Brave Sis Project · Solidarity Lab
The Case for Philanthropy
Building infrastructure for solidarity practice in a post-DEI landscape.
A methodology field-tested since 2019, now moving from a single practitioner to a certified network. We are raising $100,000 to launch the Initial Design Cohort of the Solidarity Lab Facilitator’s Academy.
Organization Overview
Brave Sis Project, operating as Solidarity Lab, is a storytelling, learning, and leadership organization that advances cross-cultural solidarity through the documented legacies of Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Foremothers. The organization was founded in 2019 by Rozella Kennedy, author of Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History (Workman/Hachette), winner of a 2024 Nautilus Book Award, and a multi-decade equity and organizational leadership professional across varied sectors. The platform and its publications have reached readers across six continents and more than a dozen countries.
All Brave Sis Project programming is built on SAIN et SAUF, a Sustainable, Authentic, Inclusive, Nurturing Solidarity and Unity Framework (French for “safe and sound”). To date the organization has served more than forty organizations, including foundations, nonprofits, and justice-focused groups, through Kennedy’s work as a solopreneur.
Brave Sis Project is fiscally sponsored by The Funding Studio, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Tempe, Arizona (EIN 93-1576968). Fiscal sponsorship qualifies Brave Sis Project to receive grants requiring nonprofit status, and makes contributions tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Need Statement for Our Times
Institutional funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion contracted sharply through 2025 and 2026. Offices were dissolved, budgets reduced, and many organizations stepped back from compliance-based diversity training. But the underlying need did not diminish, and indeed, in our fractured times, societal rebuild will require new, trust-based, and sustainable approaches. People continue to lack practical skills to interrupt harm, repair relationships, and practice solidarity across racial and cultural lines in daily interaction: at work, in congregations, in community organizations, and among neighbors and family.
The loss was not only institutional. Individuals who had committed to this work found themselves without a structure to sustain it. At the same time, women of color, and Black women in particular, reported exhaustion from serving as the default educators, absorbing the cost of others’ learning while structural conditions stalled or reversed.
Most existing racial equity programming addresses institutions through policy and human resources compliance. Comparatively little addresses the relational and behavioral layer: what a person actually says and does in the moment when harm, conflict, or discomfort occur. Brave Sis Project is positioned to fill that gap. Its frameworks are grounded in named historical scholarship and in the documented legacies of BIPOC Foremothers rather than in compliance language, helping the organization and its people grow in funding and societal climates that are moving away from the DEI label but within which racial equity outcomes remain a stated priority for many.
Our Solution: The SAIN et SAUF Framework
SAIN et SAUF stands for Sustainable, Authentic, Inclusive, Nurturing Solidarity and Unity Framework. The framework is designed to be practiced in a participant’s own life, relationships, and sphere of influence, with or without institutional sanction. This design premise distinguishes it from programming that depends on organizational mandate to survive. It also gives learners tools for values alignment they can use and model anywhere they go, and throughout their lives—an important influence and leadership vector that can serve the greater good in many contexts.
The framework issues differentiated guidance rather than uniform instruction. BIPOC participants are directed toward rest, boundaries, and protection of energy as legitimate components of the work. White participants are directed toward self-directed learning rather than extraction from BIPOC colleagues. This asymmetry is a deliberate design feature and a principal distinction between a solidarity practice and a diversity training.
The approach draws on many models, including Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation and Riane Eisler’s Partnerism framework, which contrasts power exercised over others with power exercised alongside them, as well as on the documented lives of the Foremothers.
One of many is Septima Poinsette Clark, dismissed by the State of South Carolina in 1956 and stripped of her pension for refusing to renounce her NAACP membership. She responded by establishing Citizenship Schools across the South and training others to teach in them. She built a structure that transferred capacity to the communities it served rather than positioning herself as its permanent expert. Those schools remain in operation.
There are scores of other brave Foremothers we draw upon for inspiration and modeling.
| Aspect | Compliance-based DEI | SAIN et SAUF |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Representation and inclusion | Liberation and power redistribution |
| Focus | Individual bias | Systemic oppression |
| Approach | Add diverse faces to existing systems | Transform the systems themselves |
| Power | Structure left intact | Power redistributed |
| Accountability | To organization and leadership | To impacted communities |
| Facilitator role | Expert delivering content | Co-creator holding space |
| Timeline | One-time training | Ongoing practice |
Program Description
All our programs and offerings are based on key methodologies and proprietary frameworks developed over Kennedy’s decades of professional and (importantly) lived experience as a ‘bridger,’ an equity director, an organizational leader, and often “the only” Black person in white spaces, navigating, leading, and learning.
Many of the engagements for institutional and group settings have analogous praxes for individual learning as well.
Individual and Organizational Learning
To further examine the spectrum of engagements and facilitations developed by Kennedy, please visit our learn and for organizations pages.
Digital History and Narrative Products
The SistoryLessons newsletter, published twice monthly, the Substack free “mini-coaching,” and the Foremothers “inspirational quotes” app extend the Foremother-centered curriculum into accessible digital formats. These products are offered free and function as the organization’s widest point of public reach.
