Dear Friends and Supporters,

Rooted in the past, grounded in our present, looking toward our future.

October in California. The fog lifts a little earlier each day, the light turns the color of something ending, and for a moment it looks like relief. Then I open my phone and the season does not feel like it’s turning at all. Another name. Another headline calling grief by a smaller word.

The words of queer Chicana activist Gloria Anzaldúa ring in my ears: “Though we tremble before uncertain futures, may we meet illness, death, and adversity with strength. May we dance in the face of our fears.”

We do not wait for hope to arrive. We make it, with our hands, with our budgets, alongside partners and communities who are still fighting for justice, long after the headlines have moved on to something else. Feminism is not a mood we’re in. It is the antidote we have, against fascism, against a politics built on scarcity and fear. Our people already hold the answers. They always have.

Some days, none of that is enough, and the grief wins the hour. I let it. I have learned that grief is not where we live. It is only where we pass through.

I move through a list of over 50 names: Alberto, Emmanuel, Felix, Lorth, Shiraz, Fouad. Names I have not heard on the nightly news, or seen scrolling past on my phone, or written on a protest sign. And then there are the names I know by heart: Renee Nicole, Alex, Lorenzo, Keith, Johan.

This is what the regime does with its days. It pulls fathers off the road to work. It bans trans kids from a locker room and calls it justice. It funds a genocide and insists it is only killing terrorists, not families, not children.

But we know what we are made of. We take our neighbor’s hand and dance anyway. We dream out loud, on purpose, in public. Our ancestors did not survive centuries of this so we could go quiet now, and we won’t. We continue to stand in what they’ve made of this country and still find our way to alegría.

We know that we keep us safe. We tend to what we’ve planted so there is something to bring in when harvest comes. Kindness. Local organizing. Mutual aid passed hand to hand. This is how we answer.

Here is what we know to be true, no matter what this administration does to prove otherwise: every child belongs here. Every child deserves to live, to learn, to play, to grow up whole.

I find my strength in a friend holding a family together, in neighbors who have decided that there is enough, that there has always been enough, and who show up for each other instead of hoarding what little they’ve been told to fear losing. This year, while corporations and other organizations chose silence and tighter budgets, Women’s Foundation California chose to go further in. We did not pull back. We did not flinch.

We mobilized and moved over $3.5 million. We supported 83 organizations with 92 grants to partners across California and beyond. We graduated 60 fellows from our state, local, and youth policy institutes. We funded the spaces that hold everything else up: survivor safety, the care economy, labor organizing, criminal justice reform, reproductive justice, environmental justice, economic justice. Not despite the fear. Because of it. A partner who doesn’t know if they’ll have an office in six months knows exactly what a multi-year commitment means.

We are each other’s keepers. We dance because it reminds our bodies what the future is supposed to feel like. We ask you to take a breath with us, to remember that the air in this state belongs to all of us equally, no matter what they try to tell you.

Their politics run on fear, and fear is poor architecture. It cannot hold what we hold: joy, belonging, each other. The nights are getting longer now. We are still building toward the light.

With deep gratitude and resilience,

Bia Vieira, she/her/elle
CEO, Women’s Foundation California