Grantmaking Priorities
BIG We Foundation provides infrastructure and opportunities for high-potential, under-resourced communities. We express our commitment to co-creating the future by investing in people and communities working towards our shared vision of a more loving, safe, joyful, and abundant world for all people. Our grantmaking prioritizes narratives and stories that may otherwise go unheard.
As a community-centered organization, we invite community members to serve as grantmaking panelists to co-lead and design the criteria, selection process, and final grant awards.
Youth participatory grantmaking happens in our youth leadership council, SheLeads, where girls and femme-identifying youth identify organizations aligned with the BWF’s values. SheLeads council members determine grantmaking criteria, conduct research, and vote on which organizations are awarded.
Grants have ranged from $5,000 - $250,000, dependent upon reach, need, and resources. Thank you for supporting BWF to generate a well culture and well communities. If you are interested in supporting this work please reach out to grants@thebigwe.com or click here to donate.
“I realized that unless and until WE were the ones directing investment and unless and until those investments involved integrated capital at scale, we would not be able to manifest the transformation that we knew is possible, specifically for Black people in Memphis and across The South.”
SheStories Grant Opportunity
Applications open late spring 2024
The 2023 SheStories grant opportunity was to support the storytelling projects of Black, Brown, Indigenous, API/AAPI, Latine/a, and multiracial womxn and femme-identifying person. BWF is committed to awarding three rounds of storytelling grants over the next few years. We are proud to have awarded the first round of grants in early 2023 to four womxn storytellers and are excited to accept applications for the second round!
BWF storytelling grants uplift womxn’s voices by funding creative storytelling projects in the form of a film, podcast, or other creative outlets. Through this work, we empower womxn of color to bring forth narratives that often go unheard to initiate reflection and dialogue, creating space for safety, love, joy, and abundance for all people.
Our grantees are digging deep to bring their stories to life by sharing compelling narratives of inspiration for womxn of color to express love for themselves, their work, and their lives while being candid about the challenges, pitfalls, and hardships they face. Check back here in February 2024 to see their stories!
Grant Amount: $30,000 for each grantee
Number of Grants Available: 4
Application Due Date: September 12, 2023 at 9 PM CT
Eligibility information: This grant is for individual womxn of color Black, Brown, Indigenous, API/AAPI, Latine/a, and multiracial womxn and femmes storytellers working on a specific storytelling project to apply for project support. Applicants must be located in the United States, including Puerto Rico.
Grant period: Tentative one-year term will be from October 15, 2023 - October 15, 2024, with final storytelling projects completed by October 15, 2024.
How to Apply: Click the Apply Here link to complete the application using the type form survey. We suggest creating a Word document to work on your answers before starting the application in Typeform, so you won’t lose any of your work should you need to pause and come back to your answers at a later time. Find the full application questions HERE.
From the SheStories Community Grantmaking Panel:
Every womxn and girl has a story to tell and is a storyteller in their own right. This grant is intended to support Black, Indigenous, Latine/a, multiracial and API/AAPI girls and femme-identifying womxn and girls in bringing light to the stories they know the world needs. We want to hear the stories and perspectives that aren't normally shown in mainstream media through your eyes and voice.
Inaugural 2022 SheStories Grantees
Jana Schmeiding
Jana is a longtime spokesperson for raising awareness around Native issues and bringing Native stories to mainstream audiences. Jana’s storytelling project is a feature-length comedy entitled Auntie Chuck, which follows a Native womxn who discovers her sacred auntie role when she reluctantly agrees to take in her estranged sister’s kids for a month.
Veda Rose Robbins
Veda is a native of Mobile, Alabama, a registered nurse, and a descendant of West Africans transported on the slave ship, the Clotilda. She was thrust into community activism as a subject in the Netflix documentary Descendant, which chronicled the story of Africatown from past to present. Her storytelling project is a podcast entitled The Africatown Revival and will discuss the erasure of the culture of the West Africans who founded Africatown and the ways that they are reconnecting to it. The podcast will feature conversations with civic leaders about the future of Africatown and the descendants of those who lived there.
SheStories Grantee Cohort 2
Rahkee Jain
Rakhee is a multidisciplinary artist using textile/fiber, painting, installation, public art and moving images to tell personal stories within her community. Project: "Beyond The Sari,” is a compilation of intergenerational stories dedicated to capturing, preserving and sharing the lived experiences of South Asian women who migrated to Texas during the 1960s-1980s.
"Beyond The Sari" is a compilation of intergenerational stories dedicated to capturing, preserving and sharing the lived experiences of South Asian women who migrated to Texas during the 1960s-1980s. The project explores the challenges faced by these women, encompassing the often unnoticed contributions that shaped communities, and bringing attention to issues frequently disregarded due to cultural stigmas and societal expectations.
The project's vision is to cultivate a deeper intergenerational understanding of the South Asian diaspora, recognizing the significance of women's labor, community, and family building, as well as the value of their migration.
Shequeta Smith
Shequeta L. Smith is a Salisbury, North Carolina native and alumna of North Carolina State University. She began her career in entertainment as a College Representative for Def Jam/Roc-A-Fella Records. Since 2008, she has been busy writing and directing films, comics, and award-winning screenplays that typically feature powerful women. In 2019, she was one of eight screenwriters in the world selected to write a screenplay in Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's Imagine Impact screenwriting incubator. Currently, Smith is on a festival run with her satirical short comedy film, “Dick Control,” which has been an official selection in over nineteen film festivals and has won at five festivals.
