To support education and healing programs, primarily for Black women and girls, author, and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates is collaborating with two nonprofit organizations to establish a new fund. The fund’s goal is to raise $10 million in the next two years and will give awards to advocates for the prevention of sexual violence.
The Ford Foundation made a $1 million gift announcement on December 13 and is the first donor to the Courage Fund. Coates has also committed to donating to the campaign, as has musician John Legend and Sacramento Kings star Harrison Barnes. Leading the initiative will be A Long Walk Home and A Call to Men, two national groups that have spent 20 years focusing on sexual assault prevention and education.
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The fund’s adviser, Coates, stated that he was motivated to establish it after witnessing women come forward to testify about being sexually abused by the “Trapped in the Closet” singer R. Kelly during the trial in 2021. Following her conviction on eight charges of sex trafficking in a New York court, Kelly was sentenced to thirty years in prison.
Coates expressed in a recent statement, “My own consciousness was awakened by the courage of Stephanie ‘Sparkle’ Edwards, who, in her lonely quest to end R. Kelly’s decades of abuse, lost friends, family, and a career.”
The philanthropist added, “I wanted to conceive of the Courage Award, which will honor whistleblowers who have risked everything to break this cycle of violence in our community and to support programs for underserved girls and women who are survivors of sexual abuse.”
During his tenure at the Apollo Theater in New York City, Coates became aware of A Long Walk Home for the first time. Kamilah Forbes, executive producer of the Apollo, introduced him to the Chicago-based group, which employs art to empower Black women and girls who have endured trauma. In 2018, A Long Walk Home spearheaded a campaign to halt one of R. Kelly’s performances and provided consultation for the documentary “Surviving R. Kelly.”
Coates approached Scheherazade Tillet, a co-founder of A Long Walk Home, to recognize those like Edwards who bravely spoke against sexual assault. Her group recruited A Call to Men, a longstanding partner that teaches and educates boys and men to fight violence against women, into the fund.
“We’ve been partnering up for many years and wanting to do more and more work with them to really make sure that men were also part of the solutions with us,” Tillet shared.
According to Tillet, the Courage Fund will hand out rewards to activists and survivors who speak out against sexual abuse every other year. Each recipient will get at least $250,000. To educate individuals about sexual assault, the fund will also conduct public awareness campaigns and execute programs in nail salons, barbershops, and other unconventional settings. The initiatives are slated to begin in Chicago and expand around the country.
Tillet claims that having backing from a well-known person such as Coates—a MacArthur “genius” fellow and winner of the 2015 National Book Award for “Between the World and Me”—has been important.
“I think that helped us get the Ford Foundation funding, that helps us be able to get into certain spaces around these topics that maybe people might have felt apprehensive around,” she remarked.
According to Lilly Family School of Philanthropy data, only 1.8% of all philanthropic contributions made in the United States in 2020 went to organizations that support women and girls. Contributions of around $1.3 billion went to groups in the US that address gender- and family-based violence.
Not many of those funds go to groups that support Black survivors of sexual assault, according to Condencia Brade, strategic director of the National Organization of Sisters of Color Ending Sexual Assault. Based on data from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey conducted in 2016 and 2017, about thirty percent of Black women report having survived rape.
“There is a huge gap across this country,” she noted. “The Courage Fund creating this resource stream is so important, and I would encourage philanthropy to really take a look at that.”
The #MeToo movement’s creator, Tarana Burke, claims that the Ford Foundation’s sponsorship and the introduction of the Courage Fund gave her more motivation.
“It makes other parts of philanthropy wake up and say, ‘Oh, wait a minute. It’s been six years since the #MeToo movement went viral. What are we doing to put our money where the movement is?’”
