When you decide to commit $90 million to a cause, it’s best to consult some experts. For the NoVo Foundation, those experts are girls and women of color.
The grant maker spent a year traveling the country, listening to children, teens, and young adults describe their goals, challenges, and ideas for improving their lives. In April, the foundation announced it would apply what it learned by pouring its big pledge into community-led programs that target racism and sexual violence and that help activists collaborate.
There’s ample work to be done. Black girls are more likely to be suspended from school than their peers of other races, according to federal statistics. Women of color are victims of sexual violence at high rates: Half of multiracial women, 46 percent of Native American women, and 36 percent of black women. And black and Hispanic women make less money than white women with similar levels of education.
NoVo will be among the participants Wednesday at the annual Grantmakers for Girls of Color meeting in New York to explore safety concerns and other problems.
The Chronicle talked to five of the women who participated in NoVo’s national listening tour and are influencing its grant making. Some of them lead or work for nonprofits the foundation supports. Here’s what they said about the process and their hopes for the people they serve.
When you support girls and women of color and their children, you are actively sustaining their own healing, the reclamation of their femininity, and the reclamation of their culture.
Autumn Billie, 23
Office coordinator, Wise Fool New Mexico
Santa Fe, New Mexico
In indigenous communities, it’s common for grandparents to raise their grandchildren. As time passes, the roles reverse, and many Native young women find themselves serving as caretakers for elderly relatives while balancing school and work responsibilities.
Such a girl “doesn’t even have casual downtime for herself,” explains Autumn Billie.
It’s just one of the nuances Ms. Billie, a college student who works for nonprofits in New Mexico, thinks many foundations miss when they attempt to fit indigenous people “into a cookie-cutter system” in ways that are ill-suited to their lives.
But organizations created by and for those people know how to address their needs. For example, in Ms. Billie’s previous job as a project facilitator with the nonprofit Tewa Women United, she oversaw programs that taught young Pueblo women about sexuality and reproduction using a curriculum adapted to be more culturally relevant and translated into the Tewa language.
“We’re trying to sustain a bloodline,” she says. “I’m not just protecting these women, but I’m protecting a heritage and culture that she’s the matriarch of, the carrier.”
That kind of wisdom was evident at the NoVo listening session in which Ms. Billie participated in Española, a New Mexico town of 10,000. She was pleased that foundation leaders wanted to hear opinions directly from local girls.
“When you support girls and women of color and their children, you are actively sustaining their own healing, the reclamation of their femininity and the reclamation of their culture,” Ms. Billie says. “The most important part of that is you validate their leadership.”
We’re going to be the ones who move the social-justice movement. We’re going to be the ones who carry it on where it needs to be. ... We are powerful.
Kameisha Smith, 22
Youth coordinator, Nollie Jenkins Family Center
Durant, Mississippi
The right to express myself. The right to play. The right not to be sexualized. The right to wear my hair how I want to.
These are the clauses put forth by black girls and young women who gathered at NoVo’s invitation in Mississippi to create a bill of rights. Kameisha Smith, who helped coordinate the foundation’s visits throughout the state, was struck by participants’ honesty.
“It was a great exercise, a great conversation, that they were able to be as open as they were,” she says.
In addition to attending college, Ms. Smith works as the youth-program coordinator at the Nollie Jenkins Family Center, which supports the largely black, rural population of Holmes County, Miss. It meant a lot to her that foundation representatives traveled there to seek feedback.
“It was good for them to come down and see our landscape and see where we come from,” she says. Without first-hand experience, “it’s hard to explain how organizing in the South is different from organizing in the North.”
The listening sessions solidified Ms. Smith’s belief in the political clout girls and women of color wield.
“We’re going to be the ones who move the social-justice movement, we’re going to be the ones who carry it on where it needs to be,” she says. “We are powerful.”
A lot of people come and listen, but they don’t apply it. They just take it and they write it down, but they don’t come and help you.
Afreen Alvi, 23
Advisory board member, Young Women of Toledo
Toledo, Ohio
It can be difficult for any student to navigate the education system. If your parents were born outside of the U.S., it can be especially hard.
