2023 Healing Awards Grantee Partners
Click on each grantee partner below to find out more about their work.
ACLU of New Mexico
Communities served: Statewide
The ACLU of New Mexico works to protect and advance justice, liberty, and equity as guaranteed by the constitutions of New Mexico and the United States. The ACLU of New Mexico has been an integral partner in the fight to expand reproductive freedom in New Mexico from helping to get an old abortion ban off the books in 2021 to helping monumental protections for reproductive and gender-affirming health care to pass in 2023. Moreover, they deployed strategic tools to fight back on anti-abortion ordinances around the state including building a network of local advocates to attend and speak at city and county meetings and organize against these efforts.
Bold Futures New Mexico
Communities served: Bernalillo and Doña Ana Counties and across New Mexico
Bold Futures leads policy change, research, place-based organizing, and culture shift by and for women and people of color in New Mexico. Bold Futures centers the lived experiences and expertise of those most impacted by an issue, engaging with people at the intersection of their identities. They work to build communities where all people have what they need to make real decisions about their own bodies and lives, and all have room to live with respect and dignity. One way that they work with young women is through their partnership with United Young Parents at Breath of My Heart Birthplace and with NM GRADS. Both programs have young parents (also referred to as teen moms/dads) who face stigma for being young parents and they choose to uplift their families. Together, they passed a state memorial that recognizes August 25th as Day in Recognition of Young Parents in NM every year. They do social media campaigns, celebrations and show appreciation for young families. As a reproductive justice organization led by women and people of color, they work alongside many families, organizations and people across generations in New Mexico.
Center for Civic Policy
Communities served: Statewide
The Center for Civic Policy (CCP) works to empower and amplify the voices of everyday New Mexicans, especially those who experience oppression, to shape a more inclusive, responsive, and accountable democracy ––using a racial, gender, class, and equity lens to build transformative power through collective responsibility and build thriving communities in New Mexico.
In collaboration with local and national partners, they work to increase voter participation and turnout, identifying and training new leaders for civic life. As the convener of the NM Civic Engagement Table (NMCET), they also work to incubate campaigns and foster strategic partnerships, rooted in the power and experience of multiracial, LGBTQI+, and historically and systematically excluded communities, activists, and organizers, ensuring intersectional, cross-movement power-building strategies and grassroots organizing, to achieve a more just and equitable New Mexico where everyone can live in their full dignity.
The Crisis Center of Northern New Mexico
Communities served: Rio Arriba, Santa Fe and Los Alamos Counties
The Crisis Center of Northern New Mexico is the only domestic violence center in the northern region. Its mission is to extend crucial emergency services and supportive services for victims of domestic violence using a trauma-informed approach and to work towards decreasing domestic violence within northern rural communities. Their organization works towards gender justice and gender equity by bringing awareness and resources to the communities they serve. They provide services to individuals without prejudice regarding age, ethnicity, creed, gender, and nationality. They understand that domestic violence can impact different individuals and therefore exercise advocacy for underserved surrounding populations.
El Refugio Inc.
Communities served: Grant County and Hidalgo County
El Refugio operates the Casa Carmel Shelter for battered women/men and their children, and provides safety and security along with case management services and educational programs. They also serve and advocate on behalf of battered immigrant women and children who are afraid of being deported, offering shelter, food, and assistance in obtaining visas. They have worked to ensure that domestic violence shelters accept males over the age of 12 in their service area, inspiring the same policy statewide. El Refugio provides a doorway to a new life without violence, and pathways to reclaiming control and restoring self-respect.
Indigenous Women Rising
Communities served: Statewide and Nationwide
Indigenous Women Rising (IWR) is committed to honoring Native and Indigenous Peoples’ inherent right to equitable and culturally safe health options through accessible health education, resources and advocacy. IWR is one of the few organizations in New Mexico that provides an abortion fund. This fund is open to all Indigenous people in NM, the United States and Canada who have the capacity to become pregnant and seeking an abortion in the United States. They also fund midwifery care and sex education for Indigenous families. IWR started a program to help Native Nations understand why it is important to take reproductive and sexual health seriously when making decisions about their tribal communities. Additionally, they host intergenerational events to gather community members to have discussions about sexual health from a traditional perspective. These interactions and feedback help to inform and further develop their programs.
New Mexico Asian Family Center
Communities served: Bernalillo, Rio Arriba, Lea, Sandoval, and Curry 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 multi-generational 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. They continue to build a foundation to further the movement by evolving Tea Talks to include voices of women and LGTBQ voices from the Asian community. In addition, NMAFC provides case management, counseling, and legal support for the Pan-Asian community.
Otero/Lincoln SANE- Southern New Mexico Wellness Alliance
Communities served: Otero and Lincoln Counties and Mescalero Apache Reservation
The Otero and Lincoln Counties’ Sexual Assault and Nurse Examiner (SANE) goal is to provide outreach and improved services to the rural communities in the area. 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 other communities of color 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.
