Portland’s Kennedy Park Football Club, a BIPOC Fund grantee, engages asylees, refugees and immigrants through a shared cultural touchstone: soccer. The football club provides skill-development sessions and helps players plan for their future and navigate higher education financial aid. Kennedy Park Football Club photo
For 25 years, the Maine Community Foundation’s Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Fund (originally called the People of Color Fund) has supported organizations serving people of color advance racial equity in Maine. Today, the fund supports a wide range of nonprofit organizations that strengthen BIPOC communities, from social services and education to arts and culture. The fund has awarded 273 grants totaling $2.1 million.
It was uncommon in the late nineties for a foundation to center a grantmaking program on racial equity. “It was pretty revolutionary to have a fund advised by people from the communities that they serve;’ said Jenna Dela Cruz Vendil, BIPOC Fund advisor and associate director of democratic engagement and student activism at Bates College. Many of the grantees are newly-launched nonprofits by immigrants and asylum seekers who are organizing resources and support for their communities in Maine. “The BIPOC Fund has supported organizations that have really taken off and that speaks to their longevity and impact. “We were there when they needed it,” Vendil said.
To build a better Maine, MaineCF has invested in strategies that spotlight race-based barriers and help correct the systems and practices that create them. People of color make up more than eight percent of Maine’s population yet encounter significant barriers that negatively impact their health and economic wellbeing. The COVID-19 pandemic and murder of George Floyd in early 2020 opened the nation’s eyes to continued systemic racism in all corners of the country, including here in Maine. MaineCF was prepared to act and be a resource because it had already established this work as a priority.
The BIPOC Fund has supported Wabanaki REACH, a nonprofit organization based in Bangor that supports the self-determination of Wabanaki people through education, truth-telling, restorative justice and restorative practices in Wabanaki and Maine communities. Wabanaki REACH photo
At the time, MaineCF staff provided guidance to nonprofits across the state that asked for direction on how they could focus on racial equity in their own organizations. Donations to MaineCF’s BIPOC Fund increased by more than 34 percent in 2020. The donations were all sizes – $5, $20, $1,000 – people from all corners of the state were giving what they could to support racial equity here. Still, MaineCF continues to work with donors and organizations to dismantle unjust systems in Maine.
MaineCF donors continue to recognize the importance of this work. In 2023, an anonymous $500,000 gift allowed the fund to increase grantmaking and ensure its resources are available to BIPOC organizations well into the future. Internally, MaineCF, consistently assesses its policies and procedures to ensure equity across the organization.
An equitable Maine benefits everyone. While MaineCF’s work is never finished, the BIPOC Fund will continue to build a better, equitable Maine. As Heather McGhee writes in her book, “The Sum of Us”: “We are so much more, when the ‘we’ in ‘We the People’ is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than – and greater for – the sum of us.”