Facilitator Certification and the Solidarity Lab Academy
This is our big build. The Academy will be a multi-year model to certify facilitators in the SAIN et SAUF methodology and sustain an ongoing community of practice. Certified facilitators will be licensed to carry the methodology into their own organizations, consulting practices, and communities, extending the organization’s reach beyond what any single facilitator, including the founder, can deliver directly.
Current Funding Priority: The Solidarity Academy Design Cohort
Brave Sis Project currently operates as a single-founder methodology. Every deep engagement runs through the founder. This is the primary constraint on organizational reach and a material risk to the durability of the work: a methodology carried by one practitioner is a methodology that can be lost. The Academy exists to resolve that constraint, creating the operational backbone of the organization beyond its original format as an educational and influence platform, and the organization is seeking $100,000 to establish it.
The round is raised in two phases. Phase One is $75,000 and convenes the Initial Design Cohort; it closes 1 March 2027. Phase Two is $25,000, raised across 2027, and funds the “Community of Practice”: a facilitator directory and learning platform, curriculum advancement, and Academy growth.
The design cohort will bring together five experienced practitioners from across the equity and movement-building landscape, alongside the founder, to co-create, stress-test, and refine the complete eleven-lesson facilitator curriculum. Cohort members will be selected through a combination of invitation and application, with intentional representation across race, geography, sector, and organizing strategy. Recruitment will proceed in parallel with the funding round.
Each Founding Practitioner will receive a $3,500 participation and practitioner-development stipend in recognition of approximately 40 hours of training, practice, feedback, and methodology development over the ten-week cohort.
Upon successful completion, participants will receive the designation SAIN et SAUF Founding Practitioner and a defined, nonexclusive license to independently deliver designated SAIN et SAUF workshops using approved Academy materials and adhering to established standards for fidelity, attribution, accessibility, and participant care.
Founding Practitioners will also receive access to:
A community of practice.
Facilitator and participant materials.
Selected Academy intellectual property.
Business-development resources.
Ongoing professional-learning opportunities to support their independent practices.
This is a deliberately hybrid model: it offers more than a stand-alone, “buy a certification” credential, but does not require practitioners to join a consultancy collective, surrender their client relationships, or operate within a shared business structure. Practitioners retain their own businesses and professional identities while receiving permission to deliver designated SAIN et SAUF offerings independently.
Certification recognizes demonstrated competence. Licensing grants permission to use designated materials and deliver designated offerings. Active licensed status will depend on continued adherence to the Academy’s ethical, quality, attribution, accessibility, and participant-safety standards.
Compensating the cohort is a design requirement, not a discretionary cost. A framework that asks participants to challenge extraction cannot be built on the unpaid labor of practitioners of color.
The stipend covers participation in the ten-week founding cohort only. Continued access to current materials, the practitioner portal, community-of-practice sessions, and active licensing will be governed by a separate, transparent renewal agreement.
The funding round will close on March 1, 2027. The inaugural cohort will convene in the second quarter of 2027, with Founding Practitioners certified by the end of the year. General certification enrollment will open in early 2028. We have identified several potential cohort members.
Theory of Change
Because the contraction of institutional DEI left committed individuals without a sustainable practice, and because SAIN et SAUF is a tested methodology that functions without institutional permission, investment in curriculum design, facilitator certification, and platform infrastructure will move the methodology from a single founder to a distributed network of licensed practitioners. The result is durable access, for organizations, congregations, classrooms, and coalitions, to a solidarity practice that survives subsequent shifts in the political environment.
Goals and Objectives
For a representative twelve-month grant period, Brave Sis Project proposes to:
- Convene and certify a first cohort of facilitators trained in the SAIN et SAUF framework and the Five-Step Interrupt
- Complete design, testing, and documentation of the full eleven-lesson facilitator curriculum
- Deliver organizational team workshops to a defined number of congregations, nonprofits, and community groups
- Launch a pilot cohort of the Solidarity Lab Academy (second half of 2027)
- Grow subscriber reach for SistoryLessons and other platforms, including our YouTube channel
These targets and baselines are a work-in-progress, as we stress test the entire model and pivot from solopreneur supported to enterprise. Further details will be provided as requested, as our trusted partners and advisors continue to help us shape the growth trajectory.
Evaluation
Facilitator readiness is assessed through a certification process tied to demonstrated command of the SAIN et SAUF framework and our other resources. Workshop participants complete pre- and post-session surveys measuring movement along the Six-Stage Solidarity Continuum and adoption of the Five-Step Interrupt as a practiced behavioral response. Newsletter and digital product engagement are tracked as indicators of narrative reach.
Two additional measures speak directly to the purpose of this funding request. The first is curriculum durability: whether the eleven lessons are documented, tested, and deliverable by a practitioner other than the founder. The second is the proportion of total delivery carried by facilitators other than the founder, which is the clearest single indicator of whether the Academy has achieved its purpose.
