Annual Report
2021
Rooted in Resistance
A few words from our
Executive Director and Development Director
Coming together as Executive Director and Development Director, we were eager to take on new challenges, weaving together new energies with an aligned vision for co-creating a strategic design that resources the growth and sustainability of our regional movement.
As visionaries, we are grateful to be a part of a team of multi-generational Black Women with whom we have been able to forge relationships in spite of being physically limited to a number of virtual platforms and emails. Our small team of ethnically diverse of Black women has been working alongside a global network of Black Women, Femmes, Girls and Gender Diverse Human Rights advocates, community and regional organizers, educators, migrants, scholars, historians, storytellers, health workers with lived experiences. Together we share a vision of transforming the local and regional social and political infrastructures impacting the lives of Black Communities across the Black Diaspora of the Americas. Over the past year we shared transitions, grief, and impotence. We have collectively acknowledged the depth of racial and gender inequalities that persists in the world. We have also shared laughter, compassion, hope, and vibrant Black joy!
We have literally AfroResisted!
Despite the challenges we have faced as a growing organization, Black communities and unity have been at the forefront of our victories this year, making it possible for us to maximize the life-sustaining work, of co-creating solutions that support a locally-led change to accelerate and strengthen human rights- racial and gender justice, quality education, health, mobility and greater opportunity for Black Women, Femmes, and Girls in the region. The rich relationships we have cultivated as a team have served to root us in purpose and collective development in order to uproot systems of oppression and cultivate systems grounded in community accountability, solidarity, and self-determination for all Black people to thrive.
This report highlights AfroResistance’s impact over the last year that your generous support made possible. Our intentions have been clear throughout, for Girls and Women to be centered during and after the pandemic as champions of their lives, families, territories, and to fully participate in decision-making, from the personal to the political spaces they occupy.
We do so by addressing gaps in access to healthcare, housing, security, migration, incarceration, as well as equipping the Black community with spaces to gather, organize, strategize, unite, heal and advocate the resources they need to guarantee full civic participation and Human Rights protection. By advocating on a regional level and incorporating a language justice framework in all of the work we do, Black migration is a central part of our unifying efforts amongst individuals and communities that have been directly impacted and also strategically organizing to ensure that recovering from past and the current crisis takes into account all of the intersecting multigenerational needs. This report also details how AfroResistance strengthened our International Solidarity work with partner organizations through our continued investment in locally led initiatives in Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, Haiti and the United States, supporting activists to break down barriers to Girls’ and Women’s access to education, and a full range of resources in their communities. Our commitment to centering Blackness in our organizing and advocacy for human rights means investing in programs that challenge how racial discrimination prevents Black Women and Girls from accessing social, political, and economic conditions that allow them to live with the full dignity, safety, and joy that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees to all human beings. This is why we reaffirm that it takes the power of us to make the necessary shifts to continue prioritizing Black communities, and particularly Black Women and Girls. As leadership we are honored to be at this exact moment of history, designing and implementing new innovative programs, resourcing funds for Black Women in the region and helping to transform Democracy in the Americas, unifying and organizing Black people around Human Rights Issues impacting people of African Descent, for us to thrive. We cannot help but look ahead with full conviction that we are positioned to continue living our organizational mission in a vibrant and impactful way, in a way that will continue inspiring and collectively contributing to the growth of our communities and the world.
Janvieve Williams Comrie
Executive Director
&
Flor Montero
Development Director
Help us by donating
WHERE WE WORK
AfroResistance centers on the Black Diaspora from the Latin American and the Caribbean region.
We work in the Americas, understood as the region that includes all countries in North, Central, South America, and the Caribbean Islands regardless of the language spoken.
#Soyporquesomos
"It is a commitment to life, dignity, justice, and a collective struggle for a better life.
– Francia Marquez
AfroResistance is guided by the following Principles
Language Justice as an essential tool for Liberation
Black Unity in the Americas
Gender Analysis that centers Black Trans Women and Girls
Racial Justice that centers Blackness
Reproductive Justice as a human right
Migration that honors Black peoples movement regardless of ‘status’
Economic Justice grounded in equity of wealth
What we do
To achieve our mission, we harness collective power through:
Organizing and Advocacy
We ACTIVATE multigenerational community-specific change by providing analysis and creating unique organizing and mobilization strategies through grassroots issue-based campaigns in the Americas centered on Black Women, Femmes and Girls from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Human Rights and Civic Engagement
We DELIVER popular education resources for Human Rights and Civic Engagement from a Black Feminist perspective, in an effort to invest in the leadership development of Black communities and support their growth as decision-makers to leverage their economic resources.
