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    • The Catalyst Fund: Resources for Women of Color in Reproductive Justice
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The Catalyst Fund offers funders the opportunity to support women of color-led reproductive justice organizations and projects through a fund that will match their contributions, dollar for dollar, and increase the strategic impact of their grantmaking. Created by the Women of Color Working Group of the Funders Network on Population, Reproductive Health and Rights and seeded by the Ford and Public Welfare Foundations, Catalyst supports a sector of women that has the greatest reproductive health need but receives the least amount of funding support.

Women of color in the U.S. experience disproportionately high rates of reproductive health problems and challenges to their reproductive rights. Women of color-led organizations have been essential to some of the most important reproductive rights victories of the past decade. Their powerful new vision of reproductive justice is addressing the needs of women and girls who suffer the greatest reproductive health disparities, from the right to bear and raise healthy children in intact families to the right to terminate a pregnancy, and is engaging a new, increasingly diverse generation of young leaders.

 
Despite this track record of success, women of color-led reproductive justice work is underfunded. According to Funders Network data, in 2006 only nine percent of the $67 million Network members granted in the U.S. went to organization serving women of color, and an even smaller fraction of that to women of color-led organizations. Tides' research reveals that at the national level, in 2005, the combined budgets of the four largest white-led reproductive rights organizations total nearly $100 million, while the combined budgets of their four women of color-led counterparts total less than $2 million. At the state level, the picture is not much better.

The Women of Color Working Group believes that organizations led by those women most impacted by reproductive health disparities have the expertise to create solutions and policies that best address their community needs. It also believes that  the persistent shortage of funding to an entire sector of women is weakening the larger movement for reproductive freedom and the ability of all women in the US to secure their reproductive rights. Catalyst gives funders an opportunity to reverse this trend. Click on the links above, to learn more.