Groundswell’s Leaders on Funding Challenges for the Intersectional Reproductive Justice Movement

First, some good news: Groundswell Fund, an important funding intermediary supporting grassroots organizations at the forefront of the struggle for reproductive rights, including abortion, looks like it’s in a strong position to keep backing that fight. In November, Groundswell announced that it’s ahead of schedule to realize its 2020 Blueprint goal to move $100 million to reproductive rights organizations by 2025 after raising $83 million so far.

Additionally, the group announced that former National Network of Abortion Funds Executive Director Yamani Yansá Hernandez had been named the fund’s permanent CEO after serving in that capacity as an interim leader for a year. Hernandez’s record at NNAF (a Groundswell grantee), where she grew that nonprofit’s budget by a factor of 10 from $2 million to $20 million, means that Groundswell’s board and grantees can rest assured that they have a proven fundraiser at the helm.

Given Groundswell’s leadership in the effort to uplift underfunded grassroots groups led by women and trans people of color, these facts are cause for celebration within the intersectional movements for racial justice, reproductive freedom and the rights of gender-nonconforming people. But a recent conversation with Yansá Hernandez and Groundswell Chief Strategy Officer Naa Amissah-Hammond revealed sound reasons for concern about the long-term health and sustainability of those efforts.

Whether it’s short-term thinking and lack of commitment among funders, donors that prioritize talk over action, or a reluctance to address the toll that all of this is taking on movement leaders, formidable barriers still stand in the way.

Shifting donor priorities

The first concern is whether or not enough money will keep flowing to support the struggle for reproductive rights given the number of new battlefields that keep springing up. To give the most recent example, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos must be considered actual children while I was writing this piece.

It’s well-documented that the early post-Dobbs “rage giving” has declined, and Hernandez said that Groundswell has experienced a slowdown as well. “I think a lot of people are seeing that [decline] across the sector,” she said. At the same time, this trend may reflect a shift in where donor dollars are headed rather than a retreat from pro-reproductive rights giving. Ballot measures to protect abortion access in Michigan, Kansas and Ohio have attracted tens of millions of dollars, and abortion rights could end up on the ballot in as many as 13 states in 2024.

There’s no way to know whether donors who would otherwise be giving to abortion funds have instead started pouring money into political fights to keep abortion accessible in as many states as possible. For her part, Amissah-Hammond said that she believes a lot of funders are “reassessing their strategies” at the moment, “so some are doubling down and recommitting to investing in impacted states, and then other folks might be shifting money to new priorities, as well.”

“George Floyd funding”

Perhaps more troubling, given the fact that Black and other racial minorities are particularly burdened by restrictions on reproductive freedom, is the fact that at least some donors may be either losing interest in moving money for racial justice or even backing down in the face of potential legal action after last year’s anti-affirmative action decision by the Supreme Court.

This issue is of particular importance to Groundswell, which centers nonprofits led by Black and other people of color in its own giving. It’s possible to have at least some empathy for smaller funders that may fear being taken to court, but I was appalled when Yansá Hernandez told me about a conversation she had with an unnamed donor who “unceremoniously referred to the funding that they gave in 2020 as ‘George Floyd funding.’”

The sheer disrespect of that statement aside, during our conversation, Yansá Hernandez said that she found the donor’s attitude “problematic and worrisome” reflecting short-sighted, reactive thinking. Such funders “aren’t really understanding the long haul,” she said. “You definitely don’t solve racial justice in a couple of years.”

The same can be said of both abortion access and reproductive rights as a whole. As we’ve pointed out before, funders backing the movement to restrict abortion rights have been shoveling money toward that goal for more than 50 years. Funders who think that one or two grants, no matter the size, are going to reverse that tide are definitely engaging in wishful thinking.

Similarly, Yansá Hernandez said, although more funders seem to be aware of the deep relationship between the struggles for racial equity, reproductive rights and protecting democracy, “many people are still looking at a quick fix: ‘How much money do I have to spend this year in order for this to be solved?’” Meanwhile, many of the current anti-rights members of the Supreme Court will likely hold on to their jobs for a generation.

From her perspective, Amissah-Hammond said she is hearing talk among gender justice and LGBTQ funders about the intersection of their work with the fight to save democracy, and is also hearing from democracy funders that are starting to realize that they also need to focus on gender. “There's a lot of conversation and people talking about the importance of these issues, but I don't know if it's actually translating into long-term investments,” she said.

A heavy toll

But while declines or shifts in funding are troubling, and some corners of the philanthrosphere may well be falling back on short-term thinking, the concern voiced by the folks at Groundswell that struck me as potentially the most damaging for these movements is that the people on the front lines of this work are not just under-resourced — they’re traumatized and they’re exhausted.

“We haven’t worked to address the impact of the last several years,” Yansá Hernandez said. With the toll of COVID-19 and the “really rapid rise of fascism, I think people are really tired and worn out. And I think there's this simultaneous demand for a rallying cry to save democracy, and we're counting on the people most impacted [by these issues] to do that.”

Meanwhile, as we have covered, donors haven’t exactly rushed to provide enough money to pay nonprofit workers a living wage, let alone provide the kind of long-term, capacity-building support that would allow overworked leaders to start bringing up a new generation to take on this work. It may well turn out that, long-term, the biggest hurdle facing the movements to support democracy, racial justice and reproductive rights won’t come from far-right funders, politicians or courts. That threat may well be the fact that these overburdened, under-resourced and exhausted leaders and organizers are being asked to step up yet again at a time when, as Yansá Hernandez said, what they really need is the support to “slow down, rest, grieve and bury our dead.”

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