Content Warning: details of gendered violence and femicide
The murders of Black women, girls and femmes like Tatyana Aliyah Brooks, Khadijah Muhammad, and so many others whose names never reached headlines are not isolated incidents. They are part of a sustained crisis of anti-Black gendered violence that this country continues to normalize through silence, neglect, and abandonment.
Black women, girls and femmes are being killed by partners, stalked, disappeared, criminalized, and failed by every system supposedly designed to protect them. Families are left grieving while communities are left holding trauma that never fully heals. Still, the labor of responding falls back onto Black women. These organizers, healers, advocates, aunties, survivors, doulas, build safety nets out of almost nothing while organizations and systems with immense wealth continue to hesitate around fully resourcing this work.
The ongoing conversations around the retreat of major philanthropic investments into gender justice work, particularly the fallout connected to the unraveling of large-scale funding commitments from institutions like NoVo Foundation in 2020, cannot be disconnected from what we are witnessing now. When funders pull back from long-term investment in survivor-led organizing, Black feminist infrastructures weaken, mutual aid networks stretch beyond capacity; the safety movement shrinks.
NoVo foundation didn’t just have the largest footprint for gendered violence prevention in the sector (96% to be exact). They prioritize gendered violence, securing 37% of all the domestic funding for women’s rights and services, specifically for Black women.
That is why NCRP gave them an Impact Award in 2013. As NCRP wrote about NoVo, “the foundation understands that solving the most intractable problems in the world requires mass mobilization.”
Black feminist movements have warned for decades that gendered violence cannot be separated from economic violence, housing instability, healthcare inequity, reproductive injustice, transphobia, state violence, and chronic divestment from Black communities.
As Russell Roybal, NCRP Executive VP and Chief Impact Officer said in their recent statement on collective safety, “Reproductive access, gendered violence and LGBTQ+ rights are not separate stories. They find each other at the margins and intersections of the work and the hurt. They are chapters of the same book, written on bodies that have been policed, punished and politicized for daring to exist outside of someone else’s control. They are held together by a shared truth: Bodily autonomy is sacred, and safety, dignity and joy are not privileges, but birthrights.”
Safety was never just policing. Safety is culturally competent support systems that can intervene before violence escalates. Safety is Black women having the resources to leave dangerous situations and survive afterward.
Philanthropy has repeatedly failed to meet this moment with the urgency it demands.
For years, Black-led organizations carried entire ecosystems of care with minimal funding and impossible expectations. These organizations built emergency response systems where none existed. They organized reproductive justice, healing justice, transformative justice,