Fund Fat Forever!
Image description: The text “fund FAT” is displayed within turquoise shapes on a darker blue background.
By Tigress Osborn, Executive Director of NAAFA
If you’ve been keeping up with your emails from NAAFA or you had an eye on @naafaofficial on your favorite social media platform in December, you know that we ended the year by sharing lots of reasons for our community and our allies to #FundFat.
We asked you to fund fat labor, fat community, fat freedom, and fat joy– and you answered the call! You donated over $10,000. 58 brand new donors gave to NAAFA for the first time ever during our #FundFat campaign. Many people were inspired to give more than once between Giving Tuesday and the end of the year, and many became monthly donors, committing to give to NAAFA all year long. We are so grateful for your support!
Funding fat doesn’t end with the end of our 2023 campaign. We’re working hard at NAAFA to secure funding from sources other than individual donations from our community, but we’re not there yet. And given the historical lack of funding for fat liberation, we know we have a long way to go before we get the foundation grants or major sponsorships that help sustain some social justice orgs. We couldn’t do this work without you. Your support has kept NAAFA alive for going-on 55 years, and your support is what keeps us accountable to fat community as we grow. Every dollar you give is a sign of faith in us. We take that very seriously.
Our mission is a daily mission. Every day, someone at NAAFA is working to change perceptions of fat. Every day, we are collaborating with other community organizations to change attitudes and change policy in politics, in medicine, and in other major systems that govern our lives. Any day is a good day to donate to NAAFA if you have the means to do so.
Our team and volunteers represent a wide variety of economic circumstances. Every member of our board contributed to our fundraising efforts this year. We do not have a mandatory giving requirement or minimum fundraising requirement as some boards do, because we know that broad and intersectional representation is much harder to achieve when boards are limited to those with more means. We see with our team and with our community that generous gifts come in a variety of sizes, just as bodies do.
If you’ve never given before, or if you haven’t given in a while, I hope you’ll find inspiration in the projects and programming we have planned for 2024. We’ll be asking you over and over again to Fund Fat, even if we don’t use that exact phrase. We hope we’re giving you many reasons to say yes!
Photo of Tigress Osborn
About the Author
Prior to being appointed the first Executive Director of NAAFA in over two decades, Tigress served as Board Chair and Director of Community Outreach. As leader of the most diverse board in NAAFA’s 54-year history, Tigress championed an intersectional approach to fighting anti-fatness through education, advocacy, and support. Her work with NAAFA has been featured in USA Today, Huffington Post, and Newsweek, and heard on BBC AntiSocial and ABC News. Tigress also hosts and produces the NAAFA Webinar Series, which features a wide variety of activists, scholars, and artists from fat community. Tigress founded Full Figure Entertainment in 2008 in Oakland, CA, and co-founded the PHX Fat Force in AZ in 2019. Tigress is a Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) consultant and educator whose clients have ranged from major tech companies to small non-profits. She is a two-time women's college graduate with a BA in Black Studies from Smith College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Follow Tigress @iofthetigress on your favorite social media.
