Guest Feature: Healing to Action’s Karla Altmayer on Funding Gender-Based Violence Initiatives
Photo taken by Faith Decker, November 2024. Photo of HTA' survivor-leader, Veronica Solis, entrepreneur and business owner.
Photo taken by Faith Decker, November 2023. Photo of participants and facilitators in HTA's Survivor Power Institute.
In November, there was another devastating headline in Chicago about a husband killing his 54-year old wife, Lacramioara Beldie. This is at least the fifth case of a husband, boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend killing their partner or their partner’s family member since May of this year when 10 year-old, Jayden Perkins, a ray of sunshine and light, was stabbed to death by his mother’s ex-boyfriend.
In 2023, homicide rates as a result of gender-based violence — violence that happens to someone because they fail to conform to the gendered expectations which includes harassment, sexual assault, domestic violence, LGBTQ+ violence, and more — increased by 110% in Illinois. Today, more than 40 percent of Black women experience physical violence by an intimate partner during their lifetimes, compared with 31.5 percent of all women.¹ Native women experience rape at 2.5 times the rate of white women. People living in poverty experience intimate partner violence at a rate 286 percent higher than high-income people.²
Often after these tragedies, advocates repeat calls for training or removing judges and police, and passing legislation to further criminalize potential harm-doers only to be followed by another horrific act of violence against a woman or LGBTQAI+ person. Even when #MeToo propelled the vastness of the problem of gender-based violence into public consciousness, a resulting focus on the problem as an “interpersonal” issue has yet to make a dent on the number of cases of sexual assault, domestic violence, and abuse.
The impact of this hyper-individualization of gender-based violence and overreliance on carceral responses perpetuates a disproportionate erasure of Black and brown survivors, where evidence shows that police purposely ignore Black women. Less than 31% of survivors actually report to the police, many for fear that they might be criminalized themselves. A recent survey by the National Domestic Violence Hotline found that of survivors who reported to the police, 1 in 3 felt less safe after the police encounter.
Photo taken by Faith Decker, November 2024. Photo of HTA survivor-leaders and staff and HTA's first Solidarity Mercadito held at the National Mexican Museum of Art.
In light of these systemic failures, the most impacted survivors have forged their own strategies that focus on addressing the root causes of gender-based violence, and creating alternative responses to the current carceral model. For instance, since 2019, survivor-leaders with Healing to Action (HTA) in Chicago have been organizing and calling for deep investment in high-quality, comprehensive sexual health education as a way to prevent gender-based violence for future generations. HTA survivors have also started their own peer-to-peer strategy, facilitating workshops on gender-based violence in the community to destigmatize the issue, and connect with isolated survivors in the community. These innovative initiatives are happening because Black and brown survivors who have lived through and navigated the different systems, have the knowledge and expertise to lead the solutions to address the root causes. As experts, survivor-leaders are building the systems they would’ve liked to have seen for themselves and working to ultimately prevent gender-based violence from happening.
To build this level of survivor power, philanthropic partnerships have been instrumental. Partners like Woods Fund Chicago, who understand how systemic barriers prevent Black and brown survivor-leaders from participating in grassroots organizing, have invested in ensuring survivors have access to mutual aid support, crisis intervention advocates, healing support, interpretation, childcare, and transportation, allowing survivors to lead in their communities. Unrestricted funds have also allowed Healing to Action to truly center the ideas of survivor-leaders, allowing them to innovate on how to address the root causes of gender-based violence.
In this political moment, our movements need philanthropic partners more than ever to double down on investing in survivor-leadership so that they can continue to address the root causes of gender-based violence. Currently, only 1.6% of all philanthropic funding goes to ending gender-based violence, and a mere 0.5% goes to women and girls of color.³⁴ As the sector prepares for 2025, here are the three questions that I offer to reflect upon:
First, what types of gender-based violence initiatives exist in your foundation portfolio? How are survivors of gender-based violence informing or leading the work?
Second, is your definition of gender-based violence rooted in a carceral definition or in the lived experiences of survivors? Does the gender lens utilized to assess grantmaking consider how other social conditions intersect with gender-based violence?
Lastly, what support can your organization provide to grantee partners to grow or deepen their gender analysis in their work and implement survivor-led organizing?
As we move into a political climate run by individuals who committed and normalize sexual violence, building the collective power of survivors is needed now more than ever. With promised cuts to federal funding and threats of deportation in our horizon, survivors won’t even have a broken system to turn to. Grassroots interventions led by survivors most impacted will be a key tactic to building the collective power of survivors. It is here where philanthropy can make the difference.
Karla Altmayer is a Chicana attorney, organizer, and activist. As the co-founder and co-director of Healing to Action, Karla collaborates with survivors of gender-based violence to build survivor political power.
¹ Asha DuMonthier, Chandra Childers, and Jessica Milli. “Status of Black Women in the United States,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2017.
² “Cycle of Risk: The Intersection of Poverty, Violence and Trauma,” Heartland Alliance, March 2017.
³ Jill Richards. “Only 1.6% of giving goes to women's and girls' causes. Grants funders can change this,” Fluxx, July 2020. https://www.fluxx.io/blog/only-1.6-of-giving-goes-to-womens-and-girls-causes.-funders-can-change-this
⁴ Judy Harris Kluger and Emily Hirsch. “Nonprofits Fighting Gender Violence Have Struggled Since Losing Buffetts’ Funding. They Urgently Need More Support,” The Chronicle of Philanthropy, May 2022. https://www.philanthropy.com/article/nonprofits-fighting-gender-violence-have-struggled-since-losing-buffetts-funding-they-urgently-need-more-support