Borealis Philanthropy’s Racial Equity to Accelerate Change (REACH) Fund is a grantmaking initiative designed to strengthen the ability of organizational strategists, political educators, field builders, and other racial equity practitioners to help grassroots entities, communities, and movements dismantle entrenched systems of racism while embracing liberatory practices to co-create transformative futures.
As organizations face existential threats, political violence, rapid growth or decline, and evolving progressive and intergenerational spaces, our grantee partners have kept them on path, guiding their liberatory speech into liberatory practices, such as:
- Developing new compensation frameworks that do not replicate market approaches but are instead rooted in equity and justice.
- Creating inclusive governance structures within justice-based organizations, such as determining the equitable distribution of labor.
- Facilitating networked ecologies in which leaders align their political analysis and strategies across issue areas, strengthening the movements they belong to.
- Supporting people and institutions to undergo necessary cellular and institutional transformation, transcend the limitations of the existing nonprofit model, and operate from a place of greater clarity and alignment to pursue more equitable outcomes for all.
Despite their indispensable work, our grantee partners are facing their own challenges amid a period of philanthropic retrenchment around racial equity, driven by anti-racial equity laws and court decisions that misinform funders and misdirect their dollars away from our communities. In this time, we have been a stabilizing force for these practitioners and the organizations and movements they support. We are proud to announce that, in September, we awarded an additional $100,000 to each of the 19 leaders and organizations within our cohort, bringing our grantmaking total since our launch in 2019 to over $10 million.
In addition to grantmaking, we foster collective engagement by facilitating a community of practice where our grantee partners can share insights and successes, exchange curiosities, and collectively activate the next big ideas. The wisdom surfaced in these sessions informed our release of Meeting the Moment, Keeping the Momentum: Stories of Racial Equity and Liberatory Practices from the Field, a collection of in-depth narratives and five case studies that we shared with philanthropy earlier this year to inspire other funders and agitate the sector.
Out of our commitment to embodying and modeling liberatory practices, we will be shifting to a participatory grantmaking model next year—placing grantmaking power in the hands of movement leaders and enabling them to surface and resource emergent, impactful work from the ground up. This will also be our first time opening the doors to new grantee partners since 2021, and our first time ever awarding multi-year grants.
We are excited to share more about this update in the new year, and beyond thrilled to announce the members of this year’s cohort!
- Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA)
- Bari Katz Inc. & Authentic Coaching and Consulting
- Center for Diversity and the Environment
- Center for Urban and Racial Equity, LLC
- Change Elemental
- Circle Forward
- CompassPoint Nonprofit Services
- Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training
- Fierce Allies
- Humboldt Area Foundation
- Interaction Institute for Social Change
- Latinx Racial Equity Project
- Liberatory Power Consulting Group
- OpenSource Leadership Strategies & MP Associates
- Richael Faithful & Vega Mala Consulting
- RoadMap Consulting
- Shriver Center on Poverty Law
- Western States Center
- YWCA Boston
To learn more about the REACH Fund and how to support its work, please contact us at reach@borealisphilanthropy.org.