Since 2014, inroads has leveraged over $1,000,000 USD to fund community abortion justice efforts and strategies led by 100+ community organizations in 45 countries across the world. 

inroads’ flexible and participatory funding for stigma-busting abortion work is centered on breaking the many layers of stigma surrounding abortion justice work. In a world impacted by stigma at every level, our funding opportunities for abortion movements can be extremely rare, even unique.  As such, hundreds of grassroots collectives come to us for much-needed funding and support.

In the past 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 proud to share we are transforming our resourcing model to the: inroads Abortion Community Care Fund 🌱

We are now inviting funding partners and allies committed to abortion justice to join us to bring this vision of community caring resourcing to movements around the globe! 

Learn more about this renovated funding for abortion justice below, and reach out to our team to partner with us. 

ABORTION COMMUNITY CARE FUND

The Abortion Community Care Fund, led by the inroads global community, aims to respond to the needs and dreams of our community of abortion stigma busters: Flexible funding that sustains their work, supports their care and collective power, sparks collaborations, and ensures their resistance and persistence amid threats, criminalization, and compounding crises.

As our community member working on abortion efforts in Venezuela shared: “We urgently need funding. It is really complex for us to obtain resourcing for our type of work.”

The Abortion Community Care Fund aims to support our community through three resourcing streams:

Sustain and Respond

Our community faces constant threats and crises in their lives and livelihood that require urgent support. Sustain and Respond is a rolling fund providing trauma-informed holistic emergency support to abortion activists under threat and/or crisis. The spirit of the fund is to protect activists dismantling abortion stigma, and share the burden of risk and resilience through community care and resourcing support. Sustain and Respond recognizes the psychosocial impact of adverse conditions, legal and political marginalization, and multiple sources of oppression experienced by the criminalization of activism.

Examples of support include: Holistic security tools and training, threat modeling assessment(s), attorney fees, bail/bond, expert support/accompaniment, and dependent support during crises.

This is a new stream, for which we are actively mobilizing resources. With the support of funding partners, we envision this stream to include:

• Funding amounts: $1,000-$3,000
• Funding term: 6-months to one year 
• Funding window: Rolling – this openness is designed to ensure we are able to respond to the constant threats and crises that our community experiences.

“[We need] instant support for protecting stigma busters who get threatened, harmed or illegally arrested in difficult advocacy contexts.” – inroads member from Ghana. 

Bloom Grants

Abortion work and efforts are severely underfunded due to the stigma that prevails around abortion, especially across the philanthropic sector. Yet, with very few and limited resources, the community is leading powerful and creative abortion work. This resourcing stream is focused on funding the core and care needs of groups who do not ordinarily have access to mainstream sources of funding and are impacted by compounding injustices, as well as groups who want to experiment, try out ideas that are considered “risky” or innovate.

Examples of support include: arts, research, translation, documentation, podcasts, community-based projects or even seed funding to support the launch of something new  like an abortion and RJ hotline.  Core needs of groups as well as spaces for care, reflection and healing are also supported. 

This funding stream is one we have been able to offer consistently for the past  years, and within the evolved ACCF, we envision continuing to provide:

• Funding amounts: $3,000-$5,000
• Funding term: 1 year
• Funding window: yearly window.
  

“inroads has been exceptional awesome. Very considerate of individual members/organizations, it always ensured the whole process of funding was not complicated to follow. inroads makes you feel you are home away from home, in the comfort of a network that has your back.” inroads member from Zambia.

Collective Power and Solidarity

Abortion work is rooted in collective work, power, and solidarity. We know this as it is the way that our community has and continues to respond, sustain, and support abortion work, understanding that long-term, sustainable change does not happen alone. It is through our relationships, coalitions, alliances, and joint-actions that we care for, support, and protect our bodily autonomy. This resourcing stream funds the joint efforts and strategies of two or more groups to leverage the collective power and solidarity of the community and movements. Examples of support include: joint leadership of processes, cross-movement collective care/learning spaces, collective participatory research and action work, cross-border support networks and multi-place artistic, embodiment and healing efforts  to create worlds where abortion can be cared for and decriminalization/abolishing can be dismantled with creative collective practices.

A funding stream centering on fostering collaboration is something we have been able to offer in the past in different ways. Within the evolved ACCF, we envision providing:

• Funding amounts: $10,000-$15,000
• Funding term: 1-2 years
• Funding window: yearly window in the second/fourth quarter

“We would have never been able to bring this strategy to our country if it hadn’t been for the inroads grant. Nor would we have been able to analyze our work through data analysis had it not been for inroads’ support and accompaniment. However, equally important was our integration into a wider, international stigma-busting community. This greatly impacted our organization by improving our understanding of the global battle to fight stigma and making us feel part of a global community. – inroads member from Mexico.

ACCOMPANIMENT 

We know that funding is critical but is only one component of supporting the abortion stigma-busting efforts of our community. Committed to increasing support for more sustainability, in partnership with inroads’ members, we co-create and support community accompaniment spaces for healing, mutual learning, sharing, reflection, joy, and accompaniment. We do this work across territories, topics, and fields to build solidarity, foster collective power, and leverage collaboration. 

In addition to these spaces, we provide connections to individual experts, organizations or groups, and resources that support the efforts and strategies of our grantee partners. This is critically important as the anti-abortion and anti-human rights movements work in synchronized ways across the world- we have seen many policies and criminalization efforts spark across the globe using the same language and tactics.

Precisely because institutional and cultural stigma silences and isolates us from potential communities and resources, we do the work of managing stigma by connecting folks across those divides, especially when it might be risky for someone to reach out. In circumstances where members and grantees have been responding to legal charges and prosecution, we have been able to connect them to legal minds in other jurisdictions that can think through strategies with local lawyers. When members have been targeted by anti-abortion hacking or other attacks, our members have reached out through private means, and we can get them support. It is crucial that we be able to provide solidarity, community, and strategy to our members along with the very needed financial and resourcing. While this accompanied practice has been part of our philosophy and way of working from the beginning, as inroads grow and as the threats balloon and metastasize, we need to strategically and responsively increase our community’s capacity to provide this secure accompaniment work.   

“We felt grateful working with inroads in that the process was open and there was communication and mentorship throughout the grant implementation period, including participating in learning spaces, grantees support meetings, and receiving recommendations. inroads has been flexible and considerate during challenging times”. – inroads member from Kenya.

RESOURCING PRINCIPLES

Grounded in feminism that recognizes our intersecting social identities, experiences, and struggles, our Resourcing Principles guide the grantmaking approach of the Fund. We know and feel that why we give is just as important as how and what we give.

• Participatory
• Beyond accessibility
• Trusting and Flexible
• Accompaniment and Learning
  

Who We Fund:

• Grassroots groups that are usually excluded from funding resources and facing multiple injustices, especially: the community with disabilities, LGBTQIA2S+ communities, and Indigenous and other racialized communities.
• Registered and unregistered groups – We recognize that abortion work in each context requires different strategies, where many groups work without registrations as a protection mechanism. We honor our role to ensure support and recognition of both types of groups.
• Groups using collaborative, creative, and innovative strategies to bust abortion stigma and co-create a future where everyone experiences abortion on their own terms.
• Groups/person facing an emergency due to their abortion work and advocacy.
• Projects or initiatives in organizations that are well-resourced, only if the project is otherwise under-funded and is designed to nourish the abortion-stigma busting community.

Join us to bring this vision of community caring resourcing to abortion justice movements around the globe! 

If you are interested in funding abortion justice worldwide, reach out to our team to receive more information to partner with us 💚