We’re hiring! Join our team as the next Program Officer of the Disability Frontlines Fund (DFF).

​The Program Officer (PO) plays a critical role in the successful execution of Third Wave’s DFF grantmaking program, which directly resources groups across the United States and Territories that centers and builds the leadership of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) who identify as D/disabled, living with disabilities, D/deaf, hard of hearing, chronically sick/ill, neurodivergent, and/or mad, and who practice Disability Justice. 

In conjunction with the Co-Directors and Director or Programs, the PO is responsible for building and sustaining the fund in consultation with a diverse group of Disabled, D/deaf, Sick, and Mad community activists, grantee organizations, and supporters. The PO will coordinate the program through a learning phase of gathering data from the previous two years of grantmaking, and a strategic phase of implementing the learnings. 

The deadline to apply is September 17, 2023.

Position highlights:

• Remote work, U.S. based
• Full-time (32 hours/week)
• Starting Salary is $83,500
• Benefits package

Note: For this position, we are also accepting video submissions! The video should be accessible through a link and a maximum of 3 minutes. 

For more information and to apply, visit our Job Openings page. 

Got questions? Email kiyomi@thirdwavefund.org. 

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Image Description: Graphic with a white background and magenta border. Large, black text at the top reads, "We're searching for a program officer!" and below there is a black rectangle with a screenshot from a Zoom call of twelve Third Wave Fund staff members. Above the photo in white text it says, "$83,500 | Full Time 32-hr/week | Deadline: 9/17" and below the photo it says, "Learn more and apply: bit.ly/thirdwavejobs." The Third Wave Fund logo is at the bottom center of the graphic. Orange and purple flowers are in the bottom two corners

There is too much at stake right now. Every day there are escalating political attacks and legislative curtailing of bodily autonomy and human rights. It is critical that gender justice movements are able to focus on the work ahead, instead of jumping through hoops and bureaucracy in philanthropy.  

Organizations that make up these powerful movements need and deserve consistent support to build new skills, to build power, to grow their own vision, and to experiment, fail, iterate, and try again. And they need this space without the risk of losing their institutional partners or funding. That’s why in 2016 Third Wave started the Grow Power Fund, our long-term support fund that awards six-year grants meeting youth-led grassroots gender justice organizations wherever they’re at in support of their sustainability and long haul visions for community liberation. 

In our new report, Resourcing Movements for the Long Haul: Lessons from the Grow Power Fund’s First Six Years, we document key lessons from the Grow Power Fund’s first cycle of long-term funding. 

​Available in both English and Spanish, you'll hear directly from grantees—responding to mounting attacks against their communities—on the crucial impact of multi-year funding, the necessity for low-barrier and accessible reporting processes, and the interplay between building capacity and building trust between philanthropy and grassroots movements.

We've learned so much from our grantees and we will continue to shift, transform, and adapt our funding to meet movement’s needs.

This report is an invitation to all funders to shift and transform your grantmaking practice to meet the needs that youth-led movement leaders are naming. We hope you’ll join us in evolving your funding, and transforming your relationship with movements to be enriched by mutual trust as we listen to our grantee partners to meet them where we’re needed the most.

If you are not a funder but are moved by this fund, it exists because of individual contributions from our community! Consider joining our community of supporters who give monthly to sustain this multi-year funding, or give a one-time gift today. 
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Dear Third Wave community, 

We’re sharing big news! After five years at the helm of Third Wave Fund, we, Ana and Kiyomi, will be stepping down as Co-Directors in the beginning of 2024. Since day one, it was our intention to lead Third Wave for five years before passing the baton to a new team of bold and courageous leaders. It has been an honor to lead an incredible team as we’ve worked towards fundamentally transforming philanthropy and redistributing power and wealth. We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of the powerful legacy of youth-led intersectional gender justice activism and grantmaking that far preceded us.

We are excited for the next chapter of Third Wave. The organization has strong finances, six thriving grantmaking programs, and a creative, insightful, and leader-full team of staff and Advisory Council members who have always been committed to the vision of Third Wave. Since we came on board in 2018, our budget has grown from $2.4 million to over $6.4 million dollars, with much of that in committed revenue, and with reserves to weather economic uncertainties. This growth was because of the support of many of you reading this letter, and it leaves us feeling very confident in the continued growth of Third Wave with new leaders.

Where the organization is now, our journey here, and our success and accomplishments as co-leaders has everything to do with the Third Wave community. Our work has always been about our power as a collective. Every single one of our staff brings a different expertise and perspective to our work, and our broader community makes Third Wave powerful, resilient, flexible, and revolutionary. When we joined as Co-Directors, movement leaders, donors, our staff, Advisory Council, and the broader social justice philanthropic community threw down for us — making connections, amplifying our work, and advocating for Third Wave. We want to provide the same level of support and trust for our next co-leaders through the Powerful Futures Pledge because it was critical to our success as new leaders. Help us support sustainable leadership and powerful youth leaders in philanthropy!

We’ve begun to receive the “what will we do next” question. Our primary focus right now is on Third Wave and ensuring the success of the leadership transition. We won't be far from social justice philanthropy and movement spaces after the transition. Ana will be continuing to sharpen their liberatory operations and finance skills and Kiyomi is excited to continue doing programmatic work. Any tips, recommendations, and connections are welcomed — including great beach vacation recommendations! Ultimately, the opportunity to lead Third Wave has meant that we have had the honor to build strong, lasting relationships with many of you reading this, and we are looking forward to working both with and alongside you in different capacities!

We are very excited to be working with Strategies for Social Change (SSC), Third Wave staff and our Advisory Council for the leadership transition and position search process. SSC led our leadership transition when the baton was passed from Rye Young to us in 2018. We were in awe then, as we are now, at SSC’s ability to lead organizations through smooth hiring, transition, and onboarding processes. Our Leadership Transition Committee is being held down by Advisory Council Co-Chairs Adjoa Tetteh and Loan Tran, Advisory Council Members Isabel Sousa-Rodriguez, Quita Tinsley Peterson, and Yecelica Jaime Valdivia, and staff members Agustina Vidal, Christian Giraldo, Maryse Mitchell-Brody, Monica Trinidad, and Rachel Caïdor. We want to give a special shout out to Adjoa Tetteh, who has been a leader on our Advisory Council for six years now, was on the committee that hired us, and will now be a part of our next process. Thank you, Adjoa! 

Having the opportunity to serve as Co-Directors of Third Wave has been an opportunity of a lifetime. Coming from different social justice organizing backgrounds, neither of us had planned to be in philanthropy, let alone lead a foundation — and yet Third Wave made it possible for us as two new leaders to work together to fund and organize philanthropy on behalf of our people. Leading Third Wave through Black liberation uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic, and full scale attacks on trans people, reproductive health and bodily autonomy has shown us the resilience of movements, and the dire need for organizations like Third Wave to exist. Thank you for believing in us, holding us accountable, and trusting us to lead Third Wave. 

With gratitude and love, 
Ana and Kiyomi

As the pandemic continues with long-term impact on our communities, people with disabilities continue to sound the alarms and support each other with little to no resources for their life-saving work. In response, we’re excited to announce a new grantmaking program that disrupts this major gap in funding. Today we’re announcing the Disability Frontlines Fund at Third Wave, and our inaugural grantee cohort. 

We are in a critical time to resource Disability Justice (DJ) organizations across all of our social justice movements. In an ongoing global pandemic in which public infrastructure continues to abandon disabled people, the Disability Frontlines Fund (DFF) focuses on directly resourcing groups across the United States and Territories that center the leadership of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) who identify as D/disabled, D/deaf, hard of hearing, chronically sick, neurodivergent, and/or mad, and who practice DJ. At Third Wave, we know that there is no liberation without DJ, a critical component of all movements for justice. 

Grounded in the definition of DJ from the 10 Principles of Disability Justice offered by Sins Invalid, we are developing values that integrate these principles into our funding practices. The Disability Frontlines Fund began its work in late 2021 with a field analysis of the funding landscape for DJ organizations. For this process, we interviewed ten BIPOC DJ leaders -  Patty Berne, Lydia X.Z. Brown, Jen Deerinwater, Daphne Frias, Elliot Fukui, Sandy Ho, Najma Johnson, TL Lewis, Leroy Moore, and Max Vega. From these interviews, we developed a strategy to fund grassroots BIPOC groups practicing DJ, while still doing our own learning and development. These two-year learning grants are helping us develop and refine our longer-term grantmaking strategy. 

We’ve seen traditional philanthropy hold back resources as they spend multiple years refining their funding strategies, despite the urgency of the work on the ground. As an intervention, our first cycle of learning grants seeks to resource groups while also allowing us to learn from their strategies, priorities, and success. For our inaugural round of learning grants, we are pleased to announce that we are awarding $960k per year for two years across the 18 following organizations and individuals:

Large Grants– $100,000 per year

• Collectivo Ilé, Caguas, PR
• DAWN, Washington, DC
• Fireweed Collective, National
• Generation Patient, Greenwood, IN
• HEARD, Washington, DC
• The Disability Project at Transgender Law Center, National
  
  

Mid Sized Grants– $35,000 per year

• Autistic People of Color Fund, National 
• Deaf Queer Resource Center, San Francisco, CA
• Disability Justice Culture Club, Oakland, CA
• Entre Putxs PR, San Juan, PR
• La Sombrilla Cuir, San Juan, PR
• Los Angeles Spoonie Collective, Pasadena, CA
• Masjid al-Rabia, Chicago, IL
• Strategies for High Impact, National
  
  

Individual Grants– $12,000 per year

• Imani Barbarin, King of Prussia, PA
• Sky Cubacub, Chicago, IL
• Najma Johnson, Washington, DC
• André Pó Rodil Rivera, San Juan, PR 

Disability Justice must be a part of every movement because people living with disabilities exist in every community. Grants from this new fund are already increasing disability communities’ individual and organizational access to the care and capacity that they demand and deserve.

While this fund is not currently accepting applications for new funding at this time, we’ll be providing information on future grantmaking cycles after this cycle of learning grants concludes in 2024. 
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If you are a donor, funder, or general admirer of the Disability Frontlines Fund, reach out to Maryse Mitchell-Brody (Development Officer, Spotlight Funds) to learn more about making a donation or other ways to support at maryse@thirdwavefund.org.
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Dear friends,

We are enraged alongside you, but we know these attacks are not new. We are exhausted alongside you, but we know this is a generational fight. We are steadfast in our commitment to resourcing grassroots gender justice movements year-round, but we still need more people to join us in movement building.

Our grantee partners have taught us that our collective liberation is beyond anything the legal system can ever offer us. As attacks on reproductive justice and trans people escalate, we follow the lead of our grantees who know this fight intimately, and who are not new to the criminalization of bodily autonomy. We follow the lead of Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color, trans, queer and intersex people, low-income people, disabled people, and sex workers who have been mobilizing their communities and sounding the alarms long before the leaked Roe v. Wade draft, long before the trans bans, and who will continue to do this work long after. 

We don’t have time for siloed struggles. As Chase Strangio and Rafa P. Kidvai of Repro Legal Defense Fund said in a Twitter thread from February, “The attacks won’t stop with banning gender-affirming care for youth or abortion. This is part of a larger set of systemic imperatives that will also come for birth control, gender-affirming care for people of all ages, IVF, and even marriage equality.” As an unapologetically feminist, trans, and queer fund, we know that any efforts to restrict access to safe, legal, and affordable abortion and other sexual and reproductive healthcare are directly tied to ableism, classism, racism, and transphobia. 

In moments of escalation and crisis, we see surges in one-time donations to organizations on the frontlines of these attacks. This influx of funds reflects real community power and is absolutely needed. But what if these organizations didn’t have to spend time fundraising in crisis? What if these groups had multi-year, long-term, unrestricted funding? Where would they be right now? Where would we be right now? 

Join us in supporting work led by trans people, abortion funds, and reproductive justice organizations - donate and heed their calls to action. If you have the means, become a monthly donor to support their work for the long battles that lie ahead of us. As a fund who also ensures that our grants go towards youth-led, intersectional gender justice orgs who often don’t have 501(c)3 status or large budgets to qualify with big funders, we invite you to join hundreds of people who give monthly at bit.ly/give2thirdwavefund.

With love and rage,
Ana Conner, Kiyomi Fujikawa and Third Wave Fund staff 

Some past/current grantees mobilizing to defend trans youth & abortion access: 

• Access Reproductive Care: @ARC_Southeast
• Feminist Women’s Health Center: @FeministCenter
• Frontera Fund: @FronteraFundGrv
• Indigenous Women Rising: @IndigenousWomenRising
  
• New Voices for Repro Justice: @NewVoiceRJj
• The Reproductive Justice Action Collective: @ReJACNOLA
• Spark Reproductive Justice NOW: @SparkRJNow
• Southern Birth Justice Network: @SouthernBirthJustice
• TAKE Resource Center: @Take_ResourceCenter
• TGI Justice Project: @TGIJusticeProject
• TKO Society: @TKO_Alabama
• West Fund: @WestFundTX, a member of @AbortionFunds
• Wild West Fund: @WildWestfundNevada

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Recommended resources to read and share:

• Repro Legal Defense Fund
• Judicial Bypass Wiki 
• Repro Legal Helpline, If/When/How
• The “Auntie Networks” Already Exist, Kelly Hayes, Truthout 
• The Growing Criminalization of Pregnancy, Melissa Gira Grant, New Republic​
• We Must Love One Another: Why Trans & Repro Justice Movement Should Be Building Solidarity, Chase Strangio & Rafa P. Kidvai, Director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund
• The Reconstruction Amendments Matter When Considering Abortion Rights, Peggy Cooper Davis, Washington Post​​

Upcoming virtual events: 

• 5/11: #BeyondChoice: Funding Abortion Access and Reproductive Justice in Uncertain Times, virtual webinar hosted by Borealis Philanthropy. Register for requesting access needs

The Sex Worker Giving Circle (SWGC) is excited to announce our 2021 grantees!

