We are many hands in the struggle.

People with crossed arms at a demostration

Our Board

Our Board members are queer-feminist activists who each represent a grassroots organisation in the migrant justice field. They bring together diverse expertise of key migration routes, topics, and policies across Europe, Southwest Asia, and Africa to make decisions over grantmaking.  

Each member has a 2-year mandate, with the explicit intention of continuously diversifying our participatory team.

Lina Urbat (she/her)
Blindspots

Lina Urbat (she/her)

Lina is active as a coordinator in support work in the Western Balkans.

Hela Kanakane
Watch the Med–Alarmphone

Hela Kanakane

Hela is active with different grassroots and decolonial movements and networks.

Maria Elena Coa (she/her)
Top Manta

Maria Elena Coa (she/her)

Maria is a Venezuelan activist who has lived in Catalonia since 2017.

Shahla Raza (she/her)
Yusra Community Space

Shahla Raza (she/her)

Shahla is the founder and director of Yusra Community Center and Inshira Collective.

Mahtab Sabetera (any pronouns)
Free Homayoun

Mahtab Sabetera (any pronouns)

A Berlin-based activist and musician, Mahtab is the daughter of Homayoun Sabetera.

Pauline Zapke (she/her)
Balkan Brücke

Pauline Zapke (she/her)

Pauline’s passions intersect across migration, climate justice, and feminist organising.

Monika Matus
Grupa Granica

Monika Matus

Monika has over two decades of experience at the intersection of youth and migrant rights, EU and global political advocacy, and climate justice.

Our Staff

Our staff work part-time alongside grassroots organising, care work, and personal passions to maintain the communications and logistics of the Fund.

Emmy Fu (she/they)
Project manager

Emmy Fu (she/they)

Emmy is a facilitator and community organiser in local and transnational anti-racist and migrant justice groups.

Xavi Ferrer (he/they)
Fundraiser

Xavi Ferrer (he/they)

Born in Barcelona and based in Berlin, Xavi balances work alongside parenting his young son and engaging in grassroots activism.

Advisors

These are migrant justice organisers who have previously been on the Board or worked at the Fund, and stay on in voluntary capacities due to their insight into the organisation and ongoing passion to be involved.

Giulia Messmer (she/her)
Advisor

Giulia Messmer (she/her)

Giulia researches transformative justice practices and state repression, while being actively engaged in queer struggles and the fight for border abolition.

Recent Former Board Members

Despite finishing their mandate, their contributions are essential to who we are today; our past Board members remain visible on our site and continue to support whenever possible. Here are our most recent former members: 

Our Story

As a Fund unexpectedly born from the migrant justice ecosystem, our journey into philanthropy is imperfect and dynamic, yet this history illuminates our vision today.

FRom the people, for the people

2019

The spark

Activist Carola Rackete is unlawfully arrested for supporting migrants on route to Europe. In response, a crowdfunding campaign for legal fees raises over 1 million Euro. When Rackete’s charges were dropped, 5 organisations in the migration field came together to create democratic process to redistribute the money, with one BIPoC, woman, or gender-diverse representative from each on the Board. Arising naturally from the activist ecosystem, this was the official creation of the Fund.

photo from a distance with candles making up the sentence "europe kills!"
a tent in an forsaken place
2020

Being a trusted actor

Politically induced crises such as the fire at Moria refugee camp and the COVID-19 pandemic result in the founders and external actors pooling more into the Fund, sustaining its work. We’re actively considered a trustworthy structure with accountable relations to grassroots frontline movements, and a diversity of activist expertise in the migration field to mobilise wealth where needed.
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2021

Deconstructing our power

As decisions about wealth represent power in our ecosystem, we implement a 2-year rotating Board cycle to democratise this power as much as possible, and prioritise representatives who are racialised, migrants, part of smaller collectives, and/or based in the so-called Global South. For the greatest impact of our resources, we actively “fund the underfunded”: overlooked regions, migration topics, and informal forms of organising, as well as local, smaller initiatives.

man with sign "no+ racismo"
People hugging during a demostration
2022

Collective care &
rehearsing futures

Our in-person meetings grow friendships, do deep structural work, and connect with our grantees on a horizontal level of comradeship. For example, in 2022, we visit our Board member in Tunis, where we protest alongside mothers grieving over their disappeared children and consider seriously how the Fund could develop.

The “refugees welcome” culture across Europe had changed from its hey-day since 2015. We begin the sketches of a future vision.

