2017-2023 Gender Justice Grantee Partners
Black Health New Mexico (Central and Northern NM)
Black Health New Mexico (BHNM) focuses on elevating the voices and thought leadership of Black women in the reproductive justice and maternal health policy space through intergenerational community building for Black and BIPOC women. BHNM support Black healers and thought leaders through contract work and employment opportunities. They stand as the lead Black women led organization in New Mexico focused on health equity and maternal health outcomes. Their programs address several areas of reproductive justice over the life course including: food justice, mental health, racial justice, addressing anti-black racism, maternal health and BIPOC thought leadership development and elevation in policy design and implementation. BHNM engages in coalition building across New Mexico’s most impacted BIPOC communities, including their co-leadership of New Mexico’s Black and Indigenous Maternal Health Policy Coalition.
Breath of My Heart Birthplace (Serves Rio Arriba and Santa Fe Counties)
Breath of My Heart Birthplace (BMH) is a community midwifery clinic located in Española that works to improve access to quality prenatal care, and improve maternal and infant health outcomes in the rural communities of northern New Mexico, by serving families through a high-quality, culturally-appropriate midwifery model of care. BMH offers a no-cost walk-in prenatal clinic designed to make midwifery accessible for pregnant people and families in the Valley. Their programming focuses on serving those most impacted by health disparities and barriers to healthcare access, with special attention on the needs of young parents, Native Americans, immigrants, LGBTQ, and low-income families.
Encuentro (Serves Bernalillo County)
Encuentro’s mission is to transform New Mexico into a thriving community for all residents by engaging with Latino immigrant families in educational opportunities that build skills for economic and social justice. The Trabajadoras del Hogar program seeks to address the challenges of high job turnover, low wages, few to no benefits, and extremely limited training faced by workers, while also building capacity and strengthening NM’s workforce in one of its leading growth industries. Home health workers are the second fastest growing occupation in NM, yet training is extremely limited, especially for lower-income Spanish-speaking women who represent many in the home healthcare field.
Healing Circle Wellness Center (Serves San Juan and McKinley Counties)
Located in Shiprock, the mission of the Healing Circle is to meet in “Circle” as Sisters/Women to support one another and celebrate unique gifts, talents, and experiences. To mentor Sisters means to walk the path of self-sufficiency, self-awareness, and self-leadership for a positive community and a better future. The Center offers support groups and workshops, such as AA, Natives in Sobriety, Sisters In Circle support groups, skill building workshops, and traditional teachings from the Navajo Wellness Model. The Sisters In Circle are an intricate part of programs and host events for the community Sisters, such as an Annual Celebration of Women, the Sisters Retreat, as well as planning and strategizing sessions and support groups.
Southern New Mexico Wellness Alliance (Serves Otero and Lincoln Counties)
The Otero and Lincoln Counties’ Sexual Assault and Nurse Examiner (SANE) goal is to provide outreach and improved services to the rural communities served by their program. The geographical area covered by Southern New Mexico Wellness Alliance’s SANE program is substantially large, encompassing nearly 12,000 square miles. As a part of this goal, the Alliance provides services to underrepresented communities with low income populations such as Capitan and Carrizozo and conducts outreach to communities with extreme gender inequities, such as in Chaparral, and communities populated by mostly minorities such as Hondo and Tularosa. Within these communities, the Alliance presents at schools and other public forums and provide information about sexual assault, gender difference, sexual safety, body issues, safe dating practices, and gender roles. In addition, the Alliance initiates support groups for sexual assault survivors within the counties and communities served.
Tewa Women United (Serves six Tewa Speaking Pueblos in Rio Arriba and Northern Santa Fe Counties)
Tewa Women United (TWU) is an inter-tribal, multi-cultural, multi-racial, intergenerational collective of women who reside in the Tewa Pueblo homelands of northern New Mexico. Every day Native women and girls are centered in TWU’s work to challenge domination and oppression, addressing the root causes of violence, health, and social justice disparities. TWU’s work is to end all forms of domination and exploitation, which is rooted to violence against women and girls and our Mother Earth. Activities will achieve their goal of increasing gender equity and healing through cultural connectedness among Native girls and boys and benefit them by providing leadership opportunities and experiences that deepen their cultural identity and sense of place and belonging.
Youth Research and Resource Center (Serves Doña Ana County) (Recipients 2017-2021)
The State of New Mexico continues to experience significant issues with the high levels of trauma sustained by its female juvenile justice population. Girls in Doña Ana County are negatively impacted by poverty, gang involvement, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, lack of education, and sex trafficking. With few programs being available to provide necessary services to girls in the justice system, Youth Research and Resource Center aims to craft a local juvenile justice system that proves itself responsive to girls’ needs, increase gender-responsive programming for girls, and create a coordinated effort among agencies that currently provide therapeutic and prevention services exclusively to girls.
