2019 Grantee Spotlight

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Black Trans Travel Fund is a fund created to help provide Black transgender women with resources to make sure they are able to travel to and from their destinations safely and free from verbal harassment or physical harm. They will distribute the funds collected in order to pay for car ride services such as Uber and Lyft for Black trans women throughout New York City, with the goal being to be able to eventually expand the service to different states as they generate a consistent stream of income. This project was created out of direct response to the relentless and unacceptable violence Black transgender women across the country are currently experiencing.  

November 2019 update from organizer:  

The Black Trans Travel Fund has had since its launch in June with the help of #Map4Youth’s $2500 grant!

We launched the Black Trans Travel Fund on June 18th, on the same day we were announced as #Map4Youth grantee winners. 

We believe this gave us credibility with the public that allowed supporters to feel comfortable also donating funds to our initiative immediately. We received the $2500 from Map4Youth less than a week later, which was how we were able to guarantee implementation of BTTF’s first campaign, #BlackTransPrideRides, which helped women to get to and from World Pride events in NYC.  Using the $2500 from Map4Youth along with an additional $2500 in accrued donations, we were able to to provide 100 #BlackTransPrideRides to Black trans women in New York and New Jersey for the month of June. 

Since then, the support that we have been blessed with has been unbelievable, and also, it’s become even more clear how important this service has been and will continue to be for community. Beginning in October, for sustainability purposes, we had to restructure our fund so that there is a cap on the number of rides we can pay for each month. We came to the decision of 50 rides, with the typical amount of funding each woman receives being $50, coming up to $2500 redistributed per month. In addition to the 50 applications approved, we also currently sponsor 1-2 events centering Black trans women each month were we pay for rides home, budgeting $500-$1000 per month. Some examples of events we have sponsored have been a “Beauty & Wellness” event for Black trans women that was hosted by The Okra Project, a Black trans femmes Open Mic night, and a collaboration with the Atlantic Theater Company in which we payed for rides home for a group of Black trans women after attending a production of “The Secret Life Of Bees”.

Our staff keeps a detailed record of all donations acquired, money distributed for rides, and to whom they are provided.  ( In full transparency to the funders, we make it clear to donors that 90% of all donations go directly to Black trans women in need, while 10% goes towards operational cost in order to keep the fund running, which includes paying our staff.) 

As of November, we have officially been able to provide funding for over 600 rides to more than 300 Black trans women in New York and New Jersey, having redistributed just over $30,000!!!

Melat is a member of Women of Color in Solidarity and Homecoming Collective, providing full spectrum doula care, childbirth education and facilitating workshops on sexual, reproductive and birth justice for QTBIPoC across New York City. The project will build a sexual and reproductive health resource database and education platform that centers the needs of people living with disabilities, particularly QTBIPoC and immigrants. The resource database will contain information on trusted BIPoC sexual and reproductive healthcare providers (Doula’s, OBGYNs, Midwives, Fertility Specialists, Lactation Counselors, Herbalists etc.) information on accessible facilities, assistive technology, interpreters, insurance policy as well as data on episiotomies, cesarean delivery rates and much more. It will also include educational material such as an "Informed Patient: Know Your Rights" guidebook from the Disability Justice and Rights training. They will also be working with assistive technology specialists, interpreters and translators to ensure cross disability access.

November 2019 update from organizer:  

The project was much more expansive than we had imagined and needed time beyond the summer to develop the database software. We partnered with NYU Langone and NYC Health + Hospitals to expand our visions for the sexual and reproductive health resource database and education platform. The funds covered Assistive Technology Specialists and Data architecture infrastructure. We were able to collect data on majority of the facilities and providers in the 5 boroughs and build a solid visualization and display . We will hopefully be relaunching the database on their platforms in the fall and facilitating a series of workshops.  

 The youth of Pilsen Alliance, a grassroots organization, plans to hold a community organizing institute for the young people (13-23) of Pilsen and surrounding communities. Centered on healing and empowerment, the 6-week institute will cover a wide range of social justice and organizing topics. Different days will have their dedicated topic or theme, activities will range from workshops to neighborhood canvassing, attending public forums/city council, skills trainings, healing sessions, community building, and action planning. The project will incorporate art and popular education as much as possible to fully engage youth and address their specific needs. While we don’t expect all participants to become organizers, we do want folks to finish the program with the agency to decide how to act upon the information and skills learned in the institute and know that they have a voice when tackling issues in their communities. Youth programs in Pilsen have continuously gotten shut down due to fund deficits and rapid gentrification, and because of that they will create a safe space for all of us to collaborate as young people, enable youth empowerment, and obtain the tools necessary to fight displacement by our own means. Sample topics include Transformative, Restorative and Healing Justice. 

November 2019 update from organizer:  

The Pilsen Alliance Youth Committee wants to thank you for the support you gave us this summer. Thanks to your support we were able to launch our Pilsen Alliance Youth Organizing Institute this summer and invite 13 young people, ages 13-19 all Latinx POC from Pilsen, Little Village, and the broader southwest side, into our space. Our institute ran for 6 weeks where we conducted different workshops, presentations, and activities that gave our young people the skills and tools needed to lead campaigns and actions while centering our own marginalized communities and healing. The institute was co-facilitated by Karla De Jesus and Jonathan Mendoza who hope to both continue this work but also make sure that young people at the Pilsen Alliance can in the future take over our roles as youth organizers and create autonomy for themselves as we transition from young adults into adult allies. 

The funds #MAP4Youth provided us with covered youth stipends for spending their time with us, transportation for our youth to and from the program, art supplies for our workshops, guest speakers to help their organizations and movements, and food to help nourish our young people throughout the day.  

With funds from MAP4Youth we were able to invite folks like Benji Hart who gave a workshop about Trans liberation and the relationship it has with police brutality, which our youth loved as Benji is an amazing facilitator and community organizer for trans liberation and the #NoCopAcademy movement right here in Chicago. We also had a symposium day where #NoCopAcademy youth leaders came in to help our youth reimagine what Chicago’s budget can look like when it serves marginalized communities instead of the elites. In addition, Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) gave a know your rights immigration workshop when being confronted by immigration enforcement and police, and Alternatives, Inc. came in to give basics about healing circles, transformative justice, and allowed our youth to participate in a circle where they learned about conflict resolution and what it looks like for folks to have different versions of a situation. We were also given a mural tour by Logan Lu around Pilsen, which helped our youth learn about Pilsen history and how murals and gentrification correlate with one another. It was really important for us to expose our young people to other folks in the struggle who are doing amazing work in other parts of the city because it showed them what can be done outside of Pilsen and how that work still affects us.

In the spirit of making luxury accessible, The Okra Project is a partnership facilitated by Ianne and funded by Black Trans Solidarity Fund and a group of Black Trans chefs that aims to bring home cooked, healthy, and culturally specific meals to Black Trans People in New York City. Over the past 5 months, they served over 100 meals to Black Trans people in New York and Philadelphia. And also started The Okra Project National Grocery Fund which provides Black Trans people with $40 of grocery money nationally and internationally anywhere outside of the NYC and Philadelphia area. The Okra Project caters meals cooked by Black TGNC chefs to the Black TGNC folks in the NYC and Philadelphia area instead. The project will expand their impact in the community, using the grant to create The Okra Academy which will hire Black Trans Chefs to create an introductory cooking course for Black Trans people in order to facilitate self sufficiency and healthy food accessibility. They hope to create a new potential job revenue for Black Trans people as well as helping build the roster of Black Trans chefs who can cook for the Black Trans people in our community.

November 2019 update from organizer:  

Our project is complete! We used our grant to launch the first iteration of The Okra Academy, a weekend intensive where a Black Trans chef from our staff leads a group of Black Trans community members through kitchen basics, recipes, and culinary techniques. The goal of The Okra Academy is to build community around preparing food together, share necessary skills that the community can apply to everyday life, and prepare interested community members to possibly work for The Okra Project. Our Philadelphia based chef, Jimmy Roberts, led a group of participants through the weekend class this past August in Brooklyn, NY.

The Okra Project received a $2,500 #Map4Youth grant. With that amount, we were able to provide round trip bus fare between Philadelphia and NYC for our chef and their assistant, book hotel accommodations for the chef for the weekend, rent a kitchen-classroom space, purchase groceries, utensils, and cookware for class demonstrations and take-home meals, provide transportation to disabled participants, print class worksheet materials, and provide our chef with competitive compensation that allowed them to further their catering business.

The Donor Diapers team and Marissa will host monthly diaper distributions. The distributions, will be held at a centralized location that way families are able to have quick access to the site. Their goal is to help families by supplementing diapers (sizes 1-4) , wipes, and diaper cream. Donor Diapers’ hope is to help at least 30 to 36 different families on a monthly basis.

2020 update from organizer:

We have provided over 15000 to 350 families and 415 babies. We now provide contactless kits, all kits are packed in a sterile environment with PPE and great hand hygiene. With covid we have have seen a huge peek in families.

HYPHA's core nucleus is the sweet joining of Mars Earle, Kori Higgs, Sufia Ikbal Doucet, Mina Ezikpe, Nia Rodgers, adé Oni, Parker Hurley, and Nnedinma Umeadi; in active exploration of radical community care on a small, abundant plot of Occaneechi land in Durham, NC.

HYPHA Healing Garden and Apothecary is a collective of queer and trans healers, artists, community organizers, and gardeners, centering healing justice and wellness in order to build a better world. The HYPHA Healing Garden & Apothecary officially initiated itself on a small but abundant plot of Occaneechi land in March 2018, and came into existence to fulfill a collective desire to decolonize health & wellness and create avenues to earth-based ways of healing. We aim to grow our relationship and responsibility to land and each other by centering QTPOC healing needs and building a generative, cooperatively-stewarded community space. Since launching, HYPHA has been steadily building an inter-generational, land-based learning space. This includes consistent collective workdays, hosting a summer youth camp and community work days, harvesting and creating medicine to be sent to asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico “border”, and holding skill share workshops. The medicine of this land project is to dismantle the historical structures that have intentionally prevented black and brown folks from accessing land and intentionally separating queer and trans folks from their innate connection with nature.

November 2019 update from organizer:  

HYPHA healing garden and apothecary is so grateful for the investment in our project's vision through the monetary resource of MAP 4 Youth. So far we've been able to channel part of the grant money towards the upkeep and building up of our collective's infrastructure. This has concretely taken the shape of paying water bills, the cost to set up an LLC and bank account to allow for better collective money holding, cost of domain name for a website, Garden equipment and tools. We were able to have some garden work days this summer and the garden has been able to collaborate with the Lakewood Community Project's neighborhood summer camp by offering plant workshop programming to camp youth and been a space were neighborhood youth were able to steward 2 beds of their own tomato plants from starter to fruit.  

The Donor Diapers team and Marissa will host monthly diaper distributions. The distributions, will be held at a centralized location that way families are able to have quick access to the site. Their goal is to help families by supplementing diapers (sizes 1-4) , wipes, and diaper cream. Donor Diapers’ hope is to help at least 30 to 36 different families on a monthly basis. 

June 2020 update from organizer: 

We have provided over 15000 to 350 families and 415 babies. We now provide contactless kits, all kits are packed in a sterile environment with PPE and great hand hygiene. With COVID we have have seen a huge peak in families.