funding, followed by the West Coast and Pacific region, the Midwest, national organizations, U.S. territories, the North and Northeast, and the Mountain West.
- This funder favors small, community- or youth-led grassroots groups working in the fund’s specific areas of interest.
- Several programs make multi-year commitments. Total awards can reach $70,000 through the Sex Worker Giving Circle, $50,000 through Own Our Power, $200,000 through Disability Frontlines and $210,000 through Grow Power.
- Because Third Wave is fiscally sponsored by Proteus Fund, Proteus’s Form 990 and Schedule I contain activity from multiple sponsored funds and programs. Proteus-wide financial figures should not be presented as Third Wave-only assets, expenditures or grantmaking. Third Wave’s own annual report and program pages are the clearest public sources for program-level awards and grantees. Third Wave also states that it pays fiscal-sponsorship fees in addition to the published grant amount, which can cause amounts listed in its annual report to differ slightly from the nominal award.
- For additional information about recent grantmaking see the fund’s grantees page.
- Application for most funds is by invitation only, and several funds are currently closed.
- General inquiries may be directed to the fund’s staff via email at info@thirdwavefund.org or telephone at (917) 387-1262.
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