On June 15, Goldman Sachs announced 50 recipients of the Black Women Impact Grants program, as part of its One Million Black Women initiative to fund Black women-led and Black women-serving nonprofits.
The Black Women Impact Grants program will award 50 Black-led organizations throughout the United States with two years of general operational funding, ranging from $50,000 to $250,000. A total of $10 million will be invested through the financial institution’s multi-year program.
“We know one of the best ways to create a more inclusive economy is to invest in Black women,” David Solomon, Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO, said in a press release. “From our listening sessions, we’ve learned just how transformative Black women-led nonprofits have been for communities, and now we’re going to spotlight these organizations and give their leaders the resources they need to increase their impact.”
Applicants were chosen based on “their established efforts to deliver innovative and transformative solutions to narrow opportunity gaps faced by Black women,” according to the press release. Each organization directly focuses on advancing at least one of the One Million Black Women seven impact areas, which include: healthcare; education; affordable housing; financial health; digital connectivity; access to capital; and job creation and workforce development.
More than 800 organizations applied for the grant. Among the 50 recipients chosen are SistasCaring4Sistas, Mama Glow Foundation, Black Women Build, Polished Pebbles Girls’ Mentoring Program, Black Girls Smile Inc. and Butterfly Dreamz, Inc.
“We are excited that Black Girls Smile was chosen for this prestigious honor. Succeeding the 2020 racial reckoning, many organizations have deserted their efforts to prioritize racial, economic, medical, and social equity,” Lauren Carson, the founder of Black Girls Smile, said in a statement. “With this grant, Goldman Sachs is helping to push the needle towards equitable mental health accessibility for young Black women and girls.”
Black women continue to be under-resourced and underpaid. According to research from Goldman Sachs’ 2021 Black Womenomics report, Black women face a 90 percent wealth gap, with the median Black household owning about 85 percent less wealth than the median white household.
The One Million Black Women initiative aims to narrow the racial wealth gap by listening to and investing in Black women.
“We believe that Black women in America are the best investment that you can make today if you care about those issues,” Dina Powell McCormick, global head of sustainability and inclusive growth at Goldman Sachs, told ESSENCE last year. “So many years from now, we will be proud that we brought a coalition of partners, many of whom are Black women–led organizations, and built a program that put Black women at the center of every investment that we made. And that as a result, more than a million Black women will have been reached.”
Since taking office about three weeks ago, Donald Trump has issued a blizzard of 200+ executive orders. Among them are two key anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) directives that threaten to roll back decades of progress in expanding opportunities for people of color, women and other historically marginalized groups.
The first executive order eliminates DEI enacted under President Biden, who required all federal agencies to create plans to “address unequal barriers to opportunity” and ensure workplace equity. Trump’s order terminates all DEI, DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility), and environmental justice jobs as well as any programs, grants, or contracts related to its implementation, calling them “forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”
The second executive order eliminates all DEI orders from previous administrations, including one by President Lyndon Johnson from 1965, which required federal contractors to provide equal opportunity measures. In rolling back the policies, Trump called DEI “immoral” and “illegal” and painted it as a “corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system” that robbed “hardworking Americans”—implicitly white men—“of opportunities because of their race or sex.”
President Trump also warned of “adverse consequences” for those federal workers who fail to report colleagues who refuse to dismantle DEI policies.
While the order is limited to the federal government, it directs federal agencies to find ways, including potential litigation, to pressure the private sector also to abandon its DEI policies. This threatens to accelerate a corporate anti-DEI trend that has already been in the works. Walmart, which back in 2020 announced a $100 million investment in a center for racial equity, announced several days after Trump’s election that it was dropping the center and would no longer use the terms DEI and Latinx in official communications. McDonald’s, Meta and Target have also dropped their DEI initiatives as reported by Axios.
After the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, which deemed affirmative action in university admissions unconstitutional, attacks on DEI proliferated, and the term became a right-wing bogeyman blamed for almost anything that goes wrong in any workplace. For example, just one day after the tragic plane and helicopter collision over the Potomac River which claimed 67 lives, Trump baselessly blamed DEI policies for the crash—while the investigation into the crash’s cause had barely begun. Language in President Trump’s executive order also portrays DEI policies as inherently dangerous declaring they “threaten the safety of American men, women and children across the Nation by diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work and determination when selecting people for jobs and services in key sectors of American society.”
These statements seem to suggest that DEI exists in opposition to excellence and hard work—and that providing opportunities to non-white people automatically lowers standards.This is false. DEI requires the same standards for everyone and only hires those who fulfill the requirements of a given job, a point echoed by Everett Kelly, National President of the 800,000-member American Federation of Government Employees “The federal government already hires and promotes exclusively on the basis of merit. The results are clear: a diverse federal workforce that looks like the nation it serves, with the lowest gender and racial pay gaps in the country. We should all be proud of that.”
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Black people make up a larger share of the federal workforce (18.6%) than they do of the civilian workforce (12.8%),according to Pew Research. It’s unclear how many people will be affected by the order. Still, the federal government is the biggest employer in the US and Black people, who have the highest unemployment rates, risk greater job loss as a result.
The vagueness of President Trump’s orders have also left agencies struggling to comply and erasing Black history in the process. For example, the Air Force recently removed the Tuskegee Airmen from their training videos, and it was only reinstated after public outcry.
The anti-DEI trend is part of a larger attack on anti-discrimination efforts, sparked by the push for racial progress after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Now that DEI is under fire, the question is—how do we keep these policies alive?
Despite mounting political pressure, companies like Apple, Costco and JPMorgan Chase remain steadfast in their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, refusing to bow to conservative attacks. Additionally, most Fortune 500 companies have not abandoned their DEI policies.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a non-partisan group that fights “government abuse” primarily through lawsuits, counters President Trump’s claim that DEI or DEIA is illegal, saying, “The executive orders attempt to conflate these lawful efforts with discrimination, weaponizing enforcement to bully institutions into abandoning critical programs.” “However, no court has declared DEIA efforts inherently illegal, and President Trump cannot override decades of legal precedent.” The ACLU supported and launched numerous lawsuits against the rollback of DEI during Trump’s first term and have vowed to do so again.
In the meantime, the Civil Rights Act is still the law of the land, and it remains illegal to discriminate against anyone based on race, gender, and other protected characteristics.