Through our Collective Grants, our members invest in three priority areas that have been identified by the broader WA Women’s Foundation community and chosen from the year’s themes. While priorities change year-to-year, our themes rotate annually on a two-year cycle. The themes are as follows:
Year 1 (starting the 2022 grant cycle)
- Law, Justice & Incarceration
- Housing & Hunger
- Arts & Community Culture
Year 2 (starting the 2023 grant cycle)
- Healthcare
- Climate & Agricultural Justice
- Education
The Collective Grants are made on an annual basis. The application process begins with an online Letter of Inquiry (LOI), which opens in October of each year after our priorities have been announced. Funding decisions are made and announced each June. Organizations selected for a WA Women’s Collective Grant Awards will be provided with a Letter of Understanding (LOU) that outlines the relationship between the foundation and the grantee.
Narrative Questions
This year, we ask nonprofit organizations to answer the following questions in their LOI:
- How does your organization serve communities affected by inequity due to race and/or gender identity?
- How is your organization accountable to the community being served?
- Describe how your organization addresses systemic gender and/or racial inequities in one of the following priorities:
- School to Prison Pipeline: Focusing on the relationship between our education system and our justice system, and the trend of young adults being funneled into detention, creating a pipeline from school to jail.
- Mental Health & Housing: Focusing on the intersection of mental health and housing and supporting organizations that address the many ways trauma and mental health can create additional challenges and unique needs in housing.
- Community Cultural Preservation: Investing in systemically under-resourced communities by supporting the preservation of language, stories, performing arts, sites, crafts, relationships to land, forms of subsistence, and other cultural traditions.
- Share a story of your mission in action – a time when your organization was able to reduce disparities and/or achieve more equitable outcomes.
We do not dictate any word counts throughout this LOI, but we encourage brevity and succinctness. We recommend keeping each narrative answer to under 250 words.
Advocacy Grant
We have come to understand that systemic transformation is only possible with a wider coalition of voices demanding change. For this reason, we offer a grant to organizations that work in advocacy within each of our year’s chosen priorities. Organizations may opt into consideration for our Advocacy Grant while applying for the Collective Grants on the LOI form.
Women & Girls Grant
At Washington Women’s Foundation, one of our cherished values is to elevate and amplify the power of all who identify as women. Supported by the WFA Fund for Women, we offer the Women & Girls Grant to organizations and programs focused on women and girls within the year’s chosen priorities. Organizations may opt into consideration for our Women & Girls Grant while applying for the Collective Grant on the LOI form.