The Third Wave Fund, an activist fund led by and for women of color and intersex, queer, and trans people under the age of 35, recently launched a pilot effort, the Our Own Power fund, aimed at fostering grassroots organizations in the gender and reproductive justice fields. Rye Young, a trans-activist and executive director of the fund, spoke with PND via email about the importance of representation — the notion that organizations representing vulnerable communities should be led by members of those communities — and what nonprofits and foundations can do to boost representation within their organizations and in the sector more generally.

What can nonprofits and foundations do to increase self-representation within their organizations?

Rye Young: An important first step that many organizations skip is to acknowledge that there is a representation problem in the first place, and to appreciate that this problem does not have an easy fix because it is the result of many factors. There needs to be a conscious effort made to understand how this lack of representation came to be and why it hasn’t been addressed.

We hope to do it differently. We want to invest in gender justice organizations so that they can set the terms of their work and, to that end, will award one- and two-year capacity-building grants that help support organizations as they undergo a leadership transition or to provide coaching, skills-building training, or other types of professional development training for new leaders. We want to help them develop sustainable revenue models and, at the same time, foster self-representation more broadly by harnessing the power of vulnerable communities to tell their own stories.

Read the full article about cultural representation in nonprofits on PhilanTopic