Capacity Building
Through our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consultancies, AfroResistance also LEAD partners and individual allies in both individual, organizational and institutional capacities that FRAME and IDENTIFY OPPORTUNITIES that can advance collective priorities, racial, gender and economic justice and BUILD equitable practices and societies.
International Solidarity
We strategically COLLABORATE across issues, and build transnational collaborations between regional partners and allies uplifting locally-led change to build an intentional, international, and transformative political movement for racial justice, language justice and human rights in the Americas.
Resourcing Resistance
Organizational Growth
The year 2021 was both historical and impactful in the 18 years of AfroResistance for our region and the movement we are building, driven by the leadership of multi-generational Black Women from the Americas.
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We expanded our team with a focus on racial justice, gender equity, and Liberation.
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In 2021, we went from being a mainly volunteer-run organization to a staffed team of 8 women, weaving of our lived experiences and collective skills to support our mission in the co-creation of our strategic direction.
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We are resourcing our movement and in 2021 welcomed our Program Director, Development Director, Language Justice Coordinator, Race, Gender & Migration Coordinator, and Communications Coordinator.
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We formed a Black Language Justice League: a group of professional interpreters and translators who are passionate about helping organizations that strive for racial justice and Liberation to create multilingual spaces where every voice feels and is represented and heard.
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Our team of Black interpreters is spread throughout the Americas, some of the countries where they are located and represent are Haiti, Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile, Dominican Republic, France, Colombia, Panama, Spain and the United States.
PROGRAMS & ADVOCACY
The goal of our programming is to advance collective priorities and build equitable practices, and societies. We provide African descendants language and frameworks to identify abuses that are faced not just as racial and unjust practices at the individual level, but also as Human Rights violations. Through our programs we seek to create Black-centered organizing and mobilization strategies that are transformational and support AfroResistance’s mission to create collaborations that drive forward transformational change by nurturing:
Safe and inclusive multilingual and multigenerational spaces that unify and uplift power, and the radical imagination of Afrodescendants. Reflective analysis that supports learning and civic engagement. Space and time for connecting, celebrating, dreaming, healing and organizing together. Responsive, flexible, racial and culturally inclusive processes. The economic, political and collective capacity of Black Girls and Women.
Poderosxs Fellowship
The Poderoxas Fellowship is a transformational mentorship process for self-identified Black Women, Femmes, and Girls survivors of state violence, that are powerful social innovators, and out-of-the-box radical thinkers that seek to shift, reach and deepen their organizing/activism in regard to Power and its impact on Black Women, their families beyond their own communities and countries of origin.
2021 Fellows
Our two fellows, Mirtes and Sara, have both received accompaniment from local organizers and AfroResistance in their leadership development, healing and mental health support, as well as political education. In partnership with our longstanding partner organization Grupo Curumim Gestação e Parto in Brazil and Proceso de Comunidades Negras en Colombia, we will continue working with our fellows Mirtes and Sara, both Black state violence and incarceration survivors, currently in the second phase of their fellowship.
As a former Domestic Worker, as a Poderosa fellow, this alliance between AfroResistance and Grupo Curumim has helped me grow professionally since it is a different field for me. It has helped me grow as a person, as I receive collective support and relevant information for my life. I have had access to topics and resources that I did not know and language that speaks to the racial injustice of what I lived and what I am currently experiencing. The knowledge that I received and carry, I am passing on to people, girls in my community.
-Mirtes Renata
(Fellow in partnership with Grupo Curumim, Brazil)
“From the first moment in which I walked next to these women who radiated love, my feelings were awakened in such a way that I felt and still feel that they are part of the healing process. The connection to my healing is so arduous, that I have been on this journey for many years and that was reinforced with the process of persecution by the armed groups and by the Colombian state. My experience with AfroResistance has been incredible and transformative. Being able to feel how positive energies play through different difficulties has been very enriching for me.
