Ms. Foundation strategic plan to focus on women of colour

File Photo: The Ms. Foundation for Women will put $25 million over five years toward organizations that are led by and focus on women and girls of colour (Photo by Kostya Romantikov/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

NEW YORK — The Ms. Foundation for Women will put $25 million over five years toward organizations that are led by and focus on women and girls of colour and also form its first-ever fund that will allow it to take a stronger stance on political and policy issues, the organization said Tuesday in announcing its new strategic plan.

Teresa Younger, the foundation’s president and CEO, said the organization believes focusing on women and girls of colour “will have the greatest ripple effect” in terms of what is needed to bring about positive change in the U.S.

“The reality of the strategic plan is to be really intentional, bold and unapologetic about where we believe resources on every level need to go,” Younger told The Associated Press, pointing out that these communities have historically not gotten a lot of attention from funders at all.

“How do we move everybody up the ladder? An investment in women and girls of colour reaps the rewards at the end of the day,” she said.

The organization already focuses the majority of its grant-making on organizations that are led by women of colour or provide services directed toward them. The strategic plan makes that stance explicitly clear.

The plan also includes the creation of an arm of the foundation that will allow it to advocate on policy, a first in the organization’s 40-plus year history.

That arm is expected to support grassroots efforts on the issues the foundation advocates for, including reproductive rights and economic equality.

The strategic plan calls for the political arm to help develop strategies to get more women of colour running for office, funding polling and research and creating candidate report cards for state and local elections.

A commitment like the one the Ms. Foundation is making also could encourage other organizations and donors to put their dollars toward underserved women and girls of colour, said T’Sey-Haye Preaster, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Maryland whose research examines black women and philanthropy.

“One positive example can lead to many more,” she said. The Ms. Foundation “is really positioned well to do that type of work.”

Preaster emphasized the idea that resources centred on women of colour benefit society as a whole.

“They literally have been at the intersections of the centre of every movement for social and political change in this country,” she said. “Partly because women of colour sit at this unique nexus of racial, gender, class identity … they have a unique way of seeing.”