Getting Creative on Support for Grantee Partners

November 2025 — Moving the Needle // Woods Fund Chicago

This past July, we featured some of the ways Woods Fund Chicago has shifted to support our grantee partners beyond increasing our payout percentage.

Since then, the need to move resources to organizations on the ground — whether it’s the community organizing groups we fund, mutual aid, or more conventional aid networks — has only increased. As organizations attempt to simultaneously step into the breach of a government shutdown and combat ongoing attacks on our communities, funders have to look beyond our initial budgets and get creative. Here are some ways Woods Fund Chicago has done that this year:

#1 — WE'VE MOBILIZED OUR RESOURCES ON THE OPERATIONAL SIDE OF OUR FOUNDATION AND PUT THEM IN SERVICE OF GRANTEE PARTNERS.

That has meant bankrolling legal counsel, lending out our contractual CFO to help with organizational budgets, and deploying our crisis communications firm as grantee partners have come under fire from the current administration.

#2 — WE MOVED UP OUR GRANT PROCESS THIS YEAR TO GET MORE FUNDS TO GRANTEE PARTNERS SOONER.

By the end of summer, we had proactively spent down our grantmaking dollars and had a clear picture of our operational needs: we revised our budget mid-year to move $500,000 from operations to grantmaking.

#3 — WE COLLABORATED WITH PEERS FOR INCREASED IMPACT.

No one does this work alone. A gift of building relationships with multiyear grantee partners is that it gives us the context and confidence to advocate for them in the philanthropic sector. This year, we built with allies in philanthropy to secure additional funding for grantee partners. These collaborations proved particularly critical to support rapid response work, which is by nature emergent, and often requires resources yesterday. Partnering with peers has allowed us to push out funds for emergency work while holding to a core principle: we cannot abandon basebuilding work in one sector in response to the urgent needs of another.

#4 — WE HAVE GROWN OUR TEAM OF PROGRAM OFFICERS SIGNIFICANTLY THIS YEAR, ALLOWING US TO BE OF MORE ROBUST SUPPORT TO OUR GRANTEE PARTNERS.

Critically, our staff have lived and professional experience in the communities they serve: we are former executive directors and organizers. As we work to fund political change, the team stewarding this grantmaking are not strangers to the work, the neighborhoods, and the activists we support. Further, we’re aware of the historic and current harms perpetuated by philanthropy and the nonprofit sector: our team brings a critical perspective to this work. An organization can’t eliminate blindspots, but with honest dialogue, we can hold one another accountable to our values.

#5 — A DIVERSE AND DEEPLY COMMITTED TEAM OF PROGRAM OFFICERS HAS ENABLED CONTINUED, RIGOROUS WORK ON OUR ORGANIZATION'S INTERNAL VALUES.

Being explicit about our core principles, and revisiting them with thoughtful dialogue, has helped every other moment of decision-making hew more closely to our mission.

As trans communities come under attack from executive orders, policy changes, and more diffuse targeting, Chicago organizers are fighting back. On Tuesday October 21, grantee partners Brave Space Alliance (BSA) and the Transformative Justice Law Project were featured in a briefing on Chicago-area trans supports, held in partnership with the Healthy Communities Foundation and the Philanthropic Strategic Response Network. Given increased federal attacks on trans people — from healthcare, to education, to the freedom of mobility — it's more important than ever that we support trans communities across Illinois, via both investment and explicit, vocal solidarity.

HERE'S WHAT WE HEARD FROM BRAVE SPACE ALLIANCE AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE LAW PROJECT

While Illinois is celebrated for being an LGBTQ+ refuge in the region, the day-to-day experiences of trans people in Illinois reveal that mass disparities are still rampant, and are racialized.

Trans people experience difficulties accessing healthcare, housing, economic stability, and more, and are excluded from wealth-building opportunities and leadership pipelines.