-Sara Valencia Quiñones
Proceso de Comunidades Negras
Language Justice
AfroResistance strongly believes in the fundamental right any individual has to access and share information in the language they feel most comfortable within any given context. We are especially committed to creating access for the Black and Black indigenous communities of the region, so they can fully participate in, and lead the spaces they are immersed in.
We expanded access to language justice with the formation of our Language Justice League. Through the League, we intentionally deliver communication access within our virtual webinars, events, and partnerships, by providing multiple languages for interpretations, and translations and offering our services to a diverse array of clients throughout the region. As part of our mission, we provide movement support through our language services to other organizations organizing for language Justice because we are dedicated to the success of organizations, institutions, and movements that promote human rights and social justice on the ground and around the world.
AfroResistance aims to support and nurture movements and organizations to make more strategic and more impact reaching change, through aligning their external practices with their internal values, and by deploying a gender and racial justice lens to effectively plan and integrate an intentional process to create spaces that align with the needs of the communities you seek to support and where every voice feels represented and heard.
Offerings
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Simultaneous and consecutive interpretation for meetings, events, and gatherings
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Translation of documents
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Language justice consulting for events and organizations
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Training for organizations new to language justice interpreting
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Lead communication and management of interpreters
Our organization aims to promote and advocate for disaggregated data in the region, with a race and gender lens, especially on the impact on health, migration and incarceration. We solidified and expanded the vision of our organization, by integrating a Language Justice framework, that recognizes and represents the languages of the region, central to our strategies and program development through solid strategic partnerships with organizations in Colombia and Brazil that host our regional Poderosxs Fellows.
In 2021 with the development of our Language Justice League, a group of Black interpreters and translators working from different countries in the region who are passionate about helping organizations that strive for racial justice and liberation to create multilingual spaces where every voice feels represented and heard we have been able to reach over 24,000 people throughout the Americas, including our client base and audience.
This work entails bringing together a broad range of community participants who are able to identify the issues within their sphere of influence to enhance the capacity of base-building organizations that work with the Latine and Caribbean community. These are people of African descent seeking to support their community development and advocacy work. We have had so many victories in 2021 alone, we want to keep fighting against human rights violations and all issues that prevent low-income black people in the Americas from thriving. Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, English, Kreole, French, Sign Language (ASL)
Regional Black Migration Working Group
In 2021, in the height of the pandemic, we launched our monthly regional migration working group, consisting of a series of virtual zoom calls streamed on our social platforms, offering firsthand experiences from Black migrants, their families, and communities at the intersection of global health access, migration policies, access to education. Over one year ago we were preparing for our first regional migration call, and this last year alone we have formed a Regional Migration Network and together solidified our Black Regional Migration Working Group with women and gender expansive folk from different countries in the region such as Guyana, Guatemala, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua and Haiti.
These calls served as a space for gathering to visibilize the impacts Covid- 19 as a Global Health Pandemic, of Black migrants of many identities that has activated hundreds of supporters and volunteers throughout the region. The network, which is made up of educators, activists, migrants, and different allied partners and organizations in the region, brings together Black Human Rights advocates, immigrant-led, humanitarian, environmental, faith groups and leaders, and other Black civil society groups to share and learn about the current realities in different countries in order to strategize, design and implement effective actions, and strategies that can then influence the realities Black migrants face throughout the Americas, with a Race and Gender perspective.
In a shift to prioritize the current health crisis in the Americas, AfroResistance joined the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of over 80 organizations and networks, committed to working together for a vaccine available free of charge to everyone, everywhere. AfroResistance worked with regional partners in Latin America and the United States to conduct research on how the pandemic has affected Black communities' access to the vaccine in countries through the Americas.
Financials
We are grateful to our believers and community of supporters that rooted themselves and their communities in committing to leverage our mission and collective movement building for gender, racial, economic, and reproductive justice in the region.
