2025 YEAR-END REPORT
We are building the alliance to meet this moment.
When political attacks targeted immigrants, diversity and inclusion programs, and trans people in 2025, Alliance for Girls responded with what we do best: bringing people together. We convened 156 organizations, trained youth researchers, curated urgent resources, and proved that collective power is our greatest defense. This report shows how we strengthened our alliance when it mattered most.
Explore AFG’S 2025 Key Initiatives:
“We are our grandmothers' prayers. We are our grandfathers' dreamings. We carry them in our cells, in our bones, in our souls.”
— Layla Saad
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)
We didn't just respond to political attacks — we put young people at the center of telling their own stories.
This year, Alliance for Girls trained youth researchers who are girls, gender-expansive people, and women of color in Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) methods.
We believe it is essential that youth are not just participants in research, but co-designers, partners, and decision-makers, because they deserve both the space to tell their own stories and to inform solutions to challenges that affect their lives.
Our researchers are working on a Mental Health Report, as poor mental health and well-being among youth — particularly among girls and gender-expansive youth of color — are increasingly recognized as a significant public health issue.
“[In the BIPOC] community, there's a lot of stigma around mental health, and it makes it a lot harder for people to open up or ask for help. And I wanted to break that stigma.”
—Youth Researcher
In June, we held a YPAR Training session at the Dream Youth Clinic in Oakland, a member organization of AFG.
Alliance for Girls’ political impact survey this year found that 63% of AFG’s member organizations in the Bay Area and LA County have observed higher anxiety levels in the young people that engage in their programming, and 82% named safety as the primary concern for girls and gender-expansive youth in their work. This is due to the attacks of the current American political administration aimed at this population and non-profits serving them.
Given these alarming statistics, AFG believes that it is vital to center youth voices in understanding this relationship between safety and mental health and any development of solutions.
The Mental Health Report is deploying a mixed-methods approach, integrating qualitative and quantitative methodologies to comprehensively understand youth mental health experiences. Led entirely by youth researchers, the report will be released in 2026 — offering policy recommendations grounded in lived experience, not adult assumptions.
The Santa Clara County Plática was an in-person community gathering co-hosted by Alliance for Girls and YWCA Golden Gate Silicon Valley focused on building connections and discussing mental health and safety issues impacting young people and youth-serving organizations.
Meet AFG’s Youth Research Team:
Chuan Xin Loh
Alyvia Deangelo
Gracy Vaca Mora
Coatlupe Martínez
Susanna Chen
Priyanka Kalidindi
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
— Audra Lorde
Tracking the Political Impact
Looking ahead, we're committed to being a go-to organization for girl-championing organizations to understand what's happening in California's girl-serving sector. Through 2026, we'll continue tracking how federal policies impact state and local policies affecting healthcare, education, workers' rights, and anti-discrimination protections—the infrastructure that allows girls and gender-expansive youth, particularly those of color, to feel safe.
To provide support to our member organizations, their donors and funders, and the youth they serve, this year we curated 10 resource guides related to Immigration, Trans rights, DEI, and other urgent topics: Resource Guides.
The current political administration in the United States had a profoundly negative impact on the nonprofits in our network and the girls and gender-expansive youth they serve.
The federal government dictates where dollars go and can dismantle the little infrastructure girls and gender-expansive youth have.
This year, AFG hosted two convenings that brought together experts across policy, funding, legal advocacy, and direct services to unpack key challenges and explore strategies for action. These convenings were attended by staff representing 80 organizations and foundations.
As well as providing programming for our members, this year we conducted research to understand the impact of the political environment on our member organizations and their work at this moment.
The Political Impact Report, released in June 2025, found organizations serving girls and gender-expansive youth are caught in a triple bind — their services are urgently needed by the populations they serve, yet they are unsure which programs they can legally offer, and they are facing uncertainty about whether they will have the funding to support their work.
Despite these challenges, organizations are adapting and continuing to implement strategies that support how the organization functions and the young people they serve, centering community, collaboration, and care.
“The guides, especially those supporting nonprofits impacted by attacks on DEl, trans youth, and immigrant youth, are an invaluable resource in these challenging times. I've already reposted them on my LinkedIn to help amplify the reach.”
—Youth Programs Consultant
The political impact report survey found:
91%
of organizations may or are already facing an impact on their funding
83%
of organizations say they may or are already facing policy restrictions
8/10
organizations prioritize safety for their girls and gender-expansive youth
“We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.”
— Gwendolyn Brooks
Breakdown of AFG membership by CA county:
Our 120+ member organizations span nine Bay Area counties and LA County, creating a network that serves 300,000+ girls and gender-expansive youth across California.
Our Alliance Is More Important Than Ever
At our foundation, our alliance is a community where people look out for one another. Right now, that means providing both guidance to navigate political attacks and funding gaps and the care that sustains us through it.
