Beyond the Hashtag: How Me Too Is Building on the Momentum of a Viral Movement
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Tarana burke, Founder of the #Metoo movement lev radin/shutterstock
It’s been a little more than four years since #MeToo went viral on social media and sparked a national, and eventually global, reckoning with sexual violence. Within the first 24 hours alone, more than 12 million people tweeted the hashtag and shared their own experiences. To date, the hashtag has been used more than 19 million times and has become a unifying force among survivors.
The effects of #MeToo have been widespread, with numerous powerful figures—including Harvey Weinstein, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and USA Gymnastics Team Doctor Larry Nassar—facing scrutiny, professional repercussions and criminal charges. The #MeToo movement has helped expose the prevalence of sexual violence and prompted new streams of funding. Last year, President Joe Biden declared sexual assault to be a public health crisis and as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) included $450 million in supplemental funding for domestic violence and sexual assault services, including rape crisis centers.
#MeToo isn’t just a hashtag, however; it’s also an organization, founded by survivor and activist Tarana Burke, who started the #MeToo movement back in 2006 while working in support of Black women and girls. With the increased attention following the viral movement, Burke, who had been working at Girls for Gender Equity, decided to expand her work and began laying down the groundwork for Me Too International, an organization dedicated to assisting survivors and disrupting the systems that allow sexual violence to take place.
“I think a lot of folks don’t know that we’re a Black feminist-centered organization, supporting all communities of color, all communities of gender expansiveness, all communities of ability and disability,” said Dani Ayers, CEO of Me Too International. “I think that’s an important flag for folks to learn more about.”
Originally a fiscal sponsee of Girls for Gender Equity, Me Too International received crucial seed funding from the New York Women’s Foundation, the Collective Future Fund and NoVo Foundation, and became an independent nonprofit organization in 2019. It’s since picked up additional foundation, corporate and individual donors, and in 2021, embarked on the latest phase of its international work in partnership with the Global Fund for Women.
During its four-year anniversary celebration, Me Too used the theme #beyondthehashtag to highlight both the work that existed before the movement gained momentum in 2017, as well as how the movement continues to develop and expand today.
“We understand that hashtags are useful in that they can galvanize a group of people around a particular issue or idea,” said Ayers. “But the fact is that that’s only the very first step, and that’s not where the work lies. It’s important to us that we bring folks’ attention alone beyond the hashtag, and into the actual work.”
A funding gap
Despite the viral success of #MeToo, there is still a significant funding gap for organizations working to end sexual and gender-based violence. As Inside Philanthropy previously reported, a Ms. Foundation study found that in 2017, philanthropic giving to women and girls of color totaled $356 million–or 0.5% of the total 66.9 billion given by foundations.
In 2020, Me Too International’s annual revenue was about $3.11 million. “We’re very small and doing a lot of really big physical work,” said Ayers. “We still do need funding to continue building on this work moving forward.”
The organization has picked up some critical funders, however, including CBS, Google, Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures, and the Levi Strauss Foundation. In its 2019 impact report, MeToo also named States Made Apparel, Gucci and HBO as backers of its operational funding as well as funds for building its staff. Project funders include Pop Culture Collaborative and A&E Networks. Major individual donors include actresses Viola Davis, Alyssa Milano and Reese Witherspoon.
“We have a small number of really committed foundations that have donated to us,” said Ayers. “We also have a large number of small individual donors. We don’t have a huge, ongoing major giving source, but we have a lot of folks across the globe who give in small amounts every day.” She added that they would love to see additional corporate support as well as more engagement with private philanthropy.
Community, Purpose and Resources
The main goals of Me Too International are to organize a broad base of survivors to “disrupt the systems that allow sexual violence to proliferate into our world,” and to offer help for survivors as they heal, providing a sense of community, purpose, as well as a library of resources, which include emergency, legal and mental health resources.
For some, like Bonita Fleming, that meant immediate support at the beginning of her journey. Fleming, who is now 37, experienced her incident in 2017, the same year that the movement went viral. “I had just started counseling, but I felt like… I would need something else, something to keep me, not happy, but not sad in my healing process,” said Fleming. “I needed this to make me feel like I’m not alone.”
When Fleming first heard of Me Too, she researched the movement and found what she needed. “I instantly connected,” said Fleming. “Just being connected to the Me Too movement changed my life. It helped me to step into destiny.”
Activist, advocate and writer Alison Fields also found empowerment and healing in the movement. “For me, I was a victim of rape when I was in college—and this was back in 2007—and I really didn’t talk about it. When the hashtag #MeToo went viral four years ago, I had a little bit of a disconnect with it at first,” said Fields.
Fields felt overwhelmed by the political climate in 2015 and 2016, and struggled to leave her home. She described feeling lost. It was a combination of seeing others sharing their stories and finding resources like Me Too that helped Fields.