Afreen Alvi’s family is from Pakistan. They are committed to supporting her schooling, in part, she says, because “our mothers and grandmothers wanted to learn, but back in the day, they weren’t allowed to go and be educated.”
Despite their devotion, she couldn’t rely on her family for much advice about applying to and maneuvering through college. “There weren’t many resources I knew of at the time,” she says. “I had to figure it out by myself.”
Other children of immigrants expressed similar struggles when the NoVo Foundation came through Toledo, Ohio. Ms. Alvi was stuck by how much she had in common with the young women who gathered for the meeting.
Unlike some of her peers, she has grown accustomed to speaking out on behalf of herself and others. As president of the Muslim Student Association, she helped create halal dining options — food prepared in accordance with Islamic law — at the University of Toledo. When she’s not in class or running her own henna art business, she helps to lead Young Women of Toledo, a diversity advocacy group for locals ages 18 through 26.
Given these experiences, being asked for her opinion was not a novel phenomenon for Ms. Alvi.
“A lot of people come and listen, but they don’t apply it,” she says. “They just take it and they write it down, but they don’t come and help you.”
What is new and exciting is that the NoVo Foundation gave a grant to support Young Women of Toledo’s work: “They’re coming back to help us.”
After the very last conversation, I just sat down and cried.
Natalie Collier, 37
Founder and director, The Lighthouse
Atlanta, Georgia
People don’t often think about girls. Even in a room full of women assembled to reflect on their own lives, Natalie Collier says, “it doesn’t take long for the conversation to start to shift to boys and young men.”
That reality was sobering for Ms. Collier, who facilitated eight listening sessions in three days across Mississippi. As founder of the Lighthouse, a new, NoVo-funded nonprofit that will provide leadership and professional development training to young black women, she often has girls of color on her mind.
That so many of NoVo’s invited guests had trouble focusing on the topic “was not surprising for me, but that didn’t make it any less disheartening and sad,” she says.
Ms. Collier attributes the tendency in part to what she perceives as society’s ambivalence about girls after they grow out of their “cute” phases. Another factor may be the false notion that foundations and policy makers can help boys or girls, but not both at the same time.
“I have a niece and a nephew,” she says. “Too many people have bought into the myth that one is more important than the other, and it’s ridiculous.”
These patterns made it hard for Ms. Collier to guide the conversations. “You have push and push and push and push,” she says. “After the very last conversation, I just sat down and cried.”
This investment is really planting seeds for a critical mass of people – young women of color, trans young women, and nonconforming youth – to lead the way.
Joanne Smith, 41
Founder and executive director, Girls for Gender Equity
Brooklyn, New York
By 2027, young women of color will be leading new nonprofits. They’ll be advocating for better conditions in their communities. They’ll be winning elections and changing laws.
That’s the future Joanne Smith envisions. She believes $90 million from the NoVo Foundation will help turn that vision into reality.
“This is the most affirming initiative I have ever been a part of for girls and woman and color,” she says. “I have never in the last 15 years seen such a robust commitment to our girls as I see today with the NoVo Foundation.”
Ms. Smith has worked with NoVo since 2011, when she participated in its Move to End Violence program. Subsequently, when her organization held town-hall sessions to hear from girls of color about their concerns, NoVo’s executive director sat in.
Those sessions — which helped inspire NoVo’s own listening tour — revealed girls’ expertise and leadership potential, traits that Girls for Gender Equity works to cultivate through its community-organizing programs.
Some girls who participate go through a true “transformation,” Ms. Smith says: “Young people who would not speak or look in my eyes when they entered the room are leading initiatives now.”
Those programs, and others that NoVo will fund, don’t just benefit individuals, Ms. Smith says. They strengthen movements and create networks by helping girls build friendships that turn into valuable alliances as they grow up to lead social justice efforts.
“These are the comrades you’re going to come to rely on,” Ms. Smith says. “This investment is really planting seeds for a critical mass of people — young women of color, trans young women, and nonconforming youth — to lead the way.”
