Our 2024 Year in Review
Dear Third Wave Fund Community,
In one of Octavia Butler’s private journal entries, she reminds us that “there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” In a year shaped by transition and transformation, this wisdom has felt especially resonant. In 2024, we moved through a galaxy of emergence—welcoming new staff, deepening our resourcing commitments, and aligning more fully with the values that ground Third Wave Fund. Even amid uncertainty, we remain rooted in the legacy of movement builders, cultural workers, and radical resource-sharers who made our existence possible. Join us in reflecting on the last year by exploring our 2024 Year in Review: Fueled by New Suns.
From the very beginning, Third Wave Fund’s community met us with warmth and trust. You created space for us both to lead with clarity, imagination, and care. We inherited a staff of brilliant organizers, grantmakers, and resource movers who have been core to shaping our work and vision of impact.
Third Wave Fund’s commitment to gender justice continues to be essential. In 2024, at least 67 trans people—most under the age of 35—were killed or lost to violence across the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Over 550 anti-trans bills were introduced in 42 states, while attacks on abortion access, immigrant communities, and Muslim organizers surged alongside global calls for Palestinian liberation. Climate disasters decimated community organizing hubs, and Cop City developments, detention sites, and data surveillance initiatives expanded.
In the face of all of this, we remained clear at Third Wave Fund: The transformation we need cannot exist within silos—we must understand our work as a shared strategy for liberation. Gender justice and liberation is inseparable from racial justice, disability justice, sex worker-led organizing, transformative justice, and reproductive justice—and we need them all in our resistance and fight for liberation.
We met the moment in 2024 by staying the course in our grantmaking, redistributing over $3.2 million through 122 grants to 111 grantee partners across the U.S. and U.S. territories—with over $1 million of those funds spread across the South. We created new pathways of support for grantee partners, and moved additional resources to respond to climate crises and urgent threats. We deepened our long-term funding, fellowships, participatory grantmaking, and rapid response funding—because our survival and freedom demands infrastructure that is built to last.
As we look to 2025 and beyond, we are energized by the future. There are new suns. New ways forward. New possibilities. New forms of resistance. New leaps. New strategies. New solutions. We’re grateful for the lessons of 2024, our communities of resource, action and care, and feel clearer than ever that we will keep moving toward the bright unknown.
With deep gratitude and fierce commitment,
Morgan (Mo) Willis and MARS. Marshall
Co-Directors, Third Wave Fund
