Grantmakers for Girls of Color and the Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples have announced a partnership aimed at mobilizing funding for work focused on assisting Indigenous girls and their families and communities in the United States and its territories.

The New Songs Rising Initiative will work to expand opportunities for Indigenous girls through grantmaking, convening and community building, mentorship, and peer support, with an emphasis on Indigenous cultural work and practices that center healing. The partnership will fund organizations that address the intersection of gender justice, climate and environmental justice, economic justice, education justice; support multigenerational healing and organizing; build the organizing capacity of Indigenous girls and women to resist state, colonial, and gender-based violence; and advance the creation of art, music, and poetry that can help advance healing and uplift their voices.

To that end, the New Songs Rising Fund at Grantmakers for Girls of Color awarded grants to Protect the Sacred, a project of HARNESS; Restoring Justice for Indigenous Peoples; the Hmong American Women's Association; and Xinachtli Comadres National Colectiva. The Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples' Thriving Women Grants for Girls' Vitality awarded initial grants to Dances with Words, a youth development initiative of the First Peoples Fund; Pueblo Action Alliance; Ho'opae Pono Peace Project; and Iakionhnhehkwen (We Sustain Life).

"Initiatives like this must be the new normal," said Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples board member Deborah Sanchez. "Investing in our girls and their Indigenous identity brings us back in line with our health, our well-being, and the 'original instructions' we received from our ancestors."

"I want to live in a world where Indigenous girls know their history, know themselves, and know their power, and where they are free to reclaim what is rightfully theirs," said Grantmakers for Girls of Color president and CEO Monique W. Morris. "Funders seeking to make a change will nourish exceptional returns by restoring health, security, and abundance to organizations led by and serving Native and Indigenous girls."