Liberation Ventures Moves $3.4M to the Black Reparations Movement

9 min readMar 29, 2024

Liberation Ventures is thrilled to announce our third round of grantmaking: $3.4M to support 44 incredible organizations building the power to win comprehensive reparations for Black Americans. This includes renewals to organizations in our first and second rounds of grantmaking, as well as new investments.

Liberation Ventures believes in an expansive reparations movement — where Black people are centered, all unique Black experiences are embraced with abundance, and all people across race can see themselves in the work of racial repair. Our grantmaking is guided by our organizational beliefs, which apply to all aspects of how we operate as an organization. Read our Grantmaking FAQs to learn more about our grantmaking process, and how our organizational beliefs are embedded throughout.

Our grantmaking process changed in a few key ways this year. First, prior to starting the process, we surveyed our movement partners and asked them to rank the most important criteria we should use when making grant decisions. Amidst nine potential criteria, three rose to the top, described here. In addition, while the bulk of our grant dollars are deployed in Q1, this year we made a shift to a rolling grantmaking process throughout the year. That means that a few more movement partners may be added to this list between now and June. In July, we will begin the process for 2025 grantmaking.

By The Numbers

This round, roughly 40% of our grantmaking went to national organizations (e.g., groups focused on federal reparations, groups with several chapters across the country, and/or groups without a specific geographic focus). 20% went to the US South, another 20% went to the US West, and the remaining 20% went to the Northeast and Midwest. 95% are Black-led, and over 60% are led by women or gender non-conforming folks.

Our Grantmaking Strategy

Liberation Ventures is currently in the process of co-creating a 10-year investment strategy called the Reparations Grantmaking Blueprint. This Blueprint is modeled off of strategies developed by field catalysts in other movements, such as Freedom To Marry’s Roadmap To Victory and the 8th Amendment Project’s field-wide strategy. Since we began development of the Blueprint in July 2023, we’ve also seen other field catalysts publish similar work, such as the Economic Security Project’s Guaranteed Income Blueprint.

At Liberation Ventures, we don’t do anything alone. We are co-creating the Blueprint with a steering committee of six Black women in the reparations movement: Nicole Carty (Get Free), Dr. Cheryl Grills (CA Reparations Taskforce), Robin Rue (First Repair), Nkechi Taifa (Reparations Education Project), Collette Watson (Media 2070), and Aria Florant (Liberation Ventures). The Blueprint research process includes synthesizing movement leaders’ lived experience, learning from case studies of other movements, deep desk research on effective tactics, building a model to identify high priority cities and states, conducting in-depth audience research, interviewing 50+ experts, and more. Over the course of the Blueprint development process, we are engaging all of LV’s movement partners, advisors, and other partners for input and feedback. We want everyone’s fingerprints on it. (Note: the five committee members outside of Liberation Ventures are guiding the investment strategy development, but do not make individual grant decisions).

The Blueprint will articulate the reparations movement’s high level vision, the milestones we aim to hit along the way, the “pillars” or categories of work that will be needed in order to hit those milestones, and the specific activities the movement needs resourced. It will visibilize all the different kinds of work that will be necessary across the movement in order to achieve our goals. LV’s grantmaking decisions will be aligned to the Blueprint once it is created, and LV also hopes to use it as a tool to encourage other, larger funders to make investments in the movement in ways that reflect movement leaders’ priorities. You can read more about the Blueprint development process here.

Our Blueprint work to date has included articulating a 10-year goal, identifying strategic pillars, and prioritizing them — identifying both what we will focus on in the next 10 years, and what we will not. We are now in the process of researching and weighing the tradeoffs between potential focus areas and activities within each pillar, and we aim to finish the Blueprint by summer 2025. However, we are not waiting until then to ensure our grantmaking is aligned to the strategic pillars. Our third round of grantmaking reflects those priorities while also building on learnings from our first and second grantmaking rounds. This means we have doubled down in three core areas:

State and Local Reparations: Advancing state and local reparations efforts that build national momentum
Mass Movement: At-scale grassroots organizing to make reparations a public and political priority — and build power in the process
Narrative Change: Changing hearts and minds to ensure reparations is understood as a logical, feasible, inevitable solution

State & Local Reparations

As part of the Blueprint process, we learned from case studies on transformative change at home and abroad: marriage equality, universal health care, marijuana legalization, abortion, and more. A clear pattern stands out: successful movements build momentum at the state level in order to make a federal win not only possible, but durable. Understanding — and funding — high impact reparations efforts at the state and local level that can build on each other is critical to winning at the federal level.

State and local efforts have accelerated in recent years. Some are in the early community engagement or initial advocacy stages, while others have led to reparations policy being passed and implemented. The Blueprint Steering Committee identified seven primary phases of a state or local level reparations effort, described in the graphic below.

