Radical Love, Collective Power: Saida Agostini-Bostic on Black Queer Liberation
As part of our "Intersections of Resilience" series, we honor the transformative leadership within our comunidad. For Women's History Month, we’re highlighting stories that illuminate how their lived experiences, unwavering determination, and visionary work are actively reshaping philanthropy's future. Through their journeys, we witness the power of women's leadership to create more equitable, inclusive, and just communities.
To continue the series, we invited HIP board member Jonathan Jayes-Green to share their platform and voice.
2025 just started, and it has already been a rough year. Uncertainty, chaos, destruction, and pain surround us, and more is sure to come. As people who labor in the philanthropic sector, it is our job to be of the highest service to the people and communities we support. To do that well, we need to have our feet planted on the ground, our hands interlocked with our communities, and our eyes and minds across the past, present, and future. I am interviewing Black women from Latin America and the Caribbean to help me do just that.
Next, Saida Agostini-Bostic from Funders for LGBTQ Issues.
Jonathan: We are living through devastating times for our country, our democracy, and our communities worldwide. This Black History Month, how are you keeping yourself grounded on the long arc of resistance, strategy, and brilliance of Black people?
Saida: I'm working on a series of poems exploring the interior life and pleasures of Harriet Tubman. Reading books like Tiya Miles' Night Flyer, which plumbs Tubman's spiritual journey, has left me with a sharper understanding of what it takes to build a full-throated resistance - sheer, stubborn delight. Harriet Tubman loved freedom, loved her people, and trusted her vision. She also intimately understood that shared precarity does not equate to shared politic (to quote Dr Joy H James), and dedicated her life to being in relationship with people who shared her understanding of freedom building.
Our work at this moment is to follow the models set by Harriet Tubman, Marsha P. Johnson, Anna Julia Cooper, June Jordan, and the Combahee River Collective. We are surrounded by visionaries, organizers, mystics, and artists who have not only offered a vision of a new world but are actively building it. My role - as both a philanthropic organizer and poet- is to trust our collective vision and follow the light. We've come all this way - I have faith that we will continue to find our way.
Jonathan: I am in this work because I believe we can transform our country and our world into places where every single member of our society can thrive. What is your vision for our people and our collective society?
Saida: For this, I come back to Funders for LGBTQ Issues' vision statement, created during our new strategic plan. We envision a world where all queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people are liberated, loved, valued, respected, and thriving. This shouldn't be an audacious vision, but it has always been radical to demand the agency that is our collective birthright. I come from a tradition of people who understand without question that our love is our wealth (to paraphrase Nikki Giovanni). This is my north star, the vision I follow when all else fails.
Jonathan: What is your call to action for the philanthropic sector?
Saida: My call to philanthropy is to remember that we are not the first, nor the last, to confront the far right's attacks on bodily autonomy. Our work in this moment is to not be isolated, but to be in a deeper relationship with each other, to organize, and to fight like our lives depend on it. To remember that we have everything we need to win.
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Saida Agostini-Bostic, President, Funders for LGBTQ Issues
Saida is a longtime cultural organizer, activist, and seasoned nonprofit leader. She has guided statewide advocacy efforts promoting the rights of LGBTQ youth in foster care, education, and juvenile justice, winning critical new protections, and directed national art actions uplifting the visibility of Black girls, women, and LGBTQ communities. Founder of the Rooted Collective, a gathering of Black LGBTQ healing justice activists in Baltimore, Saida is dedicated to building radical healing spaces that move us towards freedom.
She comes to Funders from YWCA USA, where she served as Vice President of Member Services, directing a department responsible for stewarding a national network of over two hundred local associations serving 2.3 million women and girls annually. Prior to YWCA USA, Saida was Chief Operating Officer for FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, an artist collective dedicated to ending rape culture. During Saida’s tenure, she guided critical coalition-building efforts to ensure the success of key organizational projects, most notably, the display of the Monument Quilt on the National Mall, a collection of over three thousand quilt squares crowdsourced from survivors over several years.
In November 2017, Saida was named a Movement Maker by the Move to End Violence, a program of the NoVo Foundation. A graduate Cave Canem Fellow, she has received honors for her art and activism from the Baltimore Sun, R.W. Deutsch Foundation, Leeway Foundation, and the Blue Mountain Center. She holds a Masters of Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania.