What It Takes to Lead a Movement as a Black Woman

To build movements, Black women leaders juggle intense demands at a steep emotional cost. Philanthropy has an obligation to support us.

Black women have always answered the call to lead social and racial justice movements, even when our leadership went unseen. Throughout history, our wisdom and life experiences have fueled our determination to dismantle structural barriers to health and racial justice. With access to more resources, we can continue leading powerful movements that build a future where health, opportunity, and dignity are not a privilege for some, but a right for all. To pave the way to this future, philanthropy must listen deeply to understand and support us.

My personal calling

For me, the call to lead came in 2017 when I was three months pregnant and working at a network that created funds to help people pay bail. I was in a room with dedicated Black lawyers and organizers who were unpacking how pretrial detention and money bail unfairly drive the incarceration of Black people.

During that gathering, someone raised the idea of a Mother’s Day bailout to free Black mothers and caregivers and further draw attention to the harms of money bail and pretrial detention. I believed deeply in the vision, but I also had practical concerns. How would we coordinate across cities? How would we raise and distribute resources? How would we build something accountable to the people most directly facing these harms? Then someone turned to me and said: “You’re the bail girl. You should figure this out.”

I was ready for the challenge. And I said “yes.”

My “yes” became the impetus for the National Bail Out Collective, an organization I co-founded to build a community-based movement to end pretrial detention. I coordinated bail funds across dozens of cities, built infrastructure from scratch, navigated partners with vastly different resources and organizational missions, raised millions through grassroots fundraising before any large philanthropic institution would touch us, and traveled to jails and prosecutors’ offices across the South. By then, I was also navigating the physical and emotional transformation that came with being in my third trimester of pregnancy.

My deep belief in Black people led me to embrace the demands that came with serving as executive director while pregnant.  There was something clarifying about building a movement while carrying new life. Organizing was in my bones. I held the vision, the strategy, the relationships, and the grief, all at once. This is what it takes for Black women like me to lead within a movement.

Leadership at an emotional cost

While no movement can survive without this wholehearted commitment, we rarely confront the brutal, invisible cost leaders pay. One of my firsthand experiences illustrates this. During a leadership retreat, my team and our advisory committee participated in an activity where the facilitator asked us to line up in order of who held the most responsibility for the work. That placed me at the front of the line. She then asked us to line up by who held the most power. I stood at the front again. During the post-activity reflection, a colleague shared that she wished she were closer to my position of power. She admitted, however, that she did not want my level of responsibility or workload. I left finally feeling seen yet still feeling isolated. That moment crystallized a reality for me: authority is visible, but the full responsibility and emotional cost of leadership often are not.

Black women executive directors leading within movements are managing organizations, holding multiple relationships, while navigating limited resources and extreme demands. This combination often causes exhaustion and burnout, because of the structural reality within which we operate, not because of personal failings or lack of capacity. 

Black women leaders are working to transform the very systems that marginalize us based on race and gender. The exhaustion comes from carrying heavy workloads combined with enduring the very conditions we are trying to change.

The factors contributing to these heavy loads are well-documented. Black women-led organizations receive less than 0.5% of foundation giving, creating chronic under-resourcing that compounds over time. More than half of Black-led nonprofit leaders have faced pressure from funders to soften or remove race-explicit language from their work, even as race remains foundational to their missions and the issues they seek to address. Through experience, I’ve also noticed that many Black women executive directors have either founded, or inherited in their infancy, the nonprofits they lead. They are building organizations without a blueprint. Understanding what it takes to lead in this environment requires a willingness to reckon honestly with what we have built and what that work has cost us.

Navigating relationship and isolation: the invisible dimensions of leadership

Leadership within social justice movements requires continuous relationship and trust building with community members, staff, funders, board members, partners, and others. All these groups carry unique expectations and histories.

History has also shaped this country’s expectations that Black women will provide care, comfort, and emotional labor for others while ignoring our own needs. That history, from forced caregiving to enduring stereotypes of Black women as selfless caretakers, still influences leadership expectations today. Staff, supporters, funders, and others may expect Black women executive directors to lead while providing a kind of motherly care for all, something they likely do not expect of others in similar roles.

Yet despite the constant relational demand, executive director roles within social justice movements are profoundly isolating. Leaders accountable to multiple groups often lack peer support. Because these leaders are from the very communities enduring systemic harm, that isolation is personal.

The compounding financial strain, identity erasure, and isolation are part of the structural environment in which movement leadership happens.

Building a foundation of support

When I joined RWJF, I carried the memory of how it felt to navigate leadership alone without a net while the load became too heavy. To support leaders like me, I wanted to build something intentional for those who came next.

In 2025, I brought that vision to life with the launch of the Black Women’s Executive Directors (BWED) Program, created for women who, like me, answered the call to lead. Co-led by BOLD Training Institute and re:power, the program supports 10 Black women executive directors of social and racial justice organizations through sustained general operating support, leadership development, peer connection, and wellness resources; ultimately, in service of healthy and equitable communities. 

Over the past year, I have proudly watched the inaugural BWED cohort building the type of community I needed as an executive director. These leaders are recommending funders to one another, collaborating across organizations, and exchanging strategies that strengthen their work collectively. The camaraderie generates an abundance mindset that counters scarcity-driven norms the philanthropic sector enforces.

While this doesn’t eliminate structural challenges, it provides a relational infrastructure that sustains Black women leaders and their work. Inclusive leadership requires precisely these kinds of sustained, generous, trust-based relationships.

What philanthropy must do

Sustainable leadership entails building relationships, sharing responsibility, and learning collectively. Funders must listen intently to Black women and other movement leaders and invest in spaces where these leaders can learn from and support one another. This makes the work sustainable and the people doing it more effective.

About the author

Arissa Hall is Senior Program Officer for Leadership for Better Health at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is a former Executive Director of the National Bail Out Collective.