“Social justice has been a really important tool for my healing,” said Fields. “Instead of just focusing on, perhaps, individuals in my life that have harmed me, I’ve been able to focus on the systems that are also perpetuating the harm, and [that protect] the people that harm folks, that has been invigorating.”
In addition to providing resources to assist in an individual’s healing, Me Too also offers pathways to leadership and support for community transformation. Among its major programs are the Survivor Leadership Training, which Fleming is a part of, community healing circles, a survivor healing series, HBCU fellowships and a college program, which offers online courses for both students and administrators interested in creating safe campuses.
Survivor Leadership Training is a 12-week, no-cost program that trains survivor-leaders on organizing strategies and prepares them to become leaders in their communities. “It’s been a really beautiful opportunity,” said Fields, who participated in last fall’s Survival Leadership program. The training puts survivors at the center of anti-sexual-violence work, helps them identify their unique voices as leaders and prepares them with the foundational knowledge necessary to become leaders in their communities.
The program culminates with a community-based intervention project, which each participant develops themselves. Fleming’s project, for example, is called The Getaway Fund, which is designed to provide much-needed financial resources to survivors. Fleming drew from her own experience, putting together everything that she did not have available to her after her at the time of her incident. The program would help with medical bills, rent and safe transportation, and assistance for those who do not feel prepared to return to work. Fleming herself sustained permanent damage to her right hand and found it difficult to return to a job that was physical.
“I didn’t have sick time or the PTO to be able to just take off and sit down for a while, so I thought that this will be something that was very important, even if it’s helping out a little bit, even if it’s helping out with a bill or utility bill or just transportation to get back and forth to get your medical needs,” said Fleming.
Preserving history
As part of the movement, Me Too has also launched Act Too, which answers the all-important question: what’s next?
Act Too is a crowdsourced utility that enables anyone, wherever they may be, to get active in the fight to end sexual violence. Participants can find resources on how to participate, including pledges to sign, organizations to join, and places to donate.
“We see our responsibility as a galvanizing tool and a way of bringing folks together around the issue of sexual violence, sharing how pervasive it is, and helping folks to understand that there are very tangible, material things everyday folks can do to interrupt sexual violence,” Ayers said.
Act Too is also meant to serve as a record of the movement. Every story of the movement, every action taken, is written into a permanent archive on Act Too’s website though a public blockchain, which Me Too describes as “a ledger of events, one that records information about transactions.”
Every action and event is recorded onto a tile. Together, these tiles form a mural of the evolution of the movement. Examples of the tiles include the passing of the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) in the 1980s; Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Supreme Court nominee, now judge, Brett Kavanaugh; and the release of the Netflix miniseries “Unbelievable,” which dramatized the 2008–2011 serial rape case and received acclaim for centering survivors’ stories.
An intersectional movement
One of the most impactful aspects of #MeToo is the growing recognition of the importance of intersectionality in the movement. Me Too International was founded on the premise of helping survivors from all walks of life, especially those who are most vulnerable, like Black, queer, trans and disabled people, and those of communities of color.
For Fields, the intersectionality aspect of the movement made a big impact on her as a Korean American woman.
“Me Too International names the multiple systems of oppression that some folks experience, so realizing the experiences that I’d had weren’t necessarily just because I was a woman, but also because I was an Asian woman,” Fields said. “For a long time, I really thought that I had to choose between anti-racist social justice work and gender-based violence work because a lot of the representation that I was seeing was primarily white women talking about healing and surviving after trauma.”
Me Too’s work cuts across international borders, as well. Most recently, Me Too announced a new phase of its partnership with the Global Fund for Women to support local groups in the Global South that are working to end sexual violence.
The Global Fund for Women is a nonprofit organization that funds gender justice movements around the world with the hopes of creating meaningful and long-lasting change. Among the global movements it supports are the anti-sexual-violence and gender-based-violence feminist movement in Peru, adolescent girls rights, anti-gender-based violence in Israel and Palestine, the domestic workers rights movement, abortion rights in East Africa and the #MeToo movement.
In 2021, the Global Fund for Women awarded close to $17 million to 343 organizations in 80 countries. The fund has received support from the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation Inc., the North Star Fund Inc., the Alpern Family Foundation and the Cambridge Community Foundation. However, a full 64% of its funding comes from individual donations.
“We have power when we come together across geographies and learn from each other. And that’s what this work is about. It’s about disrupting rape culture across borders. We know it can be done because it is being done,” said Latanya Mapp Frett, president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, during a panel discussion where the next phase of the partnership was announced.
In 2017, two words gave rise to a movement. Four years after the #MeToo hashtag went viral, the work continues. “I hope that it continues and leaves a legacy,” said Fleming. “When we’re all older, hopefully, we will be able to pass a torch to the future, and this will be something that can be infinite, that will never die.”
“Healing is not always going to be good,” she added. “But I don’t ever see myself going back to how I was when I started.”
