Two years ago this month, the NoVo Foundation stunned the nonprofit world by announcing at the height of the pandemic that it was halting funding for critical programs focused on women and girls. For those of us working to prevent gender violence, the announcement hit especially hard. NoVo, a fund run by Jennifer and Peter Buffett, accounted for 96 percent of all funding for such work in the United States.
Today, many antiviolence organizations are still navigating the impact of NoVo’s exit — underscoring the overall dearth of philanthropic investment in curbing gender violence, and in women and girls more broadly.
Kaethe Morris Hoffer, executive director of the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, told us that “the impact on our programmatic capacity has been real. We’ve only been able to avoid layoffs by the skin of our teeth and currently have to leave open a number of positions that we value but simply don’t have the resources to support.”
At our organization, Sanctuary for Families in New York City, NoVo was by far the largest foundation supporter for more than a decade, enabling us to launch and ultimately expand our Anti-Trafficking Initiative, which provides legal, case-management, counseling, and other services to 400 trafficking survivors annually.
NoVo’s support allowed us, for the first time, to hire a full-time staff member to work with former clients who have become advocates in the antiviolence movement. With the loss of the foundation’s funding, we had to make painful staff reductions and freeze positions in our antitrafficking and survivor leadership programs.
Diversified Funding Is Key
While NoVo’s departure has been deeply troubling to antiviolence advocates, it also holds important lessons about the dangers of relying heavily on the generous support of one donor. Morris Hoffer noted that the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation is “one of many organizations to be massively destabilized by the disappearance of NoVo money.” But she was quick to add that “it is certainly not NoVo’s fault that they were such singular players in providing support to organizations focused on the concerns of girls and women.”
Even before NoVo stopped making grants for gender-violence work, just 1.6 percent of funding in the United States was directed toward women and girls. Not surprisingly, there is even less support for women and girls of color and for trans people, who are among the most marginalized groups experiencing gender violence. Only a handful of grant makers focus on preventing gender violence, and while all of them are important contributors, their resources are limited.
This profound lack of dedicated, consistent support puts antiviolence service providers in a precarious position and needs to change. Globally, one in three women experience physical or sexual violence, typically at the hands of intimate partners — a problem that accelerated during the pandemic. Addressing the problem requires substantial resources, including providing lifesaving shelter, counseling, legal assistance, emergency food and clothing, job training, and advocacy.
This should be a natural fit for donors who support other areas of social-justice advocacy. But too often foundations choose not to fund overlapping antiviolence work. “We’ve often been told that our work is too ‘niche’ for major funders of immigration advocacy and services,” said Archi Pyati, CEO of the Tahirih Justice Center, which has worked at the intersection of immigration and antiviolence advocacy for 25 years.
Organizations led by women of color feel this acutely. “Funding social justice means investing in women-of-color leaders who are often fighting against the psychological and physical impacts of oppression, trauma, lack of access to high-capacity networks, and deep-seated biases,” said Pyati.
Pandemic Funds Running Low
In the early months of the pandemic, donors did seem to be waking up to the problem. Many responded quickly and generously to the heightened needs of violence survivors who were confronting an array of connected crises, including job loss and food and housing insecurity, while often being forced to quarantine with abusers. However, this temporary influx of support was not enough to sustain long-term services and operational costs.
Covid-19 emergency funding initially helped Turning Point for Women and Families, a Queens, N.Y., nonprofit that supports Muslim violence survivors and covers rental costs for clients struggling to pay for housing. But all those resources have dissipated, and the organization currently has just one foundation grant.
Robina Niaz, Turning Point’s founder and executive director, and a survivor herself, has found that supporting these women is a long-term process that necessitates long-term funding. “It takes time for the Muslim women who are mostly immigrants and experiencing abuse at home to feel safe and begin to trust us. Many are without a support network and completely isolated. Trust-building doesn’t happen overnight,” Niaz said.
The good news is that more donors are starting to recognize the need for greater overall funding of women and girls. Promising grant-making coalitions have emerged in the past few years. These include the Collective Future Fund, which is building what it calls “a survivor-led feminist future,” and the Black Girl Freedom Fund, a project of Grantmakers for Girls of Color, which aims to raise $1 billion in the next 10 years. MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates have also led the way with major investments in organizations supporting women and girls nationally and internationally.
While these developments are encouraging, ending gender violence will require a more coordinated and well-resourced commitment, specifically dedicated to this issue, from every area of philanthropy, including foundations, corporations, and individuals. It will require flexible, multiyear funding for antiviolence organizations of all sizes, with an emphasis on those led by women of color and survivors. Recent research by the nonprofit FreeFrom found that of 50 antiviolence organizations they surveyed, 1 in 2 staff identified as survivors.
Gender violence affects millions of people in the United States and globally. When the philanthropic community talks about adopting a racial-justice and feminist focus, substantial dedicated funding for the antiviolence movement must be part of that endeavor. No organization doing this work should have to depend on the decisions of one foundation to provide gender-violence survivors with the help and services they urgently need.
