Ten years ago, Amina Doherty was sitting around a kitchen table — “like all amazing things that come from Black women, this came from kitchen table conversations,” Doherty says — with her friends Hakima Abbas and Tynesha McHarris. They’d all worked in and around philanthropy for years, and were frustrated, to say the least, with the lack of funding accessible to the Black feminist movements they saw making systemic change around the world. 

“What would it look like for a fund to be led by and for Black women?” they asked each other. “We just had a real, strong sense that the kind of political organizing and activism that was being led by Black feminists was just not being resourced,” Doherty says. (Spoiler: Abbas is leading research now that’s found that around 0.1 percent of philanthropic money globally goes to Black feminist-led organizations.)

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