Trans-led organizations know what trans people need, and are well positioned to lead peer-to-peer outreach efforts to connect the most marginalized in the community with life-saving and affirming resources.

Trans people don't live single issue lives, so investing in work that is focused on trans health and empowerment leads to improvements across communities and sectors: if trans people benefit, so does everybody else.

Advocates for trans people are being labeled 'domestic extremists' by the federal administration: organizations need additional layers of support and security just to operate right now.

As hospitals and other medical providers reduce services in response to political pressure, trans-led and serving organizations need urgent funding to meet the moment by expanding services and advocacy.

Woods Fund Chicago was proud to contribute to the Illinois Pride Connect hotline this summer, which was developed in collaboration with BSA and a host of local organizations and offers legal advice for LGBTQ+ callers on issues ranging from discrimination, to healthcare, to benefits access.

As the briefing above reinforces, no identity is siloed. This means both that our work must be intersectional, with consciousness of racialized disparities, but also that building infrastructure to support and protect trans people and their freedom supports and protects freedom more broadly. We look forward to continued opportunities to support trans-led organizing.

Debbie Southorn joins the Woods Fund Chicago team as a program officer after most recently serving as a co-director for the national youth & student anti-war organization, Dissenters. For more than a decade, she’s organized abolitionist campaigns and projects in Chicago with a focus on developing the leadership of BIPOC and working class young people. As an organizer with American Friends Service Committee she coordinated the #NoCopAcademy campaign to stop the city from building a new police training facility on the West Side and invest in Black youth and communities instead. She’s organized with students and youth to get police out of schools, to win investments in public mental health, to cut contracts with weapons companies, to end surveillance programs, and to divest from policing, war, and militarism.

To Honor Miss Major, We Fight for the Trans and Queer Spaces She Built

Why We’re Reading It: As queer communities across the country grieve the death of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, two close collaborators eulogize the Chicago-born trans activist. Initially known as a survivor of the 1969 Stonewall riot, Miss Major was fiercely intersectional, becoming a public voice for decriminalizing sex work, centering trans rights, and prison abolition — and the piece honors her as a mother figure and mentor. A broader obituary appeared in Them, but it’s the Truthout piece that offers a call to action: “Major never abandoned the struggle against fascism, which is to say, the fight to free us all. In these days between, after Major has left her body, we might stay in sadness because anything else feels impossible. Yet the way to honor Major is to keep hammering holes in the walls that confine us, and to expand the trans and queer spaces she built.”

Truthout // Read now

They Came for Our Neighbors. We Showed Up.

Why We’re Reading It: Chicago organizer Kelly Hayes offers a deep dive into a rapid response action in Rogers Park. “We are taking these actions to defend our neighbors, the sanctity of our values, and the character of Chicagoland,” she writes. “This is a place where immigrants are loved, needed, and appreciated, and we will not give up members of our beloved communities without a fight.”

Organizing My Thoughts // Read now

Further reading: a recent piece in NY Magazine, “Inside the Chicago Resistance Against Trump and ICE” covers rapid response efforts across the city, lifting up the work of Latino Union of Chicago’s “Adopt a Day Laborer” corners and ICIRR’s family support hotlines.

Chicago Faith Leaders on Leading in a Time of ICE and Border Patrol Arrests, Raids

Why We’re Listening: WBEZ interviewed a panel of local faith leaders, including Reverend Ciera Bates Chamberlain, executive director of grantee partner Live Free Illinois, on responding to ICE. The leaders preached unity and resistance: “We have to go out and get our people and bring them with us,” says Chamberlain. In a particularly potent exchange, Imam Tariq El-Amin clarifies a religious position:

Sasha Ann Simons: So when [legality and morality] are at odds, that must be a hard place for a faith leader to stand — or is it?

El-Amin: “No, actually, it’s a very easy place for a faith leader to stand, because we’re always on the side of humanity. We’re always on the side of what is moral. And our nation has a long history of being on the wrong side of morality.”

WBEZ // Listen now