Funding needs differ depending on the stage of each local or state-level effort. In the early stages, investment is necessary to fuel the organizing, advocacy, and campaigns that pressure governments to create task forces that are responsive to communities. Reparations champions in government also often need advice on how to develop political will inside a legislative body (they are often supported by our movement partner, First Repair). Once task forces are established, they require technical assistance to inform research on specific harms as well as the design of reparations policy recommendations. This technical assistance often takes the form of research completed by local academic institutions to develop a harm report (such as our movement partner, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, who is supporting the Boston reparations task force), community engagement surveys to understand what Black communities want in a reparations policy portfolio, and more. After task forces publish their recommendations, community organizations must work with legislators to turn those recommendations into policy, and build the power to pass that policy — requiring more organizing, public opinion polling and narrative/message testing to develop an effective communications strategy, and more.

This year, California is a strategic priority for LV. As the first state to establish a Reparations Task Force, develop a harm report, and design policy proposals, the success of California has the potential to catalyze other state efforts across the country. We’re excited to support the anchor organizations of the Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation, and Truth (co-led by The California Black Power Network, Equal Justice Society, and six former members of the California Reparations Task Force) as well as a number of other organizations advancing reparations work in California, including Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiatives (BARHII), KQED, and Nikkei Progressives.

In addition, in December 2023, New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul established a commission to study reparations. The commissioners have been chosen, and will begin their work immediately. Two of LV’s movement partners — Get Free and BLIS Collective — are anchor organizations in the New Yorkers for Reparations Coalition. Across the river, we’re thrilled to support the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, which is convening a Reparations Council to conduct research, develop proposals, and put pressure on the state legislature to act.

Finally, local reparations advocacy campaigns also continue to gain steam. As of December 2023, FirstRepair recorded at least 76 unique local reparations efforts across the country. This year, we’re excited to support organizing efforts in Palm Springs, Kansas City, Atlanta/Fulton County, Tulsa, and Brownsville, among others.

Mass movement

Grassroots organizing on a mass scale is essential to make reparations a public and political priority, from the local to the federal levels. Historic and contemporary social movements — including abolition, Civil Rights, and marriage equality — have succeeded by translating people power into narrative and political power. In order to build and maintain this power, we need numbers, and we need our movements to be equipped with frameworks for creating lasting social change.

Organizations like Get Free are building the infrastructure that will bring more people — especially young people — into the movement through campaigns for repair across the country. Others, like Reparations United, are leading campaigns to leverage the collective power of the Black electorate to demand action on reparations. Equity and Transformation is building a base committed to repairing the harm of the War on Drugs.

Narrative Change

To win reparations, we must tell a new story to the country about what reparations are, who they are for, and why they matter. To date, the narrative about reparations has been stuck in the past and too narrowly focused on cash payments at the federal level. We know that in reality, reparations are about the future; a comprehensive portfolio of financial and non-financial policy to build the thriving, just multiracial democracy that all of us deserve. To win reparations policy that will stick, we know we must uproot anti-Blackness from our mental models and cultural models along the way. This has been a core focus of LV’s work, particularly with the launch of the Reparations Narrative Lab to support organizers, researchers, and artists to build narrative power and increase public support for reparations.

This year, we’re excited to support a range of organizations doing important narrative change work. Kinfolk and the (Un)known Project are memorializing and telling the stories of Black people, in particular of those enslaved and those communities who have been erased in historical storytelling. Dr. Marcus Hunter’s Radical Reparations, Culture.House, and Color Farm Media are bringing conversations about reparations to new audiences through books and documentary films. Intelligent Mischief is creating in-person and digital experiences that enable people to imagine the world on the other side of reparations. Groups like the Reparation Education Project and the National Black Cultural Information Trust are creating spaces to educate more and more people on the issue. Media 2070 is documenting the media’s role in entrenching anti-Black narratives, working toward repair in our media ecosystems, and driving more accurate coverage of the reparations movement.

Finally, we also made a few investments this year geared toward experimenting with new avenues to bring repair into mainstream dialogue at the federal level. We believe that the work outlined above — to advance state and local reparations, change narratives, and build a mass movement — will be essential to laying the groundwork for long-lasting federal reparations policy. While we lay that groundwork, we can also experiment with new avenues to advance federal legislation on repair, which we believe will help shift the narrative on reparations from one of impossibility to one of possibility.

This work includes Marijuana Justice, which is advancing reparative policies tailored to the war on drugs as marijuana is legalized across the country, and the Black Veterans Project, which works to expose and redress the discrimination of Black veterans in the military. We’re also thrilled to support Dr. Margaret Burnham and the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) to build a campaign for the descendants of victims of race-based lynching and other historical homicidal racial violence, building from her recently published book, By Hands Now Known.

Here’s the full list of organizations and projects we’re supporting:

New Organizations

Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiatives (BARHII)

Black Liberation Indigenous Sovereignty (BLIS) Collective

California Black Power Network

400+ Years [CA Task Force harm documentary, Dr. Cheryl Grills]

Culture.House

Descendants of Enslaved Communities — UVA

Equal Justice Society

Federal lynching redress legislation [Dr. Margaret Burnham]

The GRO Fund

Indebted: Race and Debt in America [Maurice Weeks]