Q&A With Emergent Fund Director Alicia sanchez gill
As the director of one of our three partner philanthropic organizations, Alicia Sanchez Gill shares the monumental impact Emergent Fund is making in indigenous communities and communities of color. Thank you Alicia, for taking the time to share your story and reveal your insight on social justice, grassroots organizing, and the power of human generosity during a pandemic.
“There’s always constant reminders that we can’t do this work alone. It takes all kinds of people, institutions, skills to transform the world. We all can just do the part that we can. Even if it’s a small thing, like checking on your neighbor, all of that care has value and impact. ”
What is your background and what led you to Emergent Fund?
My name is Alicia, and I’m the director of Emergent Fund. I’ve been in this role for about a little over a year. I’m a D.C.-based organizer who has mostly come from the basis of gender justice organizing. Most of my work has been focused on intimate partner violence and reproductive justice. I’ve organized across multiple issue areas impacting women and LGBTQ people of color in D.C., including the decriminalization of fare evasion and the implementation of a landmark Street Harassment Prevention Act in Washington DC, which was the first of its kind in the United States. I’ve also worked to create options for survivor safety using an anti-carceral practice by helping to incubate a trans and queer people of color-led transformative justice working group in D.C.
Having worked across many different kinds of movement spaces, I came to philanthropy because I saw that often our communities are underfunded. We were doing work with very few resources. What I was really excited about in this role in Emergent Fund is that we are directly supporting organizers. What Emergent Fund is doing is giving organizers the support that they need to build power, transform our world and transform systems. That felt really exciting to me because I really believe in work that moves from a place of trust actually shifts power and transforms the status quo.
Can you tell us about the work Emergent Fund does?
Emergent Fund is an intermediary fund. We are a small, social justice, rapid response fund and we were established right after the 2016 election. We were built specifically to help move resources quickly with no strings attached to communities that were and continue to be under attack by federal policies and priorities. We focus on resources, grassroots organizing and power building in indigenous communities and communities of color that are facing injustice based on racial ethnic religious and other forms of discrimination.
The kinds of grants that Emergent Fund funds are efforts that support emergent strategies that help communities respond to rapidly changing conditions. We support organizations who are seeking long term social justice. We’re a fund so we don’t do programming necessarily, but we essentially move money quickly to grantees, sometimes in as quickly as a week, when organizers need it the most. We really want to support communities under threat in the midst of a crisis and build a powerful reality of what’s to come next.
It’s important to know that:
1) We’re rapid, so that we move money every month.
2) We’re flexible, so our money is given with no strings attached. There’s a low barrier to apply, and we really trust the leadership of the grantees.
3) Our model is participatory, which means we have a network of activists across the country who help us make decisions about where grants go. We know that people who are closest to the work are best equipped to make decisions about where resources are distributed.
What results does your organization achieve?
Since Emergent Fund began right after the 2016 election, we’ve supported organizers fighting against family separation, muslim bans, police violence, reproductive justice and much more. We’ve funded organizers on the frontline of many issues.
Since Covid began, Emergent Fund has supported 237 grantees with over 1.8 million dollars since March. For comparison, we moved 1.7 million dollars to 77 grantees in all of 2019. This increase speaks to the support that we’ve gotten from individual donors. (Emergent Fund gets funding from individuals and philanthropic institutions.) Since Covid-19 began, we’ve seen so much human generosity. Our grantees have really shown up to take care of their communities in beautiful and interesting ways. So many of our grantees with what little resources that they had started small little community funds to practice mutual aid and find ways to take care of their people.
What is the hardest decision you’ve had to make recently, and how did you evaluate the tradeoffs involved?
When we launched the People’s Bailout in March, my goal was to raise $500,000. I had no idea how many would apply. In our first of four grant rounds, we had about 50 proposals. I remember saying with disappointment that with $500,000 divided by 50 grantees, that meant that they would only get $10,000 each. I was feeling disappointed because that didn’t seem like enough.. and this was just round one of four. One of the decisions we had to make was, do we give fewer grants with more money, or do we try to meet the need that we have with a smaller amount?
Ultimately we chose the latter, and this was a hard choice. In my dream world, we would meet everyone’s needs. It’s important to think about the fact that Emergent Fund is just one small fund. This was a moment when we had to rely on our partners from other philanthropic organizations. There’s always constant reminders that we can’t do this work alone. It takes all kinds of people, institutions, skills to transform the world. We all can just do the part that we can. Even if it’s a small thing, like checking on your neighbor, all of that care has value and impact.
What are your goals for the next few years?
As a rapid response fund, our goals are to be flexible, to take risks on new projects, and to trust what is at the core of our work, which is to have deep trust for black, indigenous and people of color organizers, and people who are closest to the problems. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that you have to be prepared for everything and that you have control over very little. Our goals are centered around our values.
We are making plans to continue to lean into risk-taking, flexibility and trust based philanthropy. We hope to expand our grantmaking to continue to support these moments of change. Our goal is to support more grantees for a more sustained amount of time, because we understand that organizing and creating change is not a one-time event and we want to expand our grantmaking to continue to support that fact.
What do you, personally, spend most of your time on?
The truth is I spend a lot of time on administrative stuff. I am the person who makes sure, when we approve someone to receive a grant, that it actually happens. A big part of my time is spent on grant administration.
I spend a large portion of my time being in relationship with current and prospective grantees. Emergent Fund doesn’t require our grantees to write reports. We trust our grantees and trust they know their work best, so I have an open door policy, where grantees can reach out to me to tell me what is and is not working for them. They can reach out for support. I’ve had grantees reach out during Covid to ask for help and to ask for other funders. Emergent Fund truly has the best grantees. They are incredibly sweet and compassionate. I spend a lot of time building relationships with grantees, foundation partners, donor partners, and people who are interested in Emergent Fund. It’s great because you can’t do this work without relationships. That is probably the biggest part of my job - relationships, and it’s the most fun part. I love being able to support perspective grantees, and being transparent and human so people know what to expect from us. It’s about people knowing that we can be accountable to communities.
In addition, I spend my time on grant management, communications, data collection, looking at outcomes, thinking about best practices and being in coalition with other funders.
Who are some of your personal heroes?
Our grantees are my personal heroes. They are on the frontlines serving the world and I do this work to support them.
On a personal level, I’m very close to my father but I also have a strong matrilineal lineage. I think about my aunts who organized in churches, and my mom, retired now, after 30 years of being a teacher. There are just so many incredible women in my own family who have been models of compassion, generosity and doing work that aligns with your values. I’ve had some really cool women in my family.
I’m really inspired by the everyday ways that the people in my family show up for each other. There are many people in my family who work in the medical or health field. Two of my aunts are nurses, two of my uncles are EMTS. They’re exactly the people Hero’s Heart is seeking to support - people working on the frontlines. My dad is a veteran, and other family members clean hospitals. They’re all really the people that we’re talking about when we say everyday heroes.