Organizational Capacity
Brave Sis Project draws on its founder’s background in strategy, communications, resource development, and organizational leadership, together with direct experience in corporate DEI and global humanitarian sectors and six decades of lived experience as a Black woman in majority white spaces, with the considerable bridge-building this has both necessitated and fostered. An award-winning book published by a major trade house establishes third-party credibility, and a record of service to more than forty organizations demonstrates delivery capability at the organizational level. The Facilitators Academy Design Cohort members will bring similar attributes and credentials to the community of practice.
Existing production infrastructure includes a resource-heavy, self-hosted website, an established newsletter platform, a course delivery environment, and a suite of deployed digital history applications. Fiscal sponsorship through The Funding Studio provides 501(c)(3) eligibility for institutional funding along with financial administration and donor processing.
Sustainability
Brave Sis Project operates a tiered structure of offerings spanning free content, paid self-paced courses, and fee-based organizational engagements. The Academy extends that structure by licensing certified facilitators to deliver the methodology, generating program income that does not depend on the founder’s direct delivery capacity.
Philanthropic support is sought for the development phase specifically. Curriculum design, cohort stipends, and platform and network infrastructure are costs that earned revenue cannot reasonably absorb, since no client purchases the design of a curriculum that does not yet exist.
We are candid about what comes afterward. The model of other academies we admire — organizations doing comparable framework and movement-building work — is sustained almost entirely by philanthropy, decade after decade. That is a legitimate and durable path. It is not the one we are aiming at. We are building toward a hybrid, in which earned revenue from courses, organizational engagements, certification and licensing grows against a philanthropic base that stays flat rather than expanding.
We are also still working out what else can be sold without compromising what this is for. This work exists to redistribute power, and every price is a form of gate. The principle we are confident about is that organizations pay so that individuals do not have to: institutional engagements, site licenses and sponsored cohorts are what keep the assessment free and the entry course affordable. Additional growth and sustainability models are under active exploration, and we would rather say so plainly than promise a date on which the Academy becomes self-funding.
Risks and Mitigation
Political environment. Continued backlash may suppress organizational demand. The methodology is expressly designed for practice without institutional permission, and it supersedes derailing discourse about “DEI,” “wokeness,” retribution, and the like. Our focus is Solidarity and Unity, and while racism is understood as the “blueprint” for all systemic and societal discrimination, our lens extends broadly across vectors of difference, from ethnicity and culture to ability and age, to gender expression and sexuality, to access to autonomy, health, and agency. Individual and facilitator channels do not depend on corporate training budgets.
Founder concentration. The methodology currently resides with one practitioner. This is the condition the Academy is designed to resolve, which is why the present funding round represents the point of highest leverage.
Cohort recruitment. Cohort positions are open and recruitment runs alongside the funding round. The combination of a $5,000 stipend, certification, and an independent delivery license makes the position materially attractive to experienced practitioners, and a cohort of five is small enough that a strong field is sufficient rather than necessary.
Market positioning. Organizations in retreat from equity work may resist programming that carries the DEI label. SAIN et SAUF is positioned as leadership, trust, and collaboration infrastructure, a distinction grounded in the substance of the methodology rather than in terminology.
Budget Summary
The current request is $100,000, raised in two phases.
Phase One — $75,000, closing 1 March 2027. Convenes the Initial Design Cohort.
- Practitioner stipends (5 × $3,500) — $17,500
- Curriculum design and production — $12,000
- Fractional operational support — $10,000
- Evaluation and documentation — $6,000
- Fiscal sponsor administration (8%) — $6,000
- Operating reserve — $6,000
- Program direction — $7,500
- General operating — $5,000
- Legal: contributor agreements and license templates — $5,000
- Total — $75,000
Phase Two — $25,000, raised across 2027.
- Facilitator directory and learning platform — $10,000
- Certification launch campaign, operations — $8,000
- Curriculum and materials revision — $7,000
- Total — $25,000
Sixty-seven percent of Phase One is direct program cost, twenty-four percent administration and operations, and nine percent an operating reserve carried into the cohort year.
The first $15,000 of the round is secured through an institutional grant awarded in July 2026.
A detailed line-item budget, including the multi-year Academy financial model, is available on request and can be tailored to the funding priorities and reporting requirements of each prospective funder.
Contributions
Contributions to Brave Sis Project are made through The Funding Studio, a 501(c)(3) organization (EIN 93-1576968), and are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. The Funding Studio accepts gifts by check, Zelle, ACH, and wire transfer, as well as gifts of appreciated stock, distributions from donor-advised funds, and employer matching contributions.
Founding supporters of the Initial Design Cohort will be recognized as SAIN et SAUF Mamans. Each is named in the curriculum and in Academy materials permanently, briefed on the cohort’s findings ahead of publication, with the opportunity to consult with Kennedy, given advance access to the full eleven-lesson framework through a dedicated webinar session series in early 2027, and offered first access to organizational licensing at founding rates.
Recognition is offered at any gift of $5,000 or more. A gift supports the Academy as a whole rather than an individual seat.
Rozella Kennedy, Founder
hello@bravesis.com · bravesis.com