A Black feminist world is one where all people can thrive and realise their full potential, free from violence and discrimination. In Kingston, Jamaica, an organisation has spent ten years building it, in the face of conditions designed to make that impossible.

In 2006, TIME magazine dubbed Jamaica “the most homophobic place on earth.” Nine years later, Akilah White and Neish McLean, inspired by a transformative workshop held by WE-Change Jamaica, created a blog to amplify transgender voices, share lived experiences, and confront the systemic inequalities faced by gender expansive people in Jamaican society. That bold act became the foundation of TransWave Jamaica, the country’s first transgender-led advocacy organisation, now operating across research, policy, health promotion, and direct community support. In a context where trans and gender expansive people navigate daily risks to their safety, their health, and their existence, TransWave Jamaica has built ten years of unrelenting research and policy advocacy, and community care.

That care shows up in one of the most intimate and material aspects of daily life. TransWave organises bi-annual clothing drives where community members sort through carefully laundered, donated garments, selecting pieces that embody getting dressed as an act of self-determination. TransWave’s community support extends to backyard farming, building food self-sufficiency and organising markets for community members to sell their produce. They also organise  an Ambassador Training programme that equips queer and trans people to advocate in government spaces, health settings, and public forums on their own terms. And when formal systems fail, TransWave’s Mutual Aid Support programme provides direct relief to community members impacted by climate crises, facing displacement, medical emergencies, and hardship caused by transphobia.

TransWave’s community-rooted work is inseparable from its research and policy advocacy. Since 2019, it has been a formal partner in Jamaica’s HIV response under the Global Fund grant, connecting community members to prevention and treatment services. In 2020, TransWave developed Jamaica’s National Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Health Strategy, mapping the specific health vulnerabilities of trans Jamaicans and setting out recommendations for various sectors of society. The cumulative effect of TransWave’s work is undeniable. As Mali Dust (she/they), Monitoring, Evaluation and Grants Specialist, shares: “We’ve seen more allies, more organisations and other civil society groups who are willing to work with us, with the trans community. We’re seeing that there are more safer spaces that trans people can reside in, and can affirm themselves in without as much fear of backlash or of discrimination.” That social change, she is clear, did not happen by accident. It happened because their organisation was resourced well enough, consistently enough, to do the work.

That kind of resourcing is, unfortunately, rare. Philanthropic funding typically arrives in the form of project-specific grants with narrow scopes and specified expected outcomes. It assumes a stability and predictability that grassroots organisations seldom experience, and it leaves them unable to pivot when circumstances demand it. For organisations working with queer and trans people, they are often treated as niche rather than as doing the intersectional, essential work that they are, making them among the most expendable when budgets tighten.

The Black Feminist Fund has chosen to model something different in philanthropy. In 2023, BFF awarded TransWave a flexible eight-year grant. “We were able to keep our doors open in a time where we were battling the anti-gender movement, we saw funding cuts, and we had to respond and be there for our community in a time when national efforts were not working in their favour,” said Lamar-Shey Grant (they/she), Interim Executive Director. “The funding definitely acted as a reservoir of support.” What made this funding work was not only the amount but the nature of the partnership. As Dust described it, “For us to be able to identify the means and the needs for the community and be able to fund it in a way that is impactful rather than just specific to what’s expected under a given mandate — it has really been something that we are greatly appreciative of.” The Black Feminist Fund is TransWave’s largest funder to date, and the partnership has extended well beyond the grant. BFF supported TransWave’s attendance at the AWID Forum in Thailand, where the team led a panel on feminism and trans women in the Caribbean, bringing a perspective that is not often given space in international feminist conversations.

The value of that kind of unrestricted, trust-based funding became abundantly clear in 2025, when the dissolution of USAID delivered a dire blow to funding resources for the Caribbean LGBTQ+ movement. For TransWave, the consequences were immediate and severe. “Most of our funders who supported our work were funded by USAID,” explained Grant. “By virtue of that pausing, it affected us in that some of the funders who committed funds to us pulled out at the last minute, and those who we had confirmed grants with just ended up cutting that funding and ending the programme immaturely.” TransWave lost an estimated $100,000 USD, a sum that, as Grant noted, is catastrophic for a small organisation operating on a constrained budget. “We had to cut a whole department from our organisation. And that really put a dent in our work.” Sheré Samuels, Interim Research and Advocacy Director, situates the loss within a broader pattern: trans and gender expansive issues in Jamaica and the Caribbean “are not really a one-size-fits-all type of thing,” she explains. Their work is shaped by a specific social and political context that an external philanthropic organization or project grant cannot fully anticipate. “It really takes cash to care,” Grant emphasises. “And for a small organisation doing such an amount of work, work that has such a big impact, it really can be burdensome at times if the funding isn’t present.”

Against that backdrop, BFF’s flexible, eight-year commitment models what responsive, trust-based philanthropy looks like in practice, and the possibilities unlocked when funders trust organisations to know what their communities need. TransWave has spent ten years demonstrating what is possible when a community-led organisation is resourced that way. That trust, and the resources to back it, are what the broader philanthropic sector needs to learn to extend.

What this approach to philanthropic funding ultimately makes possible goes beyond an organization’s survival, it allows us to build a new world. For the TransWave team, building Black feminist worlds is a personal and imaginative project. For Grant, the vision is all-encompassing: “A world where all persons, Black and brown identified persons, can live and realise their full potentials. A world where we just can be and exist freely regardless of the colour of our skin and our experiences.” For Samuels, it means “understanding that our differences don’t have to mean that we are in disagreement. That we can respect what makes us different, find the similarities, and still use this to create a voice that is so much louder, representative of all and still holds everybody in that embrace.”

Ten years in, TransWave is building that world, through extreme climate events, funding crises, and expanding global anti-gender movements that have made the work more difficult and more urgent. The legal protections trans Jamaicans deserve do not yet exist. The systems meant to serve them remain largely unreformed. And yet, there is a Black feminist organisation in Kingston that trains advocates, produces policy, and continues to show up, resolutely,  for its community.