I'm alicia.

alicia sanchez gill is a Miami-born, Howard University raised queer, AfroBoricua, a queer mama and a survivor of child sexual abuse and family violence. alicia’s organizing superpowers are experimenting with new tactics, facilitating hard conversations, making sure everyone has snacks, developing strategies, listening deeply, resource matchmaking, creating the google doc and building relationships. alicia holds a masters of social work but other survivors have been her best teachers.

 

Currently, alicia is the Executive Director of Emergent Fund, a rapid response fund rooted in movement-building. In her role, alicia has raised and moved almost 10 million dollars to Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led grassroots organizations mobilizing in response to COVID-19, family separation, Muslim bans, police brutality, abortion bans, climate injustice, LGBTQ+ rights and more. Through trust-based, community led philanthropy, alicia is able to do the work of reparations and land back by moving wealth out of the hands of extractive institutions and into the hands of organizers on the frontlines so that they have the resources they need to build power and heal in the face of relentless crisis.

 

Prior to Emergent Fund, alicia spent fifteen years in gender justice organizations working on local and national campaigns to end interpersonal and state patriarchal violence with abolition as a north star. alicia has her roots and heart in cross movement organizing firmly grounded in Black, queer feminist theory and lived experience. alicia started her organizing in 2005 through her work directly with other survivors when she led Washington DC’s 24-hour hotline and hospital advocacy crisis program for survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. Her work in rape crisis and domestic violence shelters politicized her, gave language to her own experience and laid bare the failures of the carceral state. She’s been creating alternatives to the state for survivors ever since. She is deeply connected to local and national movement spaces, having worked, volunteered and organized with The DC Rape Crisis Center, HIPS, The Women’s Collective, Collective Action for Safe Spaces, The Diverse City Fund, Black Mama’s Bailout, INCITE!, YWCA USA, DecrimNow DC! and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. alicia has also served on the Peace Corps Sexual Assault Advisory Council, the DC Department of Health Advisory Council, the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence Policy Task Force, and the Sex Workers Advocates Coalition.

 

alicia serves on the advisory council for The Constellations Culture Change Fund at the Center for Cultural Power, the Democracy Frontlines Fund and Abortion Bridge Collaborative Fund. She believes in continuous political education and building power in community and is a member of Mijente, Black Feminist Future and Southerners on New Ground (SONG). alicia was named a Roddenberry fellow in 2021, which has allowed her to co-create a philanthropic ecosystem in which movements are supported to do the work that transmutes crisis into change. No matter which orbit alicia’s organizing in, her work is to bring a survivor-centered and intersectional praxis to building collective power and transforming systems.