With passion and purpose, the 2024-25 Giving Project cohort mobilized half a million dollars for BIPOC-led organizations fighting for gender justice in our region. Thanks to the dedication of the 20 community members in this year’s cohort, Headwaters is resourcing 12 organizations across the region building power to end patriarchy, transphobia, and homophobia, and to create a world free from misogyny.

This year, cohort participants raised over $250,000 from their communities through grassroots donor organizing. Combined with a matching contribution from Headwaters, the 2025 Giving Project will provide each organization with a two-year, unrestricted grant totaling $40,000.

Doubling Down on Funding Organizing for Gender Justice

This year’s Giving Project was organized around the theme of gender justice. Over the course of the six-month program, the cohort built an understanding of gender justice as an intersectional and expansive struggle that centers those most impacted by various, often compounding, forms of gender-based oppression.

Sierra Judy, Headwaters’ Giving Project Program Officer, explains the decision to focus on gender justice as this year’s Giving Project theme: “The focus on gender justice as a funding priority was set a year ago. In choosing this theme, we were doubling down on what we already knew to be true: that there is no collective liberation without gender justice.”

When this year’s cohort first met in September of 2024, they didn’t yet know how pressing this Giving Project’s focus would become. With the Trump administration’s attacks on transgender people’s self-determination, access to healthcare, and legal recognition, alongside an increasingly hostile environment for reproductive healthcare, the fight for gender justice has taken on increasing urgency.

“All of the cohort members came into the program with a commitment to gender justice,” explains Judy, “As our political environment has continued to shift and become more hostile to issues of gender justice, that commitment only deepened—it fueled their fire.”

Bilal Alkatout, Headwaters’ Co-Executive Director, echoes Judy’s praise for the cohort’s focus in this moment: “At a time when the right is positioning gender self-determination as a political wedge issue and many supposedly progressive institutions are shying away from full-throated support of gender justice, this cohort stepped up. Headwaters is proud to reinforce organizing throughout Minnesota that advances gender-justice, thanks to this cohort’s fierce donor organizing.”

Read the full article about funding gender justice organizing at Headwaters Foundation.