For decades, the black female voice in mainstream comics has been missing. In this five-part docuseries, award-winning graphic novelist Shequeta L. Smith explores the history of black women in comics and how it intersects with the film and gaming industry - all the while making history by touring the world of international comic cons with her female-centered multimedia company, Shero Comics.
Anahi Naranjo Jara
Anahi is an environmental justice advocate and oral historian born and raised in Quito, Ecuador. She has conducted various oral history projects and drives her non-profit communications work with a mission to elevate stories of BIPOC communities on the frontlines of pollution and the climate crisis, stories that are often not elevated in dominant discourses.
Her storytelling project the Pachamama Oral History Project: Las Mujeres del Terreno (The Women of the Land) will document the impacts of climate change and machismo on the physical and cultural landscapes of agrarian women in Guaranda, Ecuador. Their stories will be curated via a multimedia gallery. Anahí will interview agrarian women across Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru using oral history methodologies. Anahí will also be documenting the shifting landscapes around them affected by a changing climate and shifting values. Their stories will be curated via a multimedia documentary gallery using audio, photo, and video materials to elevate their stories, struggles, resilience, and hopes for what lies ahead in their own lives and in the landscapes they're part of.
LeeAnn Morrissette
LeeAnn C. Morrissette is an award-winning filmmaker, nationally published photographer, and writer based in Charleston, SC. Her work documents & amplifies the stories of Black people reclaiming what it means to live well and free from the wounds of generational land-based trauma. Her most recent work, With These Hands, presented by SAAFON, is an intimate visual telling of the works and lives of 6 Black farmers from around the deep southeastern states, showcasing how Black agrarianism is revitalizing our ecosystem, building community and reconnecting people of the Black diaspora with our history.
The Revolutionary Nature of Making is a documentary short that profiles an intergenerational collective of Black fiber artists based in Georgia who are reimaging their relationship to the ritual of making. They are children of lineages of sore and calloused hands, having spent the full span of the sun’s light growing and harvesting plants such as cotton and indigo. Through their practice, they are liberating themselves, their families, and their ancestors from the wounds of generational trauma. In their growing and cultivation of fiber, steeping dyes from the saps of trees and leaves of ancestral plants to the spinning wheels where sheep’s wool becomes yarn, this documentary explores how a BIPOC-led group found each other through a shared desire and understanding of the revolutionary nature of making.
Annette Hollowell
Annette is a mother, entrepreneur, facilitator, and lawyer with a particular calling towards community building, peace work and Black liberation. She is a manager, land steward, and advisor to Foxfire Ranch, an 80-acre recreational farm and entertainment venue that has been in the Hollowell family for more than a century. She is an excellent hostess committed to holding interracial and inter-generational spaces for rest, retreat, deep learning, connection, healing, and celebration. Her storytelling is rooted in ancestry, culture, and Mississippi’s long-standing legacies of Black landownership.
Her project, We Are the Promised Land, is an altar to Black land legacies in the Mississippi Hill Country that centers the Hollowell family and their land in Waterford, Mississippi, Foxfire Ranch. With all the Black land loss stories in Mississippi, we wanted to explore how the Hollowell family kept their land in the family for over a century, the compromises, sacrifices, and risks involved, and the cultural mechanisms that made it possible. Through a podcast, poetry, photography, video, and more, we explore a kaleidoscopic view of the region, all to engage our community in a conversation about inheritance - what echoes of our ancestors suggest that we are their afterlife?
Toni Blackman
Toni is a rapper, writer, and the first Hip-Hop Ambassador for the U.S. State Department. Publishing her first book at the age of 8, Toni's journey as a storyteller evolved into becoming a pioneering figure in Hip Hop Theater. Her performances span renowned venues, including BAM, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Apollo Theater, and international festivals. As an interdisciplinary creative, Toni has contributed behind and in front of the camera, consulting for TV/film, arts presentations, and cultural events. She co-hosts the Lyrical Meditation Cypher, a Hip Hop wellness podcast with six other women artists. Creator of Rhyme like a Girl and The Freestyle Union, she recently coached for Kwame Alexander's Emmy-winning series, The Crossover.
Her Project: “Sacred Cypher: Why I Rhyme” highlights gifted women MCs from the Rhyme Like a Girl program. Despite diverse backgrounds, they share stories of dedication to music and culture while navigating responsibilities like caregiving, education, health issues and financial struggles.
Kareema Bee
Kareema is an Emmy-nominated producer from New York City. Her professional background as a writer, actress and content creator spans from major TV and film productions (scripted and unscripted), to creative development, representation, social impact events, digital video and more. Her storytelling project, The Self Love Act, is a docu-series featuring Black women and girls of different ages as they explore their journey to self-love. It will feature the voices of thought leaders, wellness experts, fellow creative spirits and young dreamers who are committed to cultivating this basic human necessity that Black women and girls are often robbed of due to cultural and societal norms.
Zaire Love
Zaire is an award-winning filmmaker, music maker, writer and educator whose mission is to honor, amplify and immortalize the stories and voices of the Black South. Most of her work focuses on Memphis, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Her storytelling project, The Revolution will be STRANGE, is a narrative era-bending short film that follows a young Black couple and their Southern rural community. The characters must find reckoning with its strangeness and how Black folks often create their own strangeness to survive.