2025 Grants
Grant Year: 2025
Athens Immigrant Rights Coalition
Migrant communities in North East Georgia are living under the fear of planned mass deportation. The Rapid Response Team's goal is to document and provide witnesses of any civil and human rights violation and to support the community with information about their rights and the law. With this AJ Muste grant, we will train new members and expand our work to rural areas where the support available in the cities isn't available.
Central Christian Church
We expect our church to be in the national spotlight when President Trump seeks to deport Haitians from Springfield, Ohio. We took the lead in setting up Springfield Neighbors United, a group of around 200 individuals committed to standing with our Haitian neighbors in the face of what we consider to be unjust deportations. We will use this grant to improve the security of our facility (installing indoor & outdoor security cameras), to provide low cost legal aid (specifically, subsidizing the cost of emergency same day appointments with an immigration attorney, and providing aid to Haitians needing additional legal service), and providing training for churches that plan to provide physical sanctuary or refuge.
Nashville People's Budget Coalition
The Nashville People’s Budget Coalition is a member-led organization that educates and organizes to create safe and thriving communities for all by reducing the scope and power of policing, increasing investment in life-giving public goods, and radically democratizing municipal budgeting and governance.
National Council of Elders
The National Council of Elders (NCOE) works to build and sustain a culture of peace through intergenerational collaboration. Our programs involve political education, public statements, co-mentoring, and convening in person movement gatherings for younger and older organizers to build together, share historical memory, and strategize for stronger movements. Our work is inherently intersectional, and led by elders who were on the front lines of social movements from the 1950s forward.
Rocky Mountain Center for Peace and Justice
The RMPJC staff will lead a series of direct action trainings, to be held monthly. The series of four trainings will educate and inspire our community about the power and the practice of nonviolent direct action, with a robust background and focus on practical application:
- Nonviolent Direct Action De-Escalation Training
- Active Bystander Training
- Nonviolent Direct Action Planning and Contingency Workshop
- Nonviolent Direct Action Art and Activism Training/ Workshop
Each workshop or training session will be promoted and implemented in collaboration with key community partners.
The DC Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression
Our purpose is to address the ongoing imbalance of power between the people and the police; we seek to put power in the hands of communities historically affected by police violence and political repression, and build this struggle by uniting with our communities and demanding community control of the police. Community control is not about a particular reform to a particular system, but the inalienable democratic right of the people to decide how our actions are regulated and governed. With community control, we can defund, demilitarize, and regulate the police out of existence.
Thrive Sis
With AJ Muste’s support, Thrive Sis will launch Voices in Action, a rapid-response advocacy project empowering Black and Brown youth in Southeastern Wisconsin to resist harmful school discipline practices. Youth will receive advocacy training, create protest materials in mobile action labs, lead digital campaigns, and mobilize at school board meetings. They will co-create a public-facing toolkit to spark broader community action. This project combats the rollback of discipline equity protections and disrupts the school-to-prison pipeline through grassroots organizing, digital storytelling, and policy-focused civic engagement.
Viet Left Power
Viet Left Power (VLP) is a new power building organization with a vision and strategy for organizing working class Viet communities in the United States. VLP is the result of many decades of organizing by Viet leftists: the various initiatives to bring us together and advance a shared vision, build a sense of community, and bring working class Viet people into the multiracial Black, Indigenous, Latine, and other Asian communities’ struggle for power and justice.
Young Black Lawyers' Organizing Coalition (YBLOC)
Racial justice and democracy face unprecedented headwinds of concerted legal and policy attacks. To mount a vigorous response, it is critical that the Black legal community has a unified and strategic vision for how to resist the attacks and reconstruct (and reimagine) the infrastructure disassembled by those attacks. We will convene young Black lawyers for a strategy summit that aims to tap their collective legal, policy and power-building creativity to begin the process of developing a bold, imaginative plan.