Priority Issues

The Women’s Foundation of California supports efforts across the state to achieve significant and long-term systems change in two broad priority areas:

• Health and Safety: This includes reproductive health and justice, environmental health and justice and efforts against gender-based violence
  
• Economic Prosperity: This includes efforts towards economic security and economic development

We invest deeply in these areas and encourage cross-issue and cross-sector work that engages multiple strategies. We also support emerging grassroots efforts to build and strengthen broad-based movements led by women and girls — especially low-income women and girls and those from communities of color.

Through the Foundation’s Community Action Fund we strive to addresses complex problems in our communities with comprehensive solutions. The objectives of the Community Action Fund are to invest in:

• Implementing community-based strategies that change policies and systems to improve the lives of women and girls
• Developing the leadership of women and girls working on policy advocacy, systems change and movement building
• Promoting the human rights of women and girls in all sectors of society including economic, political, social, environmental, sexual, cultural and civil rights.

Grants from the Community Action Fund support organizations and programs that employ articulated strategies — such as leadership development, community organizing, media and public education, civic participation, research and policy advocacy — to bring about measurable and sustainable systemic change.

The Community Action Fund places special emphasis on four principles: gender analysis, racial justice analysis, human rights framework and long-term systemic change. We seek to support projects that demonstrate a gender analysis or an understanding that gender has a primary impact on societal and cultural expectations and that gender influences the actions of individuals and institutions. A gender justice analysis addresses gender roles and acknowledges the fluidity and breadth of gender, including gender queer and transgender people.

We also look for programs designed with a racial justice analysis which address structural and institutional racism and may include the promotion of policies and strategies that support equitable participation in — and access to — society’s resources and opportunities by members of all races and ethnicities.

We seek to support projects that prioritize the leadership of people of color in defining the impacts of public policies on communities of color and proposing solutions to these problems.

In addition, we seek to support projects that challenge policies and systems in order to promote, protect and fulfill the fundamental human rights of all people.

We will consider projects and organizations working for economic, political, social, environmental, sexual, cultural and civil rights for all members of communities, including women and girls.

And finally, we support projects that implement actions aimed at changing policies and systems in the long term and in sustainable ways.

Priority Issue Areas

The Community Action Fund seeks to support organizations and projects in one or more of the following priority issue areas.

Environmental Health and Justice

Under Environmental Health and Justice we support efforts designed to improve environmental conditions for women and their families where they live, work, learn and play. We support efforts that:

• Encourage active community participation in environmental decision making by women and girls and promote policies that are shaped by and responsive to women’s needs
• Elevate the voices and role of women and girls in efforts to mobilize support for chemical policy reform that will motivate industry and government investment in the design and use of chemicals that are less toxic, do not accumulate in the body and break down more readily in the environment
• Strengthen linkages between environmental health and justice and other social justice movements—particularly women’s reproductive health—and to engage new allies as advocates for environmental reform
• Make environmental health science and policy accessible to multiple audiences
• Build the capacity of nascent organizations and leaders, particularly in underserved areas of the state.

Reproductive Justice and Sexual Rights

Under Reproductive Justice and Sexual Rights we support efforts that seek to expand and protect the rights of all women and girls to make informed decisions about and exercise control over their sexual and reproductive lives.

We support efforts that:

• Are led by underrepresented women including women of color, low-income women, young women, rural, immigrant, LGBTQ and incarcerated women
• Promote policies that are shaped by and responsive to women’s needs and that address the right to bear and parent children, access to safe and legal abortion, comprehensive sexuality education, universal health care, the right to bodily integrity, the right to express one’s sexuality, sexual orientation/identity and gender identity/expression
• Strengthen ties with other social justice efforts including the reproductive health impacts of environmental pollution, affordable health care, and economic security.

Economic Justice

Under Economic Justice we support efforts that:

• Promote long-term economic security for individual women and families, especially efforts that increase women’s earnings, economic self sufficiency and pay equity
• Utilize economic development strategies that demonstrate consideration of the intersections of race, gender and class in program planning and implementation
• Influence local, regional and state economic policies and systems that affect women’s ability to achieve immediate and long-term economic self sufficiency.

Safety

To support policies and programs that work to ensure that women and girls can live a life free from the threat of physical, verbal, emotional and sexual violence. This includes ensuring women’s and girls’ rights to live a life free from discrimination based on gender.