Bold Futures (Serves Statewide)
Bold Futures New Mexico (BFNM) engages in healing justice work through a gendered lens with LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, Latine, and people of color community leaders from across the state. They work through place-based organizing and public education, policy change, culture shift, leadership development and research. Bold Futures builds their work at the intersection of people’s identities, while centering the expertise of those most impacted by an issue. Their change-making strategies come from deeply rooted reproductive justice values that recognize the intersections of people’s lives. They carry nuanced understandings of gender and sexuality as they center the leadership of self-identified women and people of color and move all of their work through an LGBTQ+ lens.
Changing Woman Initiative (Serves Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Sandoval, Rio Arriba, Taos and San Miguel Counties and Nambé, Ohkay Owingeh, Picuris, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, Taos, and Tesuque Pueblos)
Changing Woman Initiative (CWI) is a Native American-centered women’s health collective, with a mission to renew indigenous birth knowledge and healing through the development of a culturally centered reproductive wellness and Native American birth center, the first in the U.S. As a developing non-profit, their vision is to renew cultural birth knowledge to empower and reclaim indigenous sovereignty of women’s medicine and life way teachings to promote reproductive wellness and healing through holistic approaches and to strengthen women’s spiritual, physical, and emotional wellness. By creating a physical space for education and healing for Native American women, CWI seeks to reclaim the cultural identities shaped through one’s culture, from birth, through motherhood, and through all the life cycles.
Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute (Serves Santa Clara Pueblo)
Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute is based in Santa Clara Pueblo, which is a Tewa speaking sovereign tribe. The organization works to weave together the people, place, and spiritual life of the community by re-introducing and teaching old sustainable lifeways. Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute is currently working on a project called the Kwi-tewha (“Woman’s Ceremonial House” in the Tewa language). Having a place to learn how to prepare this food and gather as women is an important piece in the healing journey. Old traditional ways need to be woven together to become a healthy community, and women’s ceremonies will ground and bring order to our spiritual lifeways. Passing on this traditional knowledge is a spiritual rite of passage for Tewa women, and the Kwi-tewha is central to this endeavor.
New Mexico Asian Family Center (Serves Bernalillo and Sandoval Counties)
New Mexico Asian Family Center (NMAFC) was founded in 2006 and remains the only agency in the state providing culturally tailored services and programs to support a Pan-Asian community that advocates for and supports itself. NMAFC began primarily as a direct service agency led by Asian immigrant women to support local Pan-Asian women and families experiencing domestic violence, sexual assault, and other crimes. Since 2010, the agency has expanded to include multigenerational family programming, including Tea Talks, a men’s led initiative addressing male entitlement, patriarchy, and gender equity in an effort to build a network of strong male allies in the movement to end violence against women. Tea Talks is evolving to include voices of women and LGTBQ voices from the Asian community.
SouthWest Organizing Project – NM Con Mujeres (Serves Bernalillo County and Statewide)
SouthWest Organizing Project’s (SWOP) – NM Con Mujeres is an intergenerational gender justice platform using education and organizing to involve local communities in collective healing. This is a multi-issue, multi-constituency platform that channels a traditional vision of interconnectedness, and which sees issues of economics, safety, health, education, and environmental life as integrated and of equal importance. Con Mujeres has an advanced network of allied individuals and groups and promotes leadership and campaign development through their membership committee. SWOP’s work is anchored in a gender justice foundation based in the lived experiences of New Mexico’s women, and the group connects that foundation to the work of allies in social movements.
Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico (Serves Statewide)
Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico is the only agency in the state that exists to provide services and advocacy for, and education for and about, the transgender people of New Mexico, along with their families and loved ones. TRCNM has been engaged in education work since 2008 and has provided more than 750 Transgender 101 trainings all over NM to a wide array of audiences, including QSA/GSA clubs, hospital staff, churches, synagogues, therapists, teachers, classrooms, attorneys, and police officers.
Tri County Family Justice Center (Serves San Miguel, Mora and Guadalupe Counties)
Since 2006, Tri-County Family Justice Center (TCFJC) has served domestic violence survivors of San Miguel, Mora, and Guadalupe counties, utilizing resources available to advocate and provide direct service for those affected. Thanks to creative leadership and effective services, TCFJC has worked diligently within the community to help in the fight against injustices towards women and girls of color affected by domestic violence. TCFJC aims to provide support for women by utilizing collaboration and a coordinated community response towards ending violence. The organization’s vision is to empower victims and survivors in the rural communities served and provide accessible resources to women to begin the healing process.
Northern New Mexico College Office of Equity and Diversity (Serves Rio Arriba, Santa Fe, Taos, and Los Alamos Counties) (Recipients 2017-2019)
The Northern New Mexico College Office of Equity & Diversity addresses access and provides opportunities for any group that has been historically disadvantaged or underrepresented in higher education. They developed a Women’s Council for Northern New Mexico that provided a shared reading experience, a 2-day retreat for creating a feminist, decolonial creative praxis-oriented council, and distributed mini-grants for women leaders who attend the retreat to put their ideas into action through the support of a funded project. The NNMC Office of Equity & Diversity’s project actively engaged women in thinking about feminist community-based leadership and how their own healing connected to maintaining healthy communities.