Grantmaking
Women Building Up funds grassroots efforts led by and for directly impacted women, girls, and gender-expansive people — locally, nationally, and internationally — and works to grow the resources flowing to those closest to the work.
Our First Year of Grantmaking
$2,000,000 granted out to 25 organizations
90% went to BIPOC-led organizations.
65% supported organizations led by formerly incarcerated cis and trans women.
40% backed organizations focused specifically on girls impacted by carceral systems.
65% of our general operating funds supported organizations operating in NY.
What’s Ahead
Our role as a resource provider remains as critical as ever, and we’re proud of our partners' work.
Our grantmaking responds to the carceral systems that continue to devastate our communities and the disinvestment from criminal justice reform.
In 2027, we’ll launch an open grants cycle for organizations aligned with our long-term grants strategy.
How We Do It •
How We Do It •
WBU is committed to practicing care-based philanthropy, which builds upon the foundation of trust-based philanthropy. Care-based philanthropy is an ethic rooted in the intellectual and organizing traditions of our communities — in honor of the grandmothers, the organizers, the midwives, the women who have always understood that taking care of each other is not supplemental to the work.
It is the work.
It also emerges from what leaders told us directly: burnout, chronic underinvestment, and the experience of being betrayed by the very infrastructure that was supposed to be on their side. Care-based philanthropy is a response to that knowledge and a commitment to act on it. The pillars of care-based philanthropy, as we see it, are as follows:
We believe leaders are the resource.
We invest in the people running organizations, not just the work they produce or not just the outcomes they deliver. The people. Their sustainability, their wellbeing, and their power are the point. We resource leaders without requiring them to perform their trauma. Funding flows from trust in leadership and alignment with the work — not from the ability to center suffering.
We resource rather than monitor.
Our relationships with grantee partners are built on genuine accountability, to the communities they serve and to the values we share — not compliance, surveillance, or data extraction.
We stay when the work becomes politically vulnerable.
Our commitments are not contingent on what is comfortable for us as an institution. We resource the work because it is necessary, especially when others pull back.
Our work is relational, not transactional.
We show up consistently, not just for grant cycles. We acknowledge the toll of systemic oppression and the weight of leading in hostile conditions — and we build relationships that can hold that weight.
We minimize the burden.
We reduce the emotional and administrative labor of translating community visions into funder-legible language. We do not extract more than we give.
We believe care is movement infrastructure.
Capacity building, healing, and rest are part of what we fund because leader wellbeing is organizational health—not a perk to those who have earned it.
We protect community ownership of stories.
The experiences of the people in our community belong to them. We do not extract narratives for our visibility.
We are movement-accountable.
Proximity to this work comes with responsibility — to center community voice in our decision-making, to be transparent about how we use resources, and to be answerable to the movement, not just to donors.