On April 11, 2026 the Rosenberg Fund for Children will mark 35 years of standing with the kids of targeted activists with a celebratory event featuring Angela Y. Davis—35 Years of the RFC: Stronger Together, Solidarity Forever—in Northampton, Mass. Our program will center resistance movements, past and present, and include poetry and music by local artists Martín Espada and Pamela Means.
At times the last few months of 2025 and beginning of this year have felt like a brutal slog from one hard thing to another. A beloved extended family member died too young, work was especially demanding as we closed out our year-end fundraising and horrific local, national and international headlines trumpeted one catastrophe after another. I attended graduate school at Brown University and images of students cowering in buildings I recognized and spent time in while a gunman roamed the campus was gutting.
As families grapple with serious targeting and harassment when activist parents fight against environmental racism, genocide abroad and brutal ICE raids in communities across the country, many families in the RFC community, who are already vulnerable, are being especially hard hit with interruptions to SNAP benefits, loss of work and income or forced into hiding due to government surveillance and repression. Last fall, five new families received grant from the RFC, with 84 more families receiving renewal grants totaling over $220K, bringing our history of granting to nearly $10 million since 1990. Our Board also approved a $9000 grant, representing a significant increase over recent years, to provide emergency grocery gift cards to families in imminent danger of going hungry.
Save the Date (April 16, 2026) | Boston University Libraries, in partnership with the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, the Boston University School of Law Library and the Rosenberg Fund for Children, invite you to explore how access to information and archival materials can shape–and reshape–our understanding of history. The event will take place on Thursday, April 16th from 12:30 to 6:30 pm at BU’s Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground in Brookline, MA. The event is free and open to the public; pre-registration is required. The event will also be live streamed.
When I was a small plant, barely knee high, a man named Robby “adopted” me for $3.99 from a Food Mart grocery store. My new home was a small two room office suite on Main Street in downtown Springfield, Mass. I learned later that the Rosenberg Fund for Children (a somewhat ambitious name for what was then a very small non-profit less than a year old) had moved to that space just before purchasing me. Previously, they were housed in an office within a larger suite donated by a sympathetic labor-side law firm.
Bequests are a critical component of that strategy and a vital part of making all our work possible. Individuals who include the RFC in their estate planning are passing on necessary resources to allow us to stand with the children of resistance now and in the years and even decades to come.