Dear Friends,
We are grieved and outraged to see, in just a week’s time, two grand juries fail to indict police officers who killed unarmed black men: Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY. In just the past few weeks alone, more black men and children have been killed or harmed by police. In response, hundreds of thousands of people in cities across the country, and across the world, are rising up, walking out, boycotting, dying in, and shutting down cities to say that Black lives matter.
Today, Neighborhood Funders Group launches FundersforJustice.org. This is a virtual organizing space for funders and affinity groups to connect with each other, with the movement for justice in Ferguson, and with related organizing across the country. This web portal is intended to help enable philanthropy’s role in partnering with our communities to create and live in vibrant, healthy, prosperous, democratic communities. We invite you to complete a short survey for grantmakers and affinity groups.
Next, learn more about organizations in the field, connect with your peers, and find thought leadership and other resources to help you integrate a social change lens to your grantmaking and funder organizing. We hope this tool provides the necessary information to guide your strategic grantmaking and to shape your internal and external conversations. And we recognize that this moment is about much more than Ferguson or Staten Island. Across the country there are movements for economic, social, and racial justice taking place right now.
We believe in the incredible power of communities to come together and organize for real change: Fast food workers are on strike for living wages, Walmart workers protested on the busiest shopping day of the year, communities are blockading homes to prevent evictions, immigrants and families are fighting for their right to be together not torn apart, and communities are fighting to keep their land and access to water and their waterways. The interconnection between these movements for justice is undeniable. NFG stands in solidarity.
We hope you will find the web portal to be a useful tool. Explore it, fill out the survey, and write to us to tell us what you think – and please share it widely with your fellow grantmakers, affinity groups, and partners in the field.
Neighborhood Funders Group