NYC Pride & FemSMS: a meaningful beginning

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Some welcome news – Footage Lab (Footage Foundation / Footage France) has been selected as a 2026 Pride Gives Back grantee from HERITAGE OF PRIDE | NYC Pride which will help us launch FemSMS: Pride Edition – the first New York City phase of our compassionate, trauma-informed SMS information service.FemSMS is our human-centered, compassion-led SMS intervention co-designed with women in all their diversity and LGBTQIA+ people living through conflict, displacement, and crisis, offering trustworthy information, recognition, and connection. 

FemSMS: Pride Edition brings this model to New York City as a site of exile, co-designed with trans, immigrant, and exiled LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers navigating precarity, terrifying border regimes, and everyday, often invisible, forms of crisis and violence – and linking participants to trusted local resources related to safety, housing, immigration, healthcare, and mental wellbeing.

Since its launch in 2022, in response to Russia’s barbaric and continued full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in partnership with Project Kesher and Project Kesher Ukraine as well as with local feminist organizers in Ukraine, including Feminist Workshop, FemSMS has sent more than 50,000 messages and now reaches over 12,000 people weekly who are living through conflict, displacement, and crisis. At a time of escalating attacks on LGBTQIA+ communities, displacement, and everyday precarity in New York City, this Pride Gives Back support makes it possible for us to carry lessons from some of the most challenging global contexts into a different, but deeply related, terrain of exile, fear, and oppression.

We are deeply grateful to HERITAGE OF PRIDE | NYC Pride for this recognition, and for their ongoing work to resource community-led approaches to safety and justice in New York City. We’re also grateful to current and future partners in New York – including Qaravan and grassroots organizers in reproductive health, legal aid, and community safety – who will shape this project with their knowledge and courage.

There's much more detail and deeper context in our full donor letter, which explains what this support means, and includes the official Pride Gives Back / NYC Pride press release: http://eepurl.com/jCD6ok

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