Dear Abortion Stigma-Busters,

We are firm believers in the power of our abortion justice ecosystem! Aligned with our goals to build a values-driven and transparent organization, we have curated a 2023 recap of our work in leading efforts to build a world where everyone can access stigma-free abortions.

Read our recap to see the many ways we nurtured abortion justice in 2023! 

Our growing community

This year, we welcomed 465 new members! We are now supporting, connecting, and providing spaces and resources for collective power to more than 2600 members leading diverse abortion justice movements in more than 120 countries.

Our members are made up of abortion justice activists, community workers, researchers, abortion providers, feminist funders, grassroots collectives, and more, who are powering the diverse abortion justice movement needed to make long-lasting change worldwide.

Resourcing the movement 

In 2023, inroads provided seed funding and support to 12 grantee partners from 12 countries and launched a new cycle of flexible funding that will go to 7 recently selected grantee partners.

inroads’ flexible and participatory funding for stigma-busting abortion work is centered on breaking the many layers of stigma surrounding abortion justice work, including grassroots collectives who are unable to legally register due to restrictive and stigmatizing contexts. In a world that can be full of stigma, our funding values can be extremely rare, even unique. As such, hundreds of grassroots collectives come to us for much-needed funding and support, as evidenced by our last round of applications where we received over 180 proposals.

We are proud to recognize that the work we fund is powerful and diverse, including creating community spaces for abortion acompañantes to expand authentic access to abortion care, holding national events and artistic spaces for narrative change around abortion, tackling the unique abortion barriers and intersecting stigma faced by sex workers and LGBTQ+ communities, improving community care and security practices to sustain local abortion justice work and activism, and leading communications and strategic litigation efforts to change restrictive and stigmatizing abortion policies and practices, amongst countless other invaluable actions.

Additionally, this year, our team has been working behind the scenes to evolve our funding mechanism to better support the community care needs of abortion justice movements.

Reflecting on years of learning, experiences, and inputs from our communities, and with a commitment to intersectionality and long-term movement sustainability, we are evolving our resourcing model to the inroads Abortion Community Care Fund 🌱 Stay tuned for more details coming soon!

Building spaces for collective power and solidarity

In 2023, we: 
💚 We held the inroads Latin American and Caribbean Regional Abortion Justice Circle, a regional in-person gathering that brought members leading abortion justice efforts in 21 countries of the region together to Bogotá, Colombia, to strengthen the sustainability and power of the movement. Aware that most local abortion collectives have minimal to non-existent financial resources and very little access to this type of strategic regional space, we dedicated and prioritized funding and support for the travel and participation needs of the majority of gathering participants.

💚We facilitated the Abortion Justice Body & Territory fellowship with 11 fellows.
inroads fellowships are a collective process that brings members together around a unique abortion stigma-busting theme that promotes intersectional and cross-movement collaboration and creation. Each year, 10 to 12 members are selected and resourced as inroads fellows who participate in mutually-led fellowship circles and creative projects as a part of engaging in intersectional stigma-busting and cross-movement exploration, centered on abortion justice and decolonial practices for our collective liberation.

Additionally, inroads amplified and included 231 new stigma-busting resources, publications, and tools to the inroads Community Library and maintained our interactive Community Workspace – a dynamic virtual safe space for power building & solidarity amongst our members, now growing to connect over 1200 users!

Shifting power and uplifting stigma-busting voices 

In 2023,
💚We launched the convening of a Global Day to Destigmatize Abortions. inroads initiated the co-convening of a collective, simultaneous, and regular global campaign centered on destigmatizing abortion as a powerful advocacy and organizing tool. Through this, we hope to mobilize our communities to take action and strengthen the abortion justice ecosystem in building collective power for transformative change. This effort coordinated by inroads is being co-created and co-convened by a working group of reproductive justice organizations, feminist collectives, stigma-busting artists, feminist funders, abortion providers, community workers, international networks, and NGOs across the world.

💚We co-led “Re-centering the Margins: Abortions and Intersectionality,” a powerful session at Women Deliver 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda that reframed who should be at the center of conversations around abortion access when creating an inclusive and intersectional global abortion movement, in order to continue weaving a collective narrative of intersectionality in the pursuit of reproductive justice for all.

💚Organized “Abortion Justice: Building a creative, supportive, and secure ecosystem,” a powerful workshop at the RightsCon 2023 Costa Rica Summit that brought together abortion activists, digital rights activists, and feminist funders into an open and participatory dialogue to highlight the creative ways in which feminist social movements are centering holistic security and community care to protect our bodily autonomy.

💚Co-convened the International Safe Abortion Day Campaign an effort that provided resources, toolkits, and increased collective power to mobilize communities and stakeholders around the world to demand safe abortion access for all. We are proud to have proposed and supported the development of this year’s framing theme centering on our Unstoppable Movement alongside powerful allies.

Additionally, we joined the Steering Committee of the Feminist Leadership Hub hosted by One Future Collective and FAIR SHARE of Women Leaders. Zanda Desir, inroads Operations & Community Culture Coordinator, will bring inroads’ abortion justice lens to strengthen this mutual effort.

Amplifying our collective wisdom to strengthen the ecosystem

In 2023, 
💚We analyzed and published the in-depth community evaluation and feedback effort to better understand and reflect on our community impact, needs, strengths, and spaces for growth so that we can keep learning, evolving, and strengthening this international network in service of our powerful community.

💚We produced Building Spacious Solidarity Dialogues, an offering to share the journey and the thought process behind our unique Spacious Solidarity Dialogue series – A space for international solidarity, healing, reflection, and connection that started during the pandemic and evolved into more complex mutual learning cohorts and multi-day thematic virtual gatherings for our inroads community.

💚We published Our Collective Wisdom: A letter from the inroads community cohorts centering queer abortions, abortion justice intersections with disability justice, and abortion accompaniment. We hope this offering serves our growing community to reflect on how we can keep building an inclusive, equitable, fearless, and participatory stigma-busting abortion justice movement.

💚We crafted 9 Insights to Convene Transformative International Gatherings for Movements, a resource for allies seeking to convene regional or global gatherings for social justice movements, with quotes and input from our latest regional gathering, the organizing team, and participants evaluation survey.

Additionally, our team has been immersed in a deep process to evaluate and reimagine equity & care compensation practices for global organizations with staff working in different countries – with unequal contexts & realities. Aligned with our strategic goal of building a flexible, transparent, and values-driven organization, and with the support of consultants, we hope to share the learnings and outcomes of that endeavor in the future to support mutual learning and pollination of equity practices across the field.

This summary was just a glimpse of our work together last year.

We look forward to sharing more in our upcoming 2023 annual report and to keep shaping this stigma-busting community together.

In solidarity and appreciation,
The inroads team

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Would you like to support transformative abortion justice work worldwide? Donations and funding partners help us nurture the global abortion justice ecosystem! Support here.