Social Justice Fund Grants from our Spring & Fall 2023 Cycles
A Vision of Genuine Security and a Culture of Life: Connecting and Demilitarizing Domestic and Foreign Policy
Organization: Women for Genuine Security
Grant Cycle: 2023, April
We seek to create and implement a locally-grounded a campaign that 1. connects conceptually and practically domestic policy and foreign policy. The means providing a framework for demonstrating the interlinkages between the two and 2. offers a vision of genuine security that offers a visionary and practical model for communities. We will partner with local environmental justice, abolition, and anti-violence organizations applying community-rooted approaches to creating change. We also will partner with high schools, colleges, and senior citizen centers to work intergenerational.
Abolitionist Organizing through Participatory Media Production, Archiving, and Collective Memory
Organization: W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction
Grant Cycle: 2023, October
To integrate a suite of abolitionist media production, archiving, and media-based organizing methods into the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School curriculum. By creating a community space for the participatory production of films and podcasts, collecting and archiving local movement histories, and deploying abolitionist media as a tool for organizing debates and conversations, we aim to build the capacity of community organizers and movements, and to contribute to a broader narrative shift around policing and mass incarceration.
Challenge the Military-Industrial Complex
Organization: Stop the War Machine
Grant Cycle: 2023, October
This grant will support the group "Stop the War Machine" in organizing to challenge the Military Industrial Complex, especially but not exclusively as the Military Industrial Complex manifests itself in New Mexico. Demonstrations, vigils, joint efforts with other organizations, email newsletters are all part of this.
Community education workshops centering marginalized community members and focusing on non-carceral safety response strategies
Organization: The Black Response
Grant Cycle: 2023, October
TBR will hold workshops which build marginalized community members’ capacities to resolve conflict, access support resources and prevent crises. We will engage participants in dialogues drawing on and validating their experiences with racism, police aggression, incarceration, homelessness, and other types of marginalization while equipping them with concrete methods to address harm outside of policing. We seek to increase capacity for agency among Black, Brown, and other marginalized people—to improve their life conditions and mobilize participation in political action related to abolition.
Conscientious Objector (CO) Peer Support Circle
Organization: Center on Conscience & War
Grant Cycle: 2023, April
The CO Peer Support Circle (Uncompromisingly Conscientious, UC) is a social, emotional, experiential, cathartic, and moral peer community-based group that will promote the rights of conscience and support COs in navigating the process of conscientious objection in the US military. UC will serve as the interpersonal bridge to connect COs to war – both past and current - and provide a compassionate, nonjudgmental, cooperative sanctuary for healthy exchanges, socio-emotional peer support, and empathic human connection.
Decrim! at the Super Bowl: Stop the Raids
Organization: Erotic Service Providers Legal, Education, and Research Project, Inc.
Grant Cycle: 2023, October
The Super Bowl’s annually revived sex trafficking myth presents a highly concentrated example of how disinformation, combined with stigma, leads to the criminalization, arrests, and incarceration of sex workers. Stop the Raids uses a labor rights analysis to train and organize 100 sex workers and allies around the decriminalization of sex work through online and in-person activist capacity building in anti-oppression work and leadership, leading up to direct action that educates the public, media, and policymakers about decriminalization at Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas, NV in 2024.
Direct action at the UN General Assembly
Organization: Climate Defiance
Grant Cycle: 2023, April
We plan to organize a mass-turnout, nonviolent direct action at the UN General Assembly meeting in NYC in September of 2023. This is a great opportunity to highlight President Biden's fossil fuel hypocrisy in front of world leaders.
Historians-On-Call
Organization: Historians for Peace and Democracy
Grant Cycle: 2023, April
Historians for Peace and Democracy (H-PAD) is working with the Zinn Education Project to mobilize professional historians to oppose the right-wing’s lies and distortions about what is and what is not being taught in schools and to stand up for educational freedom. Toward that end, we have created the “Historians-on-Call” network to identify when and where the historians can support local efforts.
Mobilizing Fans to Fight for Queer Rights
Organization: Fandom Forward
Grant Cycle: 2023, April
Fandom Forward is a leader in fan activism, an organizing strategy that draws parallels between beloved pop culture and real world issues of inequity to mobilize fans for social good. During “Our Flag Means Queer Rights!”, we are training thousands of fans of HBO Max’s Our Flag Means Death to pressure their representatives to vote no on bills that hurt the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as support organizations that are protecting LGBTQIA+ rights.
NET Cohort Training
Organization: New Endeavor Texas
Grant Cycle: 2023, April
Organizers from across the issue spectrum are always able to accomplish more. That’s why the county cohort training program is so critical. New Endeavor Texas training programs build connections among organizers from different backgrounds and issue spaces, all within the same county. Well-trained and well-supported organizers are needed to make lasting change in Texas, and at the end of our cohort training programs, organizers have built up a county-wide organization that can support ongoing work at all levels of local and state government.
OpenOversight VA: The Police Data Project
Organization: OpenOversight VA
Grant Cycle: 2023, October
We will work to redesign our police transparency database and make the hundreds of documents we've obtained through Virginia Freedom of Information Act requests accessible to the public.
Peace and Justice in the Philippines: A National Speaking Tour
Organization: International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines - US Chapter (ICHRP-US)
Grant Cycle: 2023, April
We aim to oppose US-backed human rights violations and war crimes by the Philippine government against human rights defenders, poor and impoverished people, and civilians in the Philippines and abroad. People who have faced this repression will travel across the US, sharing their personal stories and education on the worsening political and economic crises in the Philippines. We aim to build a movement to oppose US military aid to the Philippines, defend the rights of activists against political repression, and build long-lasting international solidarity to fight for a just and lasting peace!
Stranger Danger - Fake Clinics Are Harming Our Communