2022 Reimagining Safety Fund

KOLIBRI’S VALUES & COMMITMENT

The Kolibri Foundation seeks to resource and amplify movements at the intersections of gender, racial and economic justice that center on healing and the ending of systemic and interpersonal violence. Kolibri seeks an end to all forms of violence including state violence, patriarchal violence, and economic violence. The Kolibri Foundation envisions a world where wealth, land, and power are equitably shared, and all communities have access to safety and justice. We believe we have a responsibility to help build a world where there are generational legacies of resilience, love, and wellbeing, not one that reinforces generational cycles of violence. We commit to living our values by investing in community-led solutions that amplify and honor the leadership and vision of those directly affected.

THE MOMENT

Over the course of the last decade, there has been an increased culture of violence and harm in the United States that stems from the legacy of chattel slavery and capitalism in this country particularly aimed at marginalized communities. Over the last 30 years, conservative Evangelical Christians have slowly used legislative and other strategies to defund and delegitimize the Gender Justice Movement and efforts to address the growing issue of state-sanctioned violence. The recent confirmations to the Supreme Court reveal a more concrete intent to continue the history of state-sanctioned violence and heteronormative patriarchy through legislative advocacy – further highlighting the crisis of this moment. The foundation sees an opportunity to fund often underfunded and under-supported organizations that are working to shift the future of patriarchal and interpersonal violence within this country. Kolibri looks to build safer communities for future generations by funding groups that are applying a gender justice lens in their strategies to ending all forms of violence with a particular focus on sexual violence. Kolibri funds community-centered and created solutions that center on BIPOC and otherwise marginalized communities. The Foundation is committed to supporting the leadership and wisdom of those pushed off into the margins of our society. The Foundation is committed to funding efforts that name the ills of racial capitalism and are strategizing to have the ability to confront it.

INAUGURAL 2022 FUNDING CYCLE

For our Summer 2022 cycle, we seek to address the short and long-term approaches to responding to and addressing patriarchal and interpersonal violence through funding organizations that are working to transform the root causes of systems and cultures of violence that perpetuate interpersonal, communal, and state harm and abuse. We are looking to fund organizations that are building infrastructure to support safety and care practices for vulnerable communities for a lifetime – inclusive of but not limited to violence perpetuated through the restriction and denial of abortion care and gender-affirming care. We recognize that movements need continuous general operating support funding and access to learning communities in order to develop and sustain the movement infrastructure necessary to shift systematic oppressive systems. In this round of grantmaking, we will invest over $3 million dollars of general operating support grants to support BIPOC-led and centering organizations that are working to address the root causes and impacts of structural state and interpersonal violence. Kolibri Foundation is accepting requests for general operating support from groups working across the US, with a particular focus on groups working in the U.S. South and Midwest. Organizations are invited to apply for up to $250,000 per year for up to two years.

We’re interested in work that involves gender justice, abolition, and reproductive justice frameworks. Rather than impose our own ideas of how these lenses can be applied to organizing strategies, we are intentionally not defining how we’re thinking about this in the RFP. Instead we want to learn from our partners about how this work is manifesting in your organization, community, and field. The Criteria and Parameters for the funding is:

• Organizations that are working to address the structural and systemic impacts of patriarchal, state-based, and interpersonal violence.
• Be an organized group of people or an organization that is a nonprofit with 501(c)3 status as determined by the IRS, OR is fiscally sponsored by 501(c)3.Organizations that are working explicitly with communities of color and/or other marginalized communities.
• Organizations with directly impacted people in meaningful and/or executive leadership throughout the organization.
• Organizations doing bold, innovative, sustaining, and/or envelope-pushing grassroots community organizing work that has the potential to have broad and deep impacts across movements.

Special Interest and Priorities

Kolibri is committed to using our resources to mobilize philanthropy to engage with communities differently and support non-traditional leaders to build long term sustained infrastructure. Kolibri is committed to funding organizations that have never been or are underfunded. We are excited about the possibility of funding organizations who are working outside of the measurements traditional funders use and in political projects that are working outside and beyond the state. Kolibri is particularly interested in supporting, but not limited to

• Organizations working in the following states: AL, AR, KS, KY, LA, MS, ND, OK, PR, SC, SD, WV, USVI
• Organizations utilizing survivor-led and use survivor-centering strategies and have survivors in their leadership
• Organizations with a focus on elevating, uplifting, and organizing queer, gender non-conforming, trans and intersex communities, Indigenous communities, working-class communities, and groups with and for multi-abled communities..
• Organizations that are critiquing the medical industrial complex, carceral state

Timeline

• June 16th, 2022- Grant Cycle Announcement
• July 1st, 2022- August 31st, 2022- Application Period
• September 2022 – November 2022 – Application Review Period
• December 2022 – Public Announcement of Grantees