Tewa Women United Named as “Radical Hope Grantee Partner” by the Novo Foundation
The NoVo Foundation has announced $34 million in Radical Hope Fund grants to 19 organizations from among 1,000 applicants doing bold and transformative social justice work in the United States and around the world.
Tewa Women United (TWU) is honored to be chosen as one of these 19 partners.
Other partners include the Florida Immigrant Coalition, Movement for Black Lives, National Domestic Workers Alliance, and the Water Protector Legal Collective. See the complete list here.
“We launched the Radical Hope Fund as a radical experiment—can a time of increasing repression and darkness also serve as a springboard for deep collaboration and transformative change?” said Jennifer and Peter Buffett, NoVo’s co-presidents. “The answer has been overwhelming: feminist grassroots advocacy, activism, and organizing are thriving across the globe, new partnerships are growing, and justice leaders everywhere are planting the seeds for a radical new world based in equity, possibility, power, and dignity for all.”
TWU’s Radical Hope project will focus on “Healing Justice and Radical Self-Care” for a three-year period.
Healing deep wounds takes time.
Since the 1800’s our communities in Northern New Mexico have experienced colonization in various forms resulting in sexual and domestic violence, displacement, disparities, and the prison industrial complex. Healing Justice is a powerful tool to transform intergenerational and individual complex traumas into healing and reconciliation.
For the past few years we have been in dialogue internally and with other organizations to explore, expand, and share our understanding of the Healing Justice framework within our current trauma informed work based on cultural strengths.
TWU’s executive director Dr. Corrine Sanchez notes, “This grant from the NoVo Foundation offers us a visioning opportunity, and allows us to contribute to transformation by creating courageous spaces in which to share different world views, demonstrate how to bring love and accountability into conversations, and honestly discuss issues of trust and mistrust; displaced patriarchy; power and control.”
This grant will be used to fund opportunities for shared dialogue within our organization and with our sister organizations at the local, state, and national levels on the meanings of Healing Justice, its implications for radical change, and a plan for implementing it as a practice to sustain our justice movements. These dialogues will be across sectors that often remain siloed, and will explore how Healing Justice can inform our work within and across the silos.
The funding from this grant is entirely separate from our regular and ongoing programming and operational needs. Please know that we continue to need and appreciate your donations to support our work.
The Healing Justice and Radical Self-Care project will explore individual and community transformation through healing-centered organizing rooted in an Indigenous feminist perspective.
Radical Hope funding support will be used for story-sharing retreats, through which the project will map out paths that connect ancestral legacies of healing traditions with new models of health and justice inside communities and movements. These stories will inform the social justice movement and expand leadership development, and will be documented via digital, audio, written, and graphic recordings; Spark Documentation; and community-based art.
Dialogues will incorporate a range of experiences, such as of those living in the shadow of the nuclear weapons industry, birth stories, treatment by reproductive healthcare providers, challenges of raising families in toxic environments, and other emerging topics that contribute to creating a shared definition of justice and social change at the intersections of environmental justice, food justice, and reproductive health in New Mexico and beyond.
Like all of NoVo’s work, the Radical Hope fund is grounded in the belief that meaningful change happens from the community level up—informed by lived experience, powered by movement building and activism, and guided by the leadership of marginalized people as the best experts of their own lives and futures.
“We hear a lot about innovation in the social sector, but the truth is that marginalized communities are rarely granted the trust, support, and space they need to experiment and dream,” said Pamela Shifman, executive director of the NoVo Foundation. “The Radical Hope Fund grantees show us that radical innovation is already happening, feminist organizing is already leading our way, and the answer so many are looking for in these challenging times is already in front of us, if only we are willing to back it up with the trust and support it deserves.”
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ABOUT TEWA WOMEN UNITED:
Located in the ancestral Tewa homelands of Northern New Mexico, Tewa Women United is a multicultural and multiracial organization founded and led by Native women. The name “Tewa Women United” comes from the Tewa words wi don gi mu which can be translated as “we are one” in mind, heart, and in the spirit of love for all. TWU believes in strengthening and re-strengthening beloved families and communities to end violence against women, girls, and Mother Earth. For more info, visit: www.tewawomenunited.org