Gabrielle Wyatt Has Been Sounding the Alarm on How America Treats Its Black Women Voters Through The Highland Project

She has spent five years listening to Black women voters, directing The Highland Project’s charitable gifts to organizations, and refusing to let their truth go unnoticed.

There is a kind of devotion that Black women in this country have shown to the democratic process that is almost without parallel, showing up to every election, organizing their neighborhoods, making sure the people around them are registered and informed and ready, and pouring their energy into a system that has always asked a great deal of them and has not always given back in equal measure. And for a long time, that devotion went largely undocumented, taken for granted by the very institutions that depended on it most.

Gabrielle Wyatt decided that needed to change. In 2020, she founded The Highland Project, a philanthropic organization built around a belief that is as straightforward as it is radical: invest in Black women, and you invest in everyone. Since then, she has committed more than $6 million to organizations working across education, economic empowerment, healthcare, housing, and political agency, and she has spent every year since asking Black women voters across the country one honest question. How are you really doing?

The answers she has collected, published, and put in front of the people with power to act on them have built one of the most comprehensive bodies of research on Black women’s economic and civic lives in the country. And what that research shows, year after year, is something that Black women have known in their bones for a long time: that the gap between what they give to this country and what this country gives back to them is wide, and it is still growing.

“Black women have long been among the clearest readers of America’s economic reality. We often feel the fractures first, not because our experiences are marginal, but because we are so deeply connected to families, communities, workplaces, and care systems.”

Five Years of Asking and Listening

Every year since 2021, The Highland Project has partnered with Brilliant Corners Research and Strategies to conduct a national poll of registered Black women voters, asking real and specific questions about their finances, their employment, their mental health, and their sense of where this country is heading. The survey reaches hundreds of women across the country, and the results are published openly, because Wyatt has always understood that data sitting in a file somewhere helps no one.

In 2025, she released two polls for the first time, releasing one in the spring and one in the fall, because the pace of change in Black women’s lives was moving faster than a single annual snapshot could capture. “The pace of change was accelerating,” Wyatt says, “and so was the strain Black women were carrying.” What those two polls found together paints a picture of a community that is navigating real and compounding hardship with a grace and a persistence that deserves far more recognition than it currently receives.

In 2021, when the country was cautiously emerging from the worst of the pandemic, 58% of Black women voters said they were satisfied with the direction of the country. By 2025, that number had fallen to just 8%, a collapse in confidence that Wyatt describes not as a political reaction but as something much more personal, a reflection of what Black women are actually experiencing in their daily lives, in their households, in their communities, and in their sense of what the future holds for them and their families.

“When Black women say the economy is not working, leaders across sectors should listen closely.”

What the Data Actually Says About Black Women’s Lives Right Now

The economic findings from The Highland Project’s 2025 polling are the kind of numbers that should be driving national conversations and shaping policy decisions at every level of government. In 2021, 33% of Black women said they believed economic conditions were getting worse. By the spring of 2025, that number had climbed to 87%, and by fall it had reached 88%, higher than it was during the height of COVID-19 instability, when businesses were closed across the country, and families were facing losses that felt unsurvivable. The fact that the present moment feels more economically threatening to Black women than that period is a finding that demands serious attention from anyone who claims to care about the direction of this country.

More than half of respondents said their wages are falling behind the cost of living, a 20-point increase from just one year prior, with the burden falling hardest on Black women without college degrees, 62% of whom reported the same. Fifty-nine percent said they worry nearly every day about saving for retirement. Fifty-eight percent worry about access to quality education for their children. Fifty-five percent worry about healthcare costs. And 54% say they stress almost daily about paying their regular monthly bills, and not emergencies or unexpected expenses either, but the ordinary cost of keeping a household running from one month to the next.

Half of the women surveyed said they or someone close to them had been directly impacted by federal job cuts, a number that adds another layer of weight to an already strained economic reality. “Black women are sounding the alarm,” Wyatt says, “not only about their own economic experiences, but about the nation’s trajectory.”

The Toll That Goes Beyond Money

What makes The Highland Project’s research particularly valuable is that it refuses to reduce Black women’s experiences to financial metrics alone. Wyatt has always understood that the economic pressures Black women face are inseparable from the emotional and psychological weight they carry alongside them, and the polling reflects that understanding.