Through grassroots and conventional fundraising efforts, we were able to raise over $150K in new funds and in the process build strategic partnerships that have contributed to how we solidify and expand the vision of our organization. Our member's and funders' contributions have been crucial to the success of our programs, and our language justice work, where language becomes a bridge to community building. These multilingual spaces give each of us the freedom to bring our whole selves and help us sustain our programs and partnerships to continue creating necessary systemic changes that allow Black women, femmes, and Girls— like our fellows Mirtes and Sara who have been impacted by state violence—to develop programs in their communities, and form regional coalitions of women who have been incarcerated and demanding justice for their involvement in the defense of their reproductive economic and territorial rights, to live with dignity, security, happiness and develop to their full capacity. Through our partnerships with Proceso de Comunidades Negras and Curumim we have been able to support the economic self-determination, decision-making, and power to access that shape resource use and mobilization, build networks amongst previously incarcerated women in Colombia, Brazil, and the region as well as contribute to the advancement of analysis, tools and continuous formation strengthening the political participation of our fellows.
The financial investment and support to AfroResistance will strengthen our International Solidarity regional migration coalition and the creation of more spaces where Black grassroots activists and community members from different countries of the region come together to share/learn and strategize regionally and internationally beyond borders on issues impacting Black communities.
In a collective effort, we have maximized resources to both sustain and strengthen our programs and partnerships in order to continue creating necessary systemic changes that leverage locally-led change and empower Women, Femmes, and Girls in the core areas of Human Rights protection, reproductive and gender justice, quality education, freedom from violence, economic self-sufficiency, and support.
We are proud that we have been able to nurture multi-generational safe and inclusive spaces where the voices of Black Women, Femmes, and Girls are reflective of their individual experiences in their communities, their families, and their courageousness in being at the front of resistance.
We are proud that we have been able to nurture multi-generational safe and inclusive spaces where the voices of Black Women, Femmes, and Girls are reflective of their individual experiences in their communities, their families, and their courageousness in being at the front of resistance.
In 2021, through our Black Women and Girls Fund, we fundraised over $25,000.00, and have successfully distributed small grants directly to Women, Femmes, and Girls experiencing severe financial need across the region, especially due to COVID19. Most of the grantees are undocumented women and girls, daughters of incarcerated women, sex workers, and involved in supporting projects for building housing for trans women throughout the Americas. The range of the grant recipients throughout the Americas was far and wide, from rural to urban, from Atlantic to Pacific. The countries our grant recipients have been from include: Peru, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Venezuela to the United States.
“I really appreciate the donation. Right now, I am managing to resolve dental issues and physical therapy for my hands.”
- Yama, Ecuador
“Thank you for the funds, we needed help urgently. I am only 13 and it is only my mother and I. This is the only fund that helped us. Western Union did not want to give me the money. Thank you for working with my mother to make it happen”.
-Nancy and Nohaly, Peru
Launching a new Poderosxs Cohort.
We will continue to work with community-based partners and individual allies in both individual, organizational and institutional capacities that help frame and identify opportunities for changes that can advance collective priorities and to build equitable practices and societies. By doing so we can provide African descendants language and frameworks to identify abuses that are faced not just as individual racial and unjust practices, but also as human rights violations linked to the skills and strategies needed to combat them.
Although language is an essential tool that shapes people's identities and experiences, as well as the way in which they are able to move in the world, it is often an afterthought in the way in which language is used as a tool of power to shape the realities of specific groups. We aim to prioritize a language justice framework to create diverse and inclusive spaces that honor all the individuals involved. We will extend our social justice capacity-building offerings for organizations and individuals.
ANNUAL REACH
More than 200 million people identify themselves as Black in the American continent, constituting about 1 in 3 or 133 million people living in the Latin American and Caribbean region today.
Migration Calls, Vaccine calls and investigation, Semana Miguel, and all events we held:
1178
participants
18047
Reach
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18577
Reach
8765
Total Followers
15378
Total Subscribers
Female
Femme
85
%
AfroResistance
Believers
Black women-led organizations in the US do not receive the kind of tangible support for organizations, including funding, necessary to scale up, sustain, and boost the movement’s impact in the long term.
For those reasons, we are appreciative of those that believe in our mission and the work that we do.
Partners
2021 Clients
Black Feminist Fund
Black Alliance for Peace
Families for Freedom
Race Forward
California Latinas for Reproductive Justice
Children's Rights Innovation Fund
Catolicas por el Derecho a Decidir, Colombia (International)
International Planned Parenthood Federation-Western Hemisphere (International)
Pro Familia, Colombia (International)
Women's Foundation California
