The Silence Women Hold: What Philanthropy Must Do Now
By: Jazmín Chávez, VP of Movement Building & Infrastructure
At Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP), we honor the dignity, resilience, and power of the women at the heart of the farmworker and day laborer movement, women whose labor feeds this country and sustains our communities, often without recognition, protection, or fair wages.
Their work transformed fields into sites of resistance and possibility. From the fields of California to urban centers across the United States, these movements have reshaped our understanding of rights, dignity, and collective power. They remind us that change has always come from everyday people organizing for justice.
These movements have never been about one person. They are about collective power.
They are about the countless people who marched, fasted, organized, and sacrificed to secure protections many of us benefit from today, and that is precisely why this moment matters.
When leaders like Dolores Huerta, alongside Ana Murguía, Debra Rojas, and Esmeralda López, speak their truth, we must listen, not as observers, but as participants in the systems that shape power, protection, and accountability, including philanthropy. These are not outsiders critiquing a movement. They are survivors who helped build it.
As we’ve all collectively sat with this moment of grief, it has opened up additional questions, especially as white men are not held accountable to the same standard and yet we instead have to show what accountability, healing, and repair look like. The courage of these women forces us to confront a hard truth: A movement can do historic good while still causing and protecting harm. This is not theoretical. It is lived, I’ve lived it within our movement space, and plenty of women have written about this, too.
Many of us have experienced this contradiction within movement spaces, admiring leaders publicly while witnessing harm privately. These realities can coexist. And when we refuse to hold both truths, we guarantee that the cycle continues.
For philanthropy, especially those of us who invest in movement building, this is a call to act differently, not to stop funding our movement spaces.
This Is Not Just About Individuals—It Is About Structure
In my experience, I have learned that this moment is not only about individual survivors, it is about the systems that shape power, protection, and accountability within movements.
We have to ask harder questions:
Who holds power? Who is believed? What does real accountability look like in practice and do you have the infrastructure to keep victims safe when harm has been reported? And most importantly, are you willing to lose “celebrity” leaders in order to protect the people? Because when a movement chooses to protect reputation over people, it is not practicing liberation; it is reproducing harm under a different name and functioning from a space of power rooted in white supremacy and violence.
This is how abuse endures within spaces meant to create freedom, and it must end. This moment is too important for our organizations to fall apart because harm is minimized to preserve legacy, survivors are asked to stay silent for the “greater good,” and visibility or celebrity is allowed to stand in for true accountability.
What This Moment Requires of Philanthropy
The courage of women who have broken decades of silence demands more than acknowledgment; it requires transformation.
For over 60 years, survivors have carried the weight of movements while sidelining their own safety and well-being. Their stories remind us that justice work, without internal accountability, can perpetuate the very harms it seeks to dismantle.
Philanthropy can work to shift this reality by funding not only what movements achieve, but how they operate.
This means:
1. Invest in Women-Led Leadership
Supporting movements is not about adding women as symbolic representation. It is about resourcing leadership pipelines where women, particularly women of color, hold decision-making power and shape strategy.
2. Resource Healing, Operational Infrastructure, and Accountability
Allocate funding for healing justice, survivor support, internal operations, and accountability processes. This includes building a human resources team to mitigate harm, addressing past harms, disrupting cycles of abuse, and building cultures of care and accountability within organizations.
3. Center Historically Overlooked Voices, Not Just The “Icon” of the Movement
Ensure that those most impacted by injustice are guiding the distribution of resources. Proximity to harm must shape power and ask for questions on staffing and the teams executing the work, not just the loudest voice in the space.
4. Challenge Systemic Power Imbalances
Fund efforts that confront patriarchy, structural inequity, and the normalization of abusive power within movements, not just externally, but internally.
5. Redefine What Success Looks Like
Impact cannot be measured solely by outcomes; we learned this during the pandemic and it’s calling on us to rethink this again today. It must include how people are treated, protected, and valued in the process.
Accountability Is Not Betrayal—It Is Love
Accountability is not a threat to movements. It is what sustains them. It is a courageous act of love for our communities, our histories, and the future we are building, just like these women have shown us.
But in order for us to collectively move forward, accountability must be paired with healing and reconciliation:
- A commitment to repair what can be repaired
- A willingness to honor survivors and victims
- A determination to ensure that the conditions that enabled harm are not recreated
Because the deeper truth is this:
Our work has shown us that across borders, movements, and political ideologies, we are still operating within systems that were never designed to protect women, especially young women, Indigenous women, low-income women, and women of color. But if we invest in the internal infrastructure to protect people while also investing in the long arc of systems change, then we can move mountains. Both things can be true and are required for the success of our movement organizations.
Where We Go From Here
We are sitting in a moment of grief, anger, and complexity, but as I mentioned before, we cannot stop there. We must act. We honor survivors by believing them and honor movements by strengthening them.
Most importantly, we honor the future by refusing to build justice on top of silence.
At HIP, we commit to advancing a philanthropic practice that centers dignity, accountability, and care, ensuring that no one is asked to sacrifice their humanity for the sake of progress.
Because our true liberation requires both justice and truth.