In the summer of 2024, Alliance for Girls organized a membership committee to support reimagining and redesigning AFG’s membership model, with the aim of launching in 2025.
Between September 2024-February 2025, the committee met monthly and worked with AFG’s staff to inform a new model, which is more value-centered and focused on engagement. The new model more explicitly asks members to work together, recognize that we are interconnected, and work towards personal and social transformation.
“If we are an alliance, we are not in competition. It is complementary, supportive. When I shine, you shine. When I win, you win.”
—AFG member organization
AFG offers its members:
Communities
of Practice
Accessible
Research & Data
Technical
Support
Funding
opportunities
Community
Events
Paid
Opportunities
for Youth
Youth-Driven
Policies & Advocacy
Networking/
Connecting
Toolkits &
Best Practices
Trainings &
Workshops
“We must never, in the name of being realistic, lose our joy. Joy is what will keep us fighting.”
— Mariame Kaba
Values Creation
In September 2025, in the midst of organizational transitions and external pressures, we came together as a team and asked ourselves: What will keep us grounded when everything around us is unstable? How do we make decisions that reflect who we are, not just what we can afford? We spent the fall identifying our core values, not as aspirations but as commitments to each other and our community.
In an environment where federal policies continue to harm girls and gender-expansive youth of color and the nonprofits serving them, knowing and standing firm in our values allows us to make decisions that reflect what we stand for.
Our values help us to hold ourselves accountable to our community in the way we show up and work. They guide us as we work to grow trust, foster relationships, and truly serve the communities we work for every day.
Together, we determined AFG’s values are:
Intersectionality
We honor and value all facets of identity and experience, rooting them in historical and current political, social, and economic contexts.
Care Work
We practice collective care rooted in showing up for and with our community and its many needs to the best of our abilities.
Joy & Wholeheartedness
We center joy and pleasure with intention and authenticity. In our work, we incorporate levity, creativity, whimsy, and laughter. We celebrate our own existence as much as the communities we serve while doing this hard work.
Intergenerational
We value and recognize that all generations—from girls and gender-expansive youth to seasoned organizers and community members—bring leadership, essential wisdom, energy, and perspectives needed for real and lasting social change.
Collective Knowledge
We have community-based memory. We recognize everyone has a lived experience they can draw from, and we can all learn from each other. It takes long-term commitment to fight erasure and transform our communities.
Interdependence
We rely on each other. In order to collaborate, we must be flexible and trust in the community to co-create/build.
Collective Accountability
We hold each other and ourselves accountable to our shared values, commitments, and collective goals while approaching conflict and challenge from a place of care and trust in each other's good intentions.
“Accountability is not punishment. Accountability is love in action.”
— Sonya Renee Taylor
A MESSAGE FROM OUR EXECUTIVE DIRECTORLooking Ahead
Dear AFG Community,
We are living through a moment of escalating political attacks, systemic intimidation, and the active erosion of rights of some of the most marginalized communities and the organizations fighting alongside them. The result is devastating: funding streams are disappearing while the needs of our communities surge. In times of manufactured scarcity like these, the systems that were created to oppress want us to turn on each other, to compete for crumbs while those in power hoard resources. This is not new, and many who came before us faced similar state-sanctioned violence faced it head on, not alone but together. Alliance, mutual care, and collective action are not abstract principles. They are our lifeline and a practice that we must choose to embrace.
This year, Alliance for Girls (AFG) was not immune to these forces. Like countless nonprofit organizations led by and for communities of color across the Bay Area and beyond, we faced budget realities that resulted in staff cuts. Even amid the grief of these losses, we move forward— not because we are unaffected or don’t care, but because our girls and gender-expansive youth of color and our member organizations that serve them need us and because retreat is not an option.
As we enter the new year, we are deepening our partnerships, including with Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), where we are expanding our work to support creating safer environments where girls and gender-expansive youth of color and their peers can truly thrive. We will continue to invest in the voices of our youth through our Youth Mental Health and Safety YPAR study led by our six youth researchers.
And we will continue to uplift the impacts of this current political environment on the health and wellbeing of the nonprofit and community-based organizations that serve these populations through our Political Impact Project. This is where power builds, from those closest to the problem.
As you consider your end-of-year giving, I ask you to include AFG in your plans. Your financial support is a political action, standing in solidarity with and investing in girls and gender-expansive youth, especially those of color, as they, and their allies, continue to advocate for a future where they are valued, respected, and safe.
Thank you for being part of this community. Thank you for refusing to let scarcity break our bonds. And thank you for showing up for one another, for our young folks, and for the future we’re building together— one grounded in justice, abundance, and collective care.
Wishing you rest, connection, and defiant joy as we step into a new year of possibility.
In solidarity and gratitude,
Chantal Hildebrand
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Year-End Report Credits: Storytelling by Public Access | Visual and web design by Njoki Gitahi | Photography by Myleen Hollero and Chanell Stone