Learnings and Updates from our Healing Justice Grantmaking
People engaged in movement work — especially Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian American and Pacific Islander women — often get burned out by the relentless nature of power building and the stress and dehumanization of having to demand, organize, and advocate for dignity and rights that should be universally enjoyed. These changemakers are using both traditional and new practices to protect themselves and manage trauma from physical, cyber, and psychological threats, sustain their wellbeing, and transform systems of White supremacy and misogyny that perpetuate these harms. The Hive Fund’s healing justice and holistic security (HJ/HS) grantmaking recognizes and resources these efforts to foster powerful, healthy movements and leaders.
Background
Healing justice is a cultural and political framework and set of practices that aims to transform collective trauma in order to build power towards liberation. Grown and nurtured in the US South in the early 2000s by groups like the Kindred Collective, healing justice encourages people to tend to collective trauma now, in the process of doing systems change work, rejecting the notion that healing can wait until liberation is won, justice is achieved, or even the campaign is over. In fact, it serves as a reminder that engaging in healing as part of movement work helps create opportunities to disrupt systems and practices both within organizations and in the world that oppress and harm; forge new ways of working that draw people closer to each other in relationship and strategic alignment; and make movements welcome spaces for a broader base of people.
In 2020, when the Hive Fund was just getting off the ground, we started a learning journey to both develop our healing justice and holistic security grantmaking and embed a healing justice framework into our internal and external practices. Read more about that process here.
our HJ/HS grantmaking
Hive Fund defines healing justice and holistic security as the support needed to help Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian women and other women of color and their communities heal transform and be protected from the harmful effects of intergenerational and ongoing trauma, violence, pollution, and weathering from white supremacy and misogyny as well as the immediate threats to their physical, digital, and psychosocial safety. Our grantmaking supports three sets of practices:
Healing practices that help transform the impact of harmful systems.
Security practices that help prevent and minimize harm from existing systems.
Power building practices that help change the systems causing harm.
We made our first round of HJ/HS supplemental grants in 2021, following one-on-one conversations with grantees with our partner Ananse Consulting. In 2022 and 2023 we partnered with Ananse again to help us expand our healing justice and holistic security grantmaking and integrate it more systematically into our grantmaking practice as we develop an internal culture around it. They conducted another round of listening sessions to help us learn more about grantee partners’ challenges and the current practices and traditions that help navigate them. We heard from many of our newer grantees that they desired more opportunities to connect with each other and the broader Hive Fund ecosystem to understand how others were applying HJ/HS strategies within their broader work.
“Support for healing justice and holistic security allowed me to have the space and resources to work with my board to develop internal practices that support our staff and to have a strong transition to new leadership.”
Leng Leng Chancey (right), President and CEO of 9to5 National Association of Working Women
In response, we offered a series of workshops that provided grantee partners a grounding in the history of healing justice and holistic security, as well as a space to bear witness to each other’s strategies and stories and hear from various practitioners about its applications. Twenty-eight individuals from 18 organizations attended the workshops to ask questions, cross-pollinate their learnings, and build connections with existing practitioners and each other. Michelle Wilson of Women Engaged presented on their organization’s use of grant funds for cybersecurity, and highlighted the need for social justice organizations to secure their tech and virtual spaces, especially as attacks on Black and Brown women and their communities increase and infiltration attempts become more common.
In late 2022/early 2023, we completed our second round of supplemental grants. The cohort of 10 grantee partners shared a range of organizational concerns that landed within the themes of leadership development and capacity-building, conflict resolution, coalition coordination and cybersecurity, among other concerns. Requests included:
Training for staff and community partners on transformational resilience and climate grief frameworks.
Cyber security audits and updates.
Organizational safety plan development and physical security system upgrades for office buildings.
Conflict mediation and transformation support to address harms within organizations and with external partners.
Trainers to embed breathwork and somatics into organizational culture.
HJHS in Practice
*We have not included grantee names to protect their privacy.
One grantee in Georgia is using Hive funds to facilitate a smooth transition to a co-executive directorship model, which will also bring on the first Black woman into an executive leadership role in the organization’s long history. Funds are being used for executive coaching for both directors and the entire leadership team so the current executive director can take a much-needed sabbatical before returning to close out her tenure.
A North Carolina grantee is exploring practices for both their organization and the broader community. Internally, they’re implementing a retirement plan and dependent care coverage plan to support their leaders, staff, and volunteers who are elderly and in need of caretakers as they prepare for retirement or are caregivers themselves. They are also developing an environmental healing program for participants to connect more deeply with the natural environment and learn about its healing properties through plant medicines and other cognitive benefits.
Another North Carolina grantee used Hive Fund grant support to launch a Nonviolent Accompaniment and Civil Defense Initiative. Staff received a day-long training in de-escalation, defense, and protection techniques, and went on to practice and share what they learned with frontline leaders and activists in their communities.
Opportunities
“Increased visibility makes leaders and their communities vulnerable to physical and cyber-attacks. We are proud to support the Hive Fund in its efforts to improve the safety, security, and wellbeing of leaders in the US South as they build vibrant and influential movements to achieve equity and justice.”
Kathryn Kevin, Programme Officer, Oak Foundation
Our commitment to healing justice and holistic security includes supporting interventions at the individual, organizational, and field levels. To date, we have made investments in our grantee partners’ ability to protect and support individual leaders by accessing professional coaching, yoga and meditation, and other wellness and development practitioners. Many grantee partners have also made organization-level interventions to improve internal culture, mediate major conflict, and boost employee benefits like healthcare and paid leave.
Over the course of our work with Ananse consulting, the Hive Fund and our grantee partners have worked with the Spiral of Transformative Change to practice applying HJ/HS principles to our work. Over the next few months, the Hive Fund will also be using this tool to develop a strategy for growing our HJ/HS grantmaking practice beyond individual and organizational investments to build capacity for incorporation of HJ/HS principles and practices in the broader field of climate justice organizing. Our team will be reflecting on what we’ve learned with Ananse over the past two years as well as what we’ve heard from grantees during our workshops and previous listening sessions to inform our next round of strategic investments in HJ/HS. We will continue to support grantee organizations directly; however, we are also exploring ways to increase access to practitioners within the climate justice movement, especially in the South, and build capacity to normalize these practices through our grantmaking.