2023

Transforming philanthropy

We spend the year venturing into philanthropic networks as a grassroots-centric intermediary. We’re identifying the spaces where our particular roots and our feminist participatory grantmaking model can thrive and shift power. We’re establishing our footing for long-term, transformative advocacy that gives trust-based autonomy to directly impacted frontline and migrant communities — an important step we know that philanthropy can and must do.

people discussing in the assembly
shadows of people dancing
2024

New seeds, new passages

With a third Board rotation, we welcome a diverse and international team. We move forward with taking an anti-oppression stance both internally and in our external work.

In the face of multiply intersecting crises, we continue to build collective organised power for a world of equity, dignity, and justice, where everyone has the freedom to move, and no one is forced to move.

LEarn MoreGEt in touch

Our Glossary

Migrant justice

Migrant justice shifts from a charity model of migrants as suffering victims into a liberation-based model where displacement is connected to the root causes of racial capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and the related climate crisis.

It is enacted through people-powered organising that pursues fair treatment, just reparations, and dignified alternatives for global systems of immobility.

This form of organising affords migrants agency and belonging, regardless of origin. It aims to transform historical and present harms, meaningfully reflecting the abundant diversity of societies rather than reproducing discourses of assimilation and vulnerability that strip the autonomy of migrants.

Our Context

Safe passage

Secure and legal routes that ensure people can reach or stay in territories without threat to their life and dignity.

Borders & bordering

Not only fixed lines on territories, borders determine groups as undeserving, and control their access to resources (housing, medical care, education, legal rights, possibilities of movement, etc). Borders multiply other forms of oppression, and are experienced as mostly invisible for those who are already privileged.

Border-industrial complex

The collaboration of policies, technologies, infrastructures, and financial industries that result in the fortification of borders, including through increased surveillance, anti-rights agendas, and detention and policing practices.

Grassroots organizing

A method of building power and mobilisation from the ground-up, much in the way that grass grows. In harnessing the capacities of ordinary people to achieve political change through united goals, grassroots movements often grow organically, emphasise the sharing of power, and allow the most impacted people to have control over improving their community and circumstances.

External & externalised borders

When the harmful impact of borders extend beyond a nation-state’s physical territories and into third countries, often in the so-called Global South. In the context of Europe, this form of bordering occurs in or at non-EU states.

Our Terms

BIPoC

Black, Indigenous, and people of color, who comprise the global majority of the world. We refrain from diminishing terms like “minority” and reclaim the agency of these communities that historically and presently experience the most harmful impacts of racial capitalism and colonialism.

Migrant

We use this term, as well as “people on the move” (POM), to embrace the complexities of histories and backgrounds behind human movement, and to preserve more flexibility than strictly legally-determined categories like “refugee.” When necessary, we use specifics to address the differences between kinds of migrants: for example, asylum-seeker, second-generation immigrant, etc.

So-called Global South vs Global North

An unequal relation of extraction between the richest countries of the world, often framed as the “receiving countries” of migration, and the countries where people migrate from, which typically have histories of colonialism by Northern states.

SWANA

The decolonial term for the geographical South West Asia and North African region. This term replaces Orientalist and colonialist terms like Middle East, Arab World, or Islamic World, which can homogenise and dehumanise diverse peoples.

Fortress Europe

A name for Europe often used by migrant justice organisers, which makes visible the harmful impact of Europe’s anti-rights migration practices.

Our Practices

Lived experience leadership

The meaningful, active empowerment and participation of migrants to lead and influence social movements impacting their lives and communities.

(Queer-)feminism

We understand queer-feminism as a practice of disrupting power, not only an identity or sexual orientation. Queer-feminism is rooted in a long historical legacy of collective care, especially for the most vulnerable and abandoned by dominant society, and often led by women or gender-diverse individuals.

Intersectional justice

Believing that there is no such thing as a “stand-alone” issue, intersectionality promotes a holistic form of justice, seeing how factors such as race, gender, class, ability, and more interact with each other to create combined forms of oppression that must be addressed together.

Reparative philantropy

A practice of redistributing resources to acknowledge and take action to repair the extractive origins of charitable giving and how colonialism, enslavement, and racial capitalism make possible the accumulation of philanthropic wealth.

Participatory grantmaking

The practice of giving decision-making power to and uplifting the expertise of the communities directly affected by funding decisions.