INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans people of Color Against Violence, formerly known as INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, is a United States-based national activist organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and their communities. INCITE! is organized by a national collective of women of color and has active chapters and affiliates in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Denver, Albuquerque, Austin, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, New York City, Ann Arbor, Binghamton, Chicago, and a chapter in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. INCITE! was founded in 2000.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues.
Urban Bush Women (UBW), founded in 1984 by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, is a Brooklyn, New York-based non-profit dance company and professional African-American women's dance company. The ensemble performs choreography by Zollar and several other choreographers, often with a focus on the experiences of women of African descent.
Mona Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports grassroots initiatives focused on education and raising the status of women and girls in the US and abroad. They believe that universal education and gender equity are the cornerstones of the eradication of poverty, disease, and conflict.
The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) is a social justice think tank focused on issues of gender and diversity. AAPF seeks to build bridges between arts, activism, and the academy in order to address structural inequality and systemic oppression. AAPF develops and promotes frameworks and strategies that address a vision of racial justice that embraces the intersections of race, gender, class, and the array of barriers that disempower those who are marginalized in society.
Mandy Van Deven is a philanthropy consultant — with particular emphasis on gender, racial, and economic justice and fortifying the infrastructure for narrative power. She is a contributor to Inside Philanthropy, the co-author of “Hey, Shorty! A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in School and on the Streets” (2011) and the editor of Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert. She has written for Salon, The Guardian, Refinery29, GlobalPost, Marie Claire (India), and Newsweek.
Slut-shaming is the practice of criticizing people, especially women and girls, who are perceived to violate expectations of behavior and appearance regarding issues related to sexuality. The term is used to reclaim the word slut and empower women and girls to have agency over their own sexuality. Gender-based violence can be a result of slut-shaming primarily affecting women. It may also be used in reference to gay men, who may face disapproval for promiscuous sexual behaviors. Slut-shaming rarely happens to heterosexual men.
Bali White is a researcher and writer interested in African, environmental, and gender studies. She is currently a Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As trans woman, she is also a community organizer and advocate addressing transgender identity, legal, health care and social concerns at the national, state and local levels. Her research and activist work around transgender advocacy and ballroom community youth has been influential in the field of public health. She previously served on the National Advisory Board for the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health and managed the CDC-funded initiatives for young trans women and MSM in the ballroom community at the Hetrick-Martin Institute.
Karen Aletha Maybank is an American physician, with family roots in Antigua. She is board certified in both pediatrics and preventive medicine/public health. Currently, Dr. Maybank is the Chief Health Equity Officer and Vice President of the American Medical Association.
Charlene Carruthers is a black queer feminist activist and author whose work focuses on leadership development. Carruthers has worked with high-profile activist organizations including Color of Change and Women's Media Center, and she was an integral founding member of Black Youth Project 100. She has served as BYP100's National Director or National Coordinator since the organization's founding in 2013.
The Catholic Medical Mission Board (CMMB) is an international, faith-based NGO, providing long-term, co-operative medical and development aid to communities affected by poverty and healthcare issues. It was established in 1912 and officially registered in 1928. CMMB is headquartered in New York City, USA, and currently has country offices in Haiti, Kenya, Peru, South Sudan, and Zambia.
Joanne Ninive Smith is a first-generation Haitian-American social worker and activist born and raised in New York City. She is the executive director and founder of the Brooklyn-based non-profit organization, Girls for Gender Equity. Smith has organized around the issues of gender equality, racial justice, school pushout, sexual harassment, police brutality, the criminalization of black girls in schools and violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people of color.
Tarana Burke is an American activist from New York City, who started the MeToo movement. In 2006, Burke began using MeToo to help other women with similar experiences to stand up for themselves. Over a decade later, in 2017, #MeToo became a viral hashtag when Alyssa Milano and other women began using it to tweet about the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse cases. The phrase and hashtag quickly developed into a broad-based, and eventually international movement.
Eva Maria Lewis is an American activist. From South Side, Chicago, she has led a number of local protests, including the July 11, 2016 youth march on Millennium Park to protest police brutality. She has also founded two organizations, The I Project and Youth for Black Lives.
Eshel is a nonprofit organization in the United States and Canada that creates community and acceptance for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ+) Jews and their families in Orthodox Jewish communities. Eshel provides education and advocacy, a speaker's bureau, community gatherings, and a social network for individuals and institutions. It was founded in 2010 to provide hope and a future for LGBTQ+ Jews excluded from Orthodox and Torah observant communities.
Farah Tanis is a New York City–based feminist activist and co-founder and executive director of the Black Women's Blueprint and of the Museum of Women's Resistance. She is the chair of the US Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Black Women and Assault. She attended the 2017 Women's March to raise awareness on the trafficking of black women. Having experienced physical and sexual abuse as a child, Tanis began working in activism on behalf of women around 1993, running a women's shelter before founding Black Women's Blueprint. She was one of the organizers of the 2017 March for Black Women in Washington D.C.
Dara Kass is an emergency medicine physician and Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. She is also an advocate for advancing the careers of women in medicine. While treating patients during the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, Kass became infected. Since then, she has become a prominent voice advocating for access to personal protective equipment and more effective measures to combat the spread of the disease.
Jessica Esquivel is a Black Mexican and American physicist and science communicator, working at the Muon g-2 particle physics experiment at Fermilab. She is an advocate for gender and racial equity in science, and a lead organiser of #BlackInPhysics, a campaign to recognize and amplify the work of Black physicists worldwide. She was also selected as an AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador in 2019.
Omowumi Ogunrotimi is a Nigerian multidisciplinary legal practitioner, founder and executive director of Gender Mobile Initiative. She has worked in over 50 rural communities advocating for safe spaces for vulnerable populations, particularly girls and women.
Osasu Edobor is a Nigerian gender advocate and founder of Think Help Restore (THR) Media and the Safe Space Initiative. She is a licensed mental health first-aider, peer educator trainer, and counselor. As a campaigner for gender inclusion, Osasu created the HERFessions app, which provides support for survivors of sexual abuse. She is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow alumna and a Young African Leaders Initiative member.
