Guest Article: Astraea Fuels Movements
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| The planning and facilitation team. Click to view slideshow. |
The grantee partners themselves organized the convening, with the guidance and support of Director of Programs Mai Kiang and U.S. Program Consultant Suzanne Pharr. Suzanne is an organizer, strategist, educator, and author of several books, including Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism. She describes the meeting and Astraea’s strategy in this guest article.
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“Movement building occurs when groups of people begin looking in the same direction and working with diverse strategies and methods to reach a common vision. Movements happen when these groups become linked to form a critical mass to demand and create change.” |
A Movement Building Strategy
Suzanne Pharr
They came from all over the country to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio—queer multi-racial groups led by people of color. From New York, the Audre Lorde Project, FIERCE, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and Queers for Economic Justice; from the San Francisco Bay Area, Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex Justice Project and Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project; from Chicago, Affinity Community Services; from Seattle, Washington DC and New York, the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance; from Atlanta, Southerners on New Ground; from Little Rock, the Center for Artistic Revolution; and from Texas, Allgo and Esperanza.These groups are recipients of strategic funding from Astraea. For more than three decades, Astraea has had a national reputation as a foundation willing to take risks by funding those who are critically important but who often go unrecognized by other foundations. Astraea is broad in its political sweep yet keenly strategic. Astraea looked out over the landscape and saw limited funding for vital LGBTI people of color and racial justice organizations.
Astraea’s strategy—to fund effective groups with at least $150,000 over three years—led to the convening of twelve organizations in San Antonio in May 2009. Because Astraea is committed to movement building, each group brought three participants, not just a single leader. They talked and worked together in Esperanza’s 10,000-square-foot building that houses cultural/political work for much of the cross-generational, multi-racial and multi-issued San Antonio progressive community.
At this third convening of the Movement-Building Initiative, the grantees were able to demonstrate how they had benefited from money that allowed them to build organizational and political capacity, develop their base, and ready themselves to join together to create a greater impact than they can singly. How did this happen? Through talking with each other at a meeting ably facilitated by members of three grantee organizations; through eating together; through attending a first-ever concert by Puerto Rican Lourdes Perez and Lebanese May Nasr; and through building collaborative strategies for social justice.
Three days of building relationships and political strategies brought home this idea:
Movement building occurs when groups of people begin looking in the same direction and working with diverse strategies and methods to reach a common vision. Movements happen when these groups become linked to form a critical mass to demand and create change.
Astraea's twelve multi-year movement-building grantee partners, dedicated and passionate about the work of social justice, are looking in the same direction and beginning to join together in shared strategies that have greater impact—one solid step toward the creation of a movement.
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