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2022 was a year of continued growth and evolution for GCIR. We continued to expand our staff capacity—including adding new members to our talented programs team— and we leaned into our roles of convenor, amplifier, and mobilizer.
Here at GCIR, 2021 marked the organization’s first year with our new president, Marissa Tirona, at the helm. With Marissa’s leadership and the strength of GCIR’s 30-year legacy, we built forward our critical role as a philanthropic mobilizing organization that moves money and power on behalf of immigrant communities. Read the full report to learn more about GCIR's work in 2021.
Read the GCIR 2020 Annual Report to learn more about our efforts to galvanize philanthropy to address urgent humanitarian needs, respond to injustices, and advance immigrant rights and inclusion during a year unlike any other in living memory.
Emerging leader scholarship receipeint, Joél Junior Morales, reflects on his experience at GCIR's 2022 convening in Houston.
In 2021, GCIR launched a process to develop a new strategy which reflects our evolution as a national philanthropic mobilizing organization that creates strategic opportunities to move money and power to immigrant and refugee communities. To that end, we asked the Luminare Group to design and facilitate a strategy development process that was inclusive, generative, and collaborative. It was important to us that we did not create this new framework in a vacuum, so we convened a dynamic group of movement leaders, funders, and experts whose perspectives are informed by varied experiences and roles within the social justice ecosystem.
In her first President's Message of 2024, GCIR President Marissa Tirona shares how philanthropy can support pro-immigrant work in a challenging political and cultural context.
When you are a Black child in Africa, often the narrative is that our dreams are not valid. However, I am a Zambian who was born and raised on the Continent and was exposed to a multitude of experiences ranging from extreme poverty to traveling to several countries before I turned ten, while also being fortunate enough to play with school friends who came from all over the world. These experiences were critical to instilling confidence in me that my dreams were indeed valid and – even though it is perceived that the Western world and global north holds all the power and resources – what we as Africans had was in fact enough to be happy. However, when I moved to America, those common perceptions started to feel very real, while the dreams seemed nearly impossible.
A review of the thought leadership, technical assistance, educational programs, and resources that GCIR provided in 2016 to support funders in understanding shifting conditions in the field and respond to emerging needs.
In her fourth quarterly message of 2021, GCIR president Marissa Tirona reflects on her first year at the helm of GCIR and looks forward to what the coming year will bring for GCIR, for movement leaders and organizations, and for our shared work.
Read the GCIR 2017 Annual Report to learn more about how GCIR staff, members, funders, and allies rose to 2017’s challenges.
In her second quarterly message, President Marissa Tirona discusses how GCIR is rooting our work as a philanthropy mobilizing organization in a global analysis, and explores how this ties into dismantling white supremacist systems worldwide.
In her quarterly message, President Marissa Tirona calls on philanthropy to act to address forced displacement, the systems that drive it, and secure the safety and dignity not only of those who are forcibly displaced but also of marginalized communities who experience violence and discrimination.
What do we hope to accomplish? What will success look like? What will it take to get there? These are some of the questions I grapple with as GCIR’s Programs Learning Manager. My position is new, reflecting the organization’s commitment to proactive learning throughout our work. In a nutshell, I aim to support the team in building evaluative capacity, including through the design (and constant iteration) of ways of working that make it easy for people to engage meaningfully in learning processes.
Read the GCIR 2018 Annual Report to learn more about GCIR's efforts to inform, connect, and catalyze philanthropy, focusing on the most urgent issues facing immigrant families and communities while looking ahead to developing a powerful affirmative vision to guide philanthropic leadership and investment for the next ten years.
Born of our recent strategy development process, GCIR’s new theory of change reflects our evolution as a national philanthropic mobilizing organization that creates strategic opportunities to move money and power to immigrant and refugee communities and galvanizes funders to resource a robust immigration and refugee rights power-building ecosystem.
In light of the intensifying attacks on immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, I want to keep you—our members, funders, partners, and stakeholders—informed of our work on a more regular basis. This midway point in the year, coinciding with my return from sabbatical, provides a good opportunity to launch this quarterly update.