Supporting the South. Resourcing Black-led organizing. Shifting to trust-based practices. Funding to win. While philanthropy grapples with what these critical ideas mean in practice, some Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) organizer and funder partnerships are showing how it’s done.
We invite you to join us as we deepen our knowledge of community organizing and support its essential role in strengthening our democracy and advancing racial justice, as well deepen our understandings of how communities in the region are adapting and responding to a global pandemic, fighting anti-Blackness and oppression in our region to build more equitable systems, and tackling social injustices head on by redefining what it means to thrive in the DMV.
Through campaigns taking on pressing issues of a fair wage, gentrification, COVID-19 unemployment and more, DMV organizers have brought a racial equity lens to intersecting issues of community development, economic justice, worker organizing, education, and migration. Their work has advanced new transformative and model policies across the region – including in previously conservative-dominated statehouses like Virginia. DC’s foundations have followed suit, pushing forward trust-based philanthropy models and a Resourcing Radical Justice collaborative centering Black liberation as the path to a thriving Greater Washington area.
This resource is based on the Organizing DMV collaborative's report, Maximizing the Moment: Investing in Power-Building to Advance Racial Justice in Metropolitan Washington, DC. Organizing DMV is a regional learning community centered on deepening funder engagement, knowledge, and support of DMV-based community organizing groups, efforts, and initiatives. The group provides touch-points for local, regional, and national funders to better understand and familiarize themselves with the Greater Washington organizing infrastructure and happenings through events, discussions, publications, and more, in partnership with the organizing community.
Organizing DMV seeks to build and sustain relationships between the funding community, as well as between funders and organizers, to grow the funding capacity of the sector. Members of Organizing DMV include representatives from Greater Washington Community Foundation, Meyer Foundation, Weissberg Foundation, Hill-Snowdon Foundation, Diverse City Fund, and if, A Foundation for Radical Possibility (formerly Consumer Health Foundation).
Local funders and grassroots groups