Forty-five percent of Black women said their mental health had gotten worse over the past year, and when asked to identify the reasons, the answers that rose to the top were not personal circumstances or individual hardships. They were the state of the country and the cost of living, forces that exist entirely outside any one woman’s control. Beyond that, 67% of respondents said they had stepped away from following the news in order to protect their mental health and their sense of peace, a number that climbed to nearly 75% among younger Black women and mothers.

Wyatt reads that not as disengagement but as discernment. “When 67% of Black women say they have disengaged from the news to protect their mental health, that is not apathy,” she says. “It is self-preservation. Rest, stillness, and reflection are not luxuries. They are leadership tools.” She built space for exactly that kind of restoration into The Highland Project’s work through Meet Me at the Highland, a narrative platform that pairs hard data with storytelling and creates room for Black women leaders to reflect and recover alongside the work of building.

What Black Women Are Calling For

The Highland Project’s polling does something that most research on Black women stops short of doing. It asks them not just what they are experiencing, but what they need, what they want leaders to prioritize, and what specific policies would make a material difference in their lives. The answers are detailed enough to serve as a genuine governing agenda for anyone who chooses to take them seriously.

Black women voters named protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as their top priority, recognizing that the social safety net is the infrastructure that keeps families from losing everything when circumstances change. After that came protecting reproductive freedom, fighting inflation, holding executive power accountable, and standing up directly to the rise of racism. On specific policy questions, 96% said they support building more affordable housing, 95% support a childcare tax credit, and 90% support both paid parental leave and student loan debt relief.

These are not abstract political positions. They are the specific conditions that would make it possible for Black women to move from surviving to actually building, for themselves, for their families, and for the communities they have always poured themselves into. “Black women are calling not for urgency born of crisis,” Wyatt says, “but for structural solutions grounded in care.”

“Given the $2 trillion in buying power in the Black community, when Black women pull back from major financial decisions, the entire economy feels it. This is not just a personal financial issue. It is a national economic signal.”

Why the Whole Country Should Be Paying Attention

One of the most significant findings from the fall 2025 poll extends well beyond the Black community and into the broader economic health of the nation. Because of what they are navigating right now, Black women are pulling back from the kinds of major financial decisions that fuel economic growth. Eighty-five percent said they are less likely to have a child given the current state of the country. Sixty-five percent said they are less likely to purchase a home. Sixty-three percent said they are less likely to invest in the stock market, and 60% said they are less likely to spend money on entertainment and experiences.

The Highland Project’s research named the stakes plainly: the Black community holds an estimated $2 trillion in buying power, and when Black women reduce their spending, the effects ripple through the entire economy. This is not a story about one community’s struggles. It is a national economic warning that deserves to be treated with the same urgency as any other indicator of systemic financial risk.

And yet, even carrying all of this weight, Black women are not walking away. Eighty-three percent said they are more likely to encourage the people around them to vote because of everything happening right now. Sixty-one percent said they are investing in their mental health through therapy. Fifty percent said they are more likely to participate in a march or protest. They are tired in ways that data can measure but cannot fully capture, and they are choosing every day to stay present, stay engaged, and keep building, which is the kind of sustained commitment that the people and institutions benefiting from it most ought to be doing far more to honor and protect.

The Future Gabrielle Wyatt Is Building Toward

The Highland Project has invested more than $6 million in over 60 leaders and organizations whose work touches every dimension of Black community life, including education, economic empowerment, healthcare access, housing stability, and political agency. The funding is intentionally flexible, designed to follow the need rather than the comfort of the giver, and it is built on the belief that sustaining the people doing the work is as essential as funding the work itself.

When Wyatt describes the future she is working toward, she reaches past policy language and philanthropic frameworks and talks about what it would actually feel like for a Black family making decisions from a place of possibility rather than crisis, with stable housing and funded schools and healthcare they can afford, with enough time and enough rest that the people raising the next generation are not running on empty. “Multigenerational wealth is not only what a family has,” she says. “It is what a family no longer has to fear.”

“Twenty years from now, I want wealth to mean that Black families and communities are not just surviving or overcoming,” Wyatt says. “I want it to mean they are rooted, resourced, healthy, joyful, and free to shape the lives they deserve.”

Fifty-five percent of Black women voters still believe this is not the time to retreat, that right now, in the middle of everything, is exactly the time to protect what matters and build something that lasts. Gabrielle Wyatt built The Highland Project around that same conviction, and she is going to keep listening, keep publishing, keep funding, and keep sounding the alarm until the truth Black women have always known finds its way into every decision being made about their lives.

To learn more about The Highland Project and read the full 2025 polling reports, visit thehighlandproject.org.