GlobalGiving Forward Fund

Thank you for your generous donation to the GlobalGiving Forward Fund. Donations to this fund are making a difference, helping to ensure communities around the world are in the driver's seat of change.

As we celebrate GlobalGiving’s 20th anniversary and the power of community-led change this year, we want to shine the spotlight again on three community-led nonprofits and introduce the leaders behind them. Their stories, first shared at GlobalGiving’s virtual anniversary event in March, are now available to view as part of our “Community Foward Film Series.” 

Here is a short description of some of their critical work: 

• Hope Foundation for African Women is working to end the life-threatening practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Kenya, starting from within the communities where it happens. The organization’s founder, Grace B. Mose Okong’o, endured FGM as a girl, and the painful experience haunted her. Grace’s work with Hope Foundation for African Women is inspired by her belief that FGM survivors and perpetrators, sometimes one and the same, hold the key to ending FGM and breaking gender barriers once and for all.
  
  
• La Maraña is making space for Puerto Ricans to envision and execute solutions that rebuild and improve their island. La Maraña’s Executive Director, Carlo André Oliveras Rodriguez, witnessed firsthand the devastation in Puerto Rico after hurricanes Irma and Maria—and the painfully slow government response that left lights out in some communities for months. Carlo believes Puerto Ricans themselves know best how to create safer futures, but they’re shut out through broken systems.
  
  
• Seeding Sovereignty is a multi-lens collective that works to radicalize and disrupt colonized spaces through land, body, and food sovereignty work, community building, and cultural preservation. Their Co-Executive Director, S.A. Lawrence-Welch, is bringing Indigenous and marginalized people together in healing ways and spaces through Seeding Sovereignty. The legacy of ethnic persecution and trauma that S.A. and their family faced, including residential boarding schools and the Sixties Scoop Era, fuels their determination to lead by example and bring support, validation, and joy to others in their journey through the healing process in a colonized world.

Watch and share our #CommunityForward film series to learn more and help us spread the word about the power of community-led change.

Your support of the GlobalGiving Forward Fund powers community-led responses, and it means people like Grace, Carlo, and S.A. get the critical resources they need to help their community move forward and build a better future. 

With gratitude,

Donna Callejon
Interim GlobalGiving CEO