What’s a significant accomplishment from the last few years that Third Wave Fund is particularly proud of?

It’s so hard to name just one! Since 2019, our grantmaking has grown from $800,000 to over $3.1 million in 2024. We also had a very successful leadership transition last year, saying goodbye to Ana Conner and Kiyomi Fujikawa and welcoming in Morgan (Mo) Willis and MARS. Marshall. But our biggest accomplishment in the last few years has been shifting a majority of our grants to become multi-year. This move demonstrates our commitment to the care and longevity of our movements and those who lead them. Our approach to grantmaking has always been about providing flexible funding that meets movements wherever they are, while also focusing on communities that have been overlooked and underresourced by philanthropy. We do this with rapid response grantmaking, capacity-building support, and long-term funding. We’ve been providing six-year general operating support grants through the Grow Power Fund to address the major gap in philanthropy since 2017. However, being able to shift more of our grantmaking areas to multi-year, such as the Accountable Futures Fund, is something we’re very proud of.

Okay, one more—in 2019, we invited our friend and former Board member, adrienne maree brown, to write a blog for our guest series on what Emergent Strategy might look like in the philanthropic field—it was so good! Last year, we were thrilled to see that same blog featured in adrienne’s latest book, Loving Corrections, a collection of love-based adjustments to grow our movements in this unprecedented political moment.

Why does Third Wave Fund believe increasing resources for LGBTQ+ communities is crucial in this moment? 

Resourcing the fight for gender justice is perhaps at its most critical point. This year is already proving to be monumental as we face the increasing onslaught of legislative attacks against LGBTQ+ communities, particularly our trans communities. This moment calls for a radical deepening of how we show up for each other. And it is not the time for philanthropy to be comfortable, nor hold back. 

More funders need to be agile and provide various types of funding—like rapid response and multi-year funding—to contribute to an ecosystem of support and care. Because yes, we need to meet this moment, and there is a long road ahead with many more moments that our LGBTQ+ communities need us to help them meet. There’s this fear we’re sensing in a large part of philanthropy of doing both rapid response and long-term commitments right now. That’s actually an investment in a scarcity mindset. When philanthropy says that providing unrestricted, long-term funding to queer and trans BIPOC-led organizations is “risky,” we say no, it’s absolutely necessary for our survival.

We have learned over the years that our movements hold a multitude of truths, and thus require a multitude of care and support strategies. It is clear that “no one way works” on the path to gender justice and liberation. Intermediary funders like us are doing the most with the little that we have. Big philanthropy has an opportunity to step up and really shift the ecosystem in this moment—and we’re watching.

What’s a fun fact about Third Wave Fund that you don’t think enough people know? 

In 2007, when Third Wave Fund was called Third Wave Foundation, we gave Tarana Burke’s organization, Just Be Inc, one of their first grants as they launched their “me too” project, which as we know, would receive global attention just over 10 years later! This is such a beautiful example of how critical it is to fund emerging groups, giving them space to build institutions that work for them; to build new skills, to experiment, to fail, iterate, and try again.