Progress NOW NM
Communities served: Statewide
As New Mexico’s progressive communications hub, ProgressNow New Mexico Education Fund centers justice for systemically excluded communities through partnerships, trusted digital communications, and issue-based and civic engagement campaigns. They provide communications support to reproductive justice (RJ) coalition partners though: communications plans, graphics, social media plans, press releases, live tweeting of legislative hearings and more. Additionally, they have a specific and intentional focus on tracking anti-choice movements as well as correcting digital disinformation. They also run educational programs that center storytelling and education on the intersection of RJ and other issues.
Silver Regional Sexual Assault Support Services (SR SASS)
Communities served: Grant, Hidalgo, Luna and Catron Counties
Silver Regional SASS provides services to survivors of sexual violence and their families through case management services, crisis intervention services, community education and awareness services, counseling services, and accompaniment services for both the SANE exam and legal proceedings. Sexual assault can occur for any gender but especially in LGBTQ+ communities, and they work to serve survivors of all genders. Reproductive justice can go hand-in-hand with sexual violence, and therefore Silver Regional SASS supports their clients in whatever decision they decide, and find them the resources to assist in long-term healing.
SouthWest Organizing Project
Communities served: Bernalillo and Statewide
SouthWest Organizing Project’s (SWOP) NM Con Mujeres is an intergenerational gender justice platform using education and organizing to involve communities of color 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 they promote leadership and campaign development through their membership committee. They continue to anchor SWOP’s work in a gender justice foundation based in the lived experiences of New Mexico’s women, and they are connecting that foundation to the work of allies in social movements.
Strong Families New Mexico (Forward Together)
Communities served: Bernalillo, Dona Ana, McKinley Counties, and the Navajo Nation
Strong Families New Mexico (SFNM) is a program of Forward Together and brings together organizations and activists statewide to build strong communities and create policies that work for NM families. Reproductive Justice (RJ) has been at the center of their 30-year trajectory in New Mexico. Forward Together organizes women of color statewide to defeat harmful reproductive health policies and passing proactive policies at the state level with community at the center. Their work also includes leadership development with a group of 50 core leaders statewide to share their truths, while centering what RJ means to their family and community through collective organizing efforts. Additionally, they provide trainings across New Mexico and work with artists to create original works of art that centers NM families and what RJ means to them.
Black Health New Mexico
Communities served: Bernalillo, Rio Arriba, and Santa Fe Counties
The work of Black Health New Mexico (BHNM) is focused on a community-centered model that encourages community-defined interventions to public health problems, specifically health outcomes that disproportionately impact Black infants, mothers and families. Their mission is to provide community education and coalition building that increases community participation and leadership in health policy and programming. BHNM believes that interventions that seek to improve health outcomes, must be deeply rooted in and influenced by the expertise, leadership and lived experience of the communities most impacted. BHNM co-leads the Black and Indigenous Maternal Health Policy Organization and uplifts young Black women in their work through earned-credit or paid internships, centering their voices in the work, training them how to think more broadly about health disparities by centering the lived experiences of community members, engaging young people with their elder constituency and grounding them in a framework of care and healing.
Breath of My Heart Birthplace
Communities served: Rio Arriba and Northern 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.
Changing Woman Initiative
Communities served: 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 country. 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, they reclaim their identities shaped through cultures, from birth, through motherhood and through all the life cycles. Historically and currently, Native American women’s access to indigenous birthing knowledge has been severely impacted by the interplay of colonization, poverty, discrimination, geography, patriarchy and racism. A culturally centered reproductive wellness and birth center offers a space to restore the health of indigenous women from this unbalanced state, beginning a healing process and promoting reproductive and gender justice.
El Centro de Igualdad de
Communities served: Bernalillo County
El CENTRO is an Albuquerque-based grassroots and immigrant-led organization focused on growing the power of low-wage immigrant workers to improve working conditions, win dignified wages, create an inclusive and equitable economy, and defend and advance the civil rights of Nuevo Mexicanos. They utilize multiple strategies to impact systemic change and grow the power of immigrant families and low-wage workers: grassroots organizing, information campaigns, leadership development, policy advocacy, voter engagement, and strategic communications to impact the issue environment.
Equality New Mexico (EQNM)
Communities served: Statewide
EQNM, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy and civil rights organization, works to lift up the very clear ways that Gender Justice, and Reproductive Justice are LGBTQ justice. They advocate for the vast array of Sexual Health, Education and Reproductive freedoms that impact LGBTQ people and all people with birthing bodies. They believe the decisions whether to create, how to create, and how best to navigate our families and structures is a key component of our liberation and fight for these changes in public dialogue and policy conversations.
