The Women’s Fund Announces 2024-25 Grantees

For its 2024-25 grant cycle, the Women’s Fund designated its funding to support organizational transformation to benefit gender and racial equity in our region and within organizations that work on key issue areas within the economic self-sufficiency and mobility space. The Women’s Fund is proud to support five organizations in their efforts to build their capacity, improve their operations, or invest in initiatives that could move the needle on issues of women’s self-sufficiency in our region.

The Women’s Fund grant decisions are made by its Women’s Fund Advisory Board, a group of women who are directly experiencing barriers to economic mobility. They conducted multiple rounds of reviews and held thoughtful discussions about the 50 applications received and had the difficult decision of selecting organizations for funding. Our economic self-sufficiency ecosystem is doing outstanding work for women in our region, and the Women’s Fund is excited to partner with the following five organizations in 2024 and 2025:

• Do It Yourself Darlin is a program of Price Hill Will, hosting educational, hands-on home repair workshops for renters and homeowners with a “pay-what-you-can” sliding scale ticket model. Funding from the grant will be used to expand their core workshop offerings and create a more gender- and racially-balanced instructor pool.
• MORTAR Cincinnati aims to eliminate systemic economic barriers and grow self-sufficiency through sustainable Black-owned busineses. They will use the funds to support the build-out and operations of a new headquarters, quadrupling their program capacity. MORTAR has graduated more than 400 entrepreneurs across 38 cohorts, and more than 64% of their alumni are Black women.
• Ohio Justice & Policy Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit law firm, and the only law firm in Southwest Ohio that assists with safe harbor expungement. OJPC will use this grant funding to help women survivors of human trafficking remove criminal-records-based barriers and expand access to services, educational presentations, and pop-up legal clinics.
• Samaritan Car Care Clinic directly addresses the critical issue of transportation barriers to economic mobility for women, providing car repairs for low-income families. The Clinic will use the grant to provide vehicle repairs to women and single mothers referred to the Clinic.
• Sweet Cheeks Diaper Bank is the only diaper bank serving and distributing free essential diapering products across the greater Cincinnati region. This funding will support low-income mothers with children experiencing diaper need, relieving them of this financial burden and allowing them to save income and attend work, and their children to receive key early education opportunities.