Publications & Tools

In this piece, Red Schulte and contributors from the Support Ho(s)e collective share their personal experiences with the best and worst funders. There are so few funders in the space that when mistakes are made there is a lack of accountability for funders that leads to compounding violence for organizers.

Third Wave Fund’s Sex Worker Giving Ciricle, NCRP’s 2021 winner of the “Smashing Silos” Impact Award, shares four key lessons funders can use as they support sex worker-led organizations: provide unrestricted, multi-year grants, center trauma-informed, empathetic grantmaking, build multilingual grantmaking structures and emphasize language justice, and stop demanding fiscal sponsors, an imposition for some of the most effective groups. They write, “Directly funding the well-being, bodily autonomy and organizing of sex workers most impacted by oppression is in itself a radical vision and our biggest impact.”

Sex Worker Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP LA) is an all-volunteer, sex worker-led organization doing transformative mutual aid work. When they point out “the precious time that could be spent providing direct services to workers is wasted on another rejected application that won’t address the growing gap in our financial resources to support our community,” the SWOP LA team again highlights that unrestricted multi-year grants are essential to their work’s survival.

The Kua ‘ana Project is at the intersection of public health, decriminalization, Indigenous rights, and the rights of trans and gender expansive people as they serve the Pasifika trans women and sex workers in Honolulu. Maddalyn Sesepasara, who leads the project, explains that steady allyship means that organizations like hers have enough funding to support both direct service and advocacy efforts, which are equally important.