Navajo Breastfeeding Coalition
Communities served: McKinley County, San Juan County, Bernalillo County, Navajo, Apache, Pojoaque Pueblo, Zuni Pueblo, Santa Clara Pueblo
The Navajo Breastfeeding Coalition (NBC) supports the wellbeing of infants, mothers, and families through their pregnancies, labor, postpartum and breastfeeding journeys. Their Coalition’s programs and services include access to midwives/doulas, prenatal/postnatal care, and lactation support. NBC supports Indigenous birth keepers on their midwifery and/or doula journey through childbirth preparation, and skills and development workshops, as well as educating hospital facilities and communities about Indigenous-based values and teachings of community, kinship (K’é), and knowledge sharing. The NBC initiatives also work beyond the state of New Mexico to provide more programmatic activities to families across the Navajo Nation and in urban Indigenous communities.
NM Comunidades en Acción y de Fé (NM CAFé)
Communities served: Dona Aña, Luna, Grant, Hidalgo Counties
NM CAFé is faith-based organization that organizes with the people of Southern New Mexico to create better conditions for workers, families, and the future leaders of New Mexico. Relating to gender and racial equity, they believe it is important to stand up against policies that make the lives of women more difficult, as millions of women are without health insurance and access to maternal health care, and women of color are most impacted by this. NM CAFé believes collective liberation relies on all of us having the tools to live our fullest lives and make decisions grounded in our own values and beliefs.
OLÉ Education Fund
Communities served: Bernalillo, Santa Fe, Valencia, Sandoval, Dona Ana, and Chaves Counties
OLÉ supports the broader Reproductive Justice (RJ) movement in New Mexico by developing leaders who help shape a supportive issue environment for RJ reforms and by taking a leadership role in women-centered worker justice organizing. Most notably, OLÉ has been organizing childcare workers to transform the workforce from poverty-wage employees to professionally compensated educators with clear career paths that they can navigate to attain higher pay, professional development, and power. This work empowers BIPOC and immigrant women who are economically oppressed by a racist childcare system designed to move more women into low-wage work. By addressing the economic injustices in the childcare system, OLÉ is helping women take control of and shape a deeply flawed, under-resourced system that women rely on to maintain healthy families and economic security.
Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM)
Communities served: Bernalillo, Santa Fe, Valencia, Sandoval, Dona Ana, and Chaves Counties; Acoma, Isleta, Jemez, Jicarilla Apache, Laguna, Navajo, Sandia, Santa Ana, Ramah Navajo, Alamo Navajo
Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains empowers individuals and families in the communities they serve to make informed choices about their sexual and reproductive health by providing high quality health services, comprehensive sex education, and strategic advocacy. In New Mexico, PPRM works alongside other reproductive justice partners to secure access to reproductive health care, including through the momentous passage of SB 10, which solidified safe and legal access to abortion. This historic passage is the culmination of generations-long efforts by LGBTQ+, Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and people of color advocating to protect safe and legal abortion care in New Mexico. PPRM uses their platform to step forward when their brand recognition can help build support, while stepping back to work behind the scenes and let their coalition partners and communities lead whenever possible.
Sexual Assault Services of Northwest NM
Communities served: San Juan, McKinley and Rio Arriba Counties; Navajo, Jicarilla/Apache, Zuni, Mountain Ute and Southern Ute Communities
SAS works in Northwest New Mexico and the surrounding Four Corners area to empower victims, provide crisis services and create a community focused on prevention. In addition to providing direct services for survivors of sexual assault, they train and educate community members and school districts on prevention and active bystander intervention. Their education seeks to change attitudes and behavior related to how individuals and groups understand and actively work to prevent gender stereotypes that can lead to violence. SAS incorporates gender and reproductive rights into their work, relating it to the importance of equity and the goal of ending violence.
Southwest Women’s Law Center
Communities Served: Statewide and all 19 Pueblos
Southwest Women’s Law Center seeks to advance women’s well-being, rights, and power in New Mexico through legal research, policy analysis, advocacy, community, stakeholder education, and coalition work at the local, state, and national levels. The SWLC’s constituency is primarily Latinx, White, and Native American women+ and girls+ in New Mexico. Their work focuses on eliminating gender bias, discrimination, and harassment, lifting women and their families out of poverty and ensuring all women have full control over their reproductive lives through access to comprehensive reproductive health services and information. Their current policy and legal work centers around getting a Paid Family and Medical Leave Act passed in NM, transforming the childcare system to be more equitable, educating stakeholders and pregnant people about the dangers of Crisis Pregnancy Centers, providing brief legal services to low-income women, and working with Tribal nations on domestic violence cases.
Tri-County Family Justice Center
Communities served: 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 to those affected. Thanks to creative leadership and effective services, they have 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. Their vision is to empower victims and survivors in the rural communities served and provide accessible resources to women to begin the healing process. TCFJC continues to provide holistic healing and spiritual healing services, and continues to learn and educate staff so they can continually enhance their programming. The spiritual/holistic groups also educate on manifesting peace, happiness, careers, success, relationships, coping mechanisms, balancing five dimensions which are physical, mental, emotional, psychological, and financial.