2025 has felt like a year spent on defense.
We have watched communities across California navigate fear, raids, displacement, and a political landscape increasingly designed to make people feel small. It has been a year filled with an unshakable grief that continues to wrap itself around us and our communities.
And yet, something else is happening too.
A shift. A surge. A widening of the movement.
One of the clearest signs of that shift is the work of La Defensa, one of our grant partners leading the charge at the intersection of abolition, gender justice, and community power.
For years, La Defensa has been transforming how Los Angeles thinks about community safety. In 2019, they helped stop the construction of two new jails–a reminder that progress and solutions previously labeled as radical are possible.
But 2025 pushed all of us into a new reality.
When ICE raids swept across the region beginning in June, people did not retreat. They mobilized. La Defensa’s Court Watch had already trained 300 people over three years. Suddenly it became a crucial line of defense and the infrastructure that was necessary.
Then this summer, more than 700 people signed up to watch the courts.
Seven hundred people insisting that judges cannot collaborate with ICE in the shadows.
Seven hundred people choosing accountability instead of idly standing by.
This is an inflection point, not because the crisis has eased but because community power has scaled faster than the harm.
But here is the truth. Numbers alone do not build movements. Infrastructure does.
We need to invest in systems and organizations like these, those that can hold the weight of this momentum. We need training programs, digital tools, policy strategies, and long-term organizing capacity. We need to build the future with the same seriousness we bring to fighting the present.
That is exactly what La Defensa is doing.
From participatory budgeting with Supervisor Holly Mitchell, asking residents what they want to do with public dollars, to the structural shifts sparked by Measure J, their work is not only resisting bad policy. It is rewriting the relationship between people and the government.
The fight is not only about stopping today’s harm.
It is about ensuring tomorrow’s freedom.
At Women’s Foundation California, we believe futurism is essential to feminist organizing. We believe elections are a means to an end, not the end itself. And we believe that partners like La Defensa show us what it looks like to build that future in real time.
As we close out 2025, a year that tested us, stretched us, and still revealed so much collective possibility, we are asking you to help sustain this work.
If you are moved to learn more and donate directly to La Defensa or any WFC partner organizations, we love to see that too!
Every dollar strengthens the infrastructure that allows community members to step into power. In courtrooms. In policy spaces. In the neighborhoods where change takes root long before it becomes visible.
We are not simply surviving this moment.
We are shaping what comes next.