​We’ve made $550,000 in grants to 24 groups led by and for queer, trans, BIPOC, disabled, HIV+, working-class, and other sex workers, including seven organizations new to the SWGC. This means that since 2018, we’ve now moved $1,550,000 to 36 sex worker-led groups across the US! 

In 2021, we hosted our first national and virtual Fellowship program, with twelve new Fellows from across the country coming on board to get oriented to the world of philanthropy, hone their leadership, make grant decisions, and fundraise for our work. To learn more about the Fellowship, read this blog post at Giving Compass from our friends at Philanthropy Together, featuring SWGC staff and 2021 Fellow Maxine Juno Sinclair!

Grants to the twelve groups selected by this year’s Fellows range from $15,000 to $25,000 per year for a period of two years. We’re also excited to announce that the twelve groups selected for funding by Fellows in 2020 will each receive a $5,000 increase to the second year of their grant. In addition to financial support, SWGC grantees will have access to Third Wave’s capacity building resources for resource development, communications, digital safety and security, and nonprofit management so that they can grow at their own pace and fully participate in movement building.
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Many thanks to our Advisors, Fellows, staff, grantees, and supporters for help making it all happen - please join us in celebrating our new and returning grantees listed below!

You can also sign up for Third Wave’s mailing list or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to stay in the loop about the SWGC and our work. And if you haven’t already, consider donating to the SWGC to help us meet our fundraising goals and resource sex worker-led liberation! 

Please contact Christian Giraldo, SWGC Program Officer, at christian@thirdwavefund.org with any questions.

COALITION FOR RIGHTS & SAFETY FOR PEOPLE IN THE SEX TRADE (CRS) 
SEATTLE, WA
Awarded $25,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to support research, community organizing, and support by and for people in the sex trade to address and intervene in the harmful impacts of the criminal legal system.

COLLECTIVE ACTION FOR SAFE SPACES (CASS)
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Awarded $25,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to support community organizing around reducing the harms of sex work criminalization, creating safer communities, and a safe employment program for trans women of color, many of whom have sex work experience.

THE HEAUX HISTORY PROJECT
PHILADELPHIA, PA
Awarded $15,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to strengthen the archiviving of sex worker stories by producing a documentary film and archival project about the history of sex work and forgotten sex worker elders in the United States.

LOVE ME UNLIMITED 4 LIFE
JACKSON, MS
Awarded $15,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to coordinate temporary housing, food justice, and job preparedness programs to improve the economic outcomes of trans sex workers in 82 counties in Mississippi.

ORGANIZACIÓN LATINA DE TRANS EN TEXAS (OLTT)
DALLAS, TX & HOUSTON, TX
Awarded $15,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to address the survival needs and strategies of Latinx trans people in the sex trades by providing medical, mental health, legal and housing resources as well as leadership building opportunities to members of the community. 

THE OUTLAW PROJECT
PHOENIX, AZ
Awarded $25,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to support their operations, including their goal to document the impact of the prison industrial complex on sex workers of color, from the perspective of trans sex workers of color as well as build the resilience and capacity of their organization so it can traverse the difficult years ahead.

SOLUTIONS NOT PUNISHMENT COLLABORATIVE (SNaP Co.)
ATLANTA, GA
Awarded $15,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to support participatory action research and conduct a Sex Worker Needs Assessment to get a census of who is engaging in sex work in the state of Georgia, and who is impacted by violence in Atlanta.
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SUPPORT HO(S)E 
CHICAGO, IL & NEW YORK, NY
Awarded $25,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to deepen existing support to incarcerated collective member Alisha Walker, organize with the national coalition Survived & Punished in support survivors of violence who have been criminalized for self-defense, and advocate for COVID-19-related safety and public health measures for people in prison.

STREET YOUTH RISE UP (SYRU) 
CHICAGO, IL 
Awarded $25,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to provide outreach, direct support, leadership development, and training to youth and organizations about institutional violence across the U.S. impacting street-based youth and young people working in the sex trade.

UTOPIA SEATTLE
SEATTLE, WA
Awarded $25,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to support building collective power and leadership centering the healing of trans Pacific Islander sex worker communities, providing mutual aid to the community through COVID-19, and creating a policy agenda drawing from power stories.

WECARETN
MEMPHIS, TN
Awarded $25,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to support their operations, including supporting of the TransPro project, which breaks down stigma and low self-esteem to empower trans women by supporting them to stabilize their job security, gain financial literacy skills, and help survivors heal from trauma.

WOMEN WITH A VISION
NEW ORLEANS, LA
Awarded $25,000 for the second year of a two-year grant (2020-2021) to support their day-to-day operations, including major areas of focus like sex work leadership development, self-defense and street medic trainings, and harm reduction programs.

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