Before there was TikTok, 24 hour news cycles, and Zoom calls, there were stories.
Stories carried between women. Stories told across kitchen tables and movement meetings. Stories that held memory, strategy, grief, and possibility all at once.
In 1979, a group of activists and community organizers gathered at the Women’s Building in San Francisco with a shared understanding: the work of women—especially women of color, immigrant women, queer and trans people—was shaping the future, and yet it was chronically underfunded, overlooked, and undervalued.
They planted a seed that became Women’s Foundation California.
For more than four decades, that seed has grown through the care of many hands. Each generation adding its own wisdom, its own fight, its own imagination of what freedom could look like.
And this work has never existed in isolation from the world around it.
We live in a time when women are still not believed.
When survivors are silenced while powerful men remain protected.
When the machinery of state violence continues to expand.
When fascism resurfaces wearing new clothes while carrying the same old playbook: control the body, control the story, control the future.
From the Epstein files to attacks on bodily autonomy, to the targeting of immigrant and trans communities and the erosion of democratic norms, we are witnessing how systems of power still rely on the subjugation of women and gender expansive people.
But we are also witnessing something else.
Across neighborhoods, campuses, city halls, and community spaces, people are organizing. Building networks of care. Creating culture and policy that refuses the lie that domination is inevitable.
This is the power of matrilineal knowledge.
The understanding that women and gender expansive people have always been teachers, storytellers, and builders of community infrastructure. These movements are passed down not only through institutions, but through relationships. Through care. Through the quiet and persistent work of believing in each other.
Knowledge that tells us survival is collective.
Knowledge that reminds us to stay curious about each other’s stories.
Knowledge that insists we witness one another fully—as human, complex, and worthy of dignity.
Every organizer, artist, youth leader, and community builder in our network becomes part of a lineage—one that stretches back to that room in 1979, and even further back to the countless women and gender expansive people who carried stories before us.
A woman is never just one person.
She is a school of memory, resistance, and possibility.
This International Women’s Day, we honor the communities who continue to teach us what liberation looks like in practice—and who remind us that even in the face of systems designed to silence us, the story is still being written.
And we are writing it together.
If this vision of collective power and possibility resonates with you, we invite you to support the work that makes these stories—and these communities—visible. Your donation helps sustain programs, storytelling, and organizing that uplift women and gender expansive people around the world.
Thank you for joining us and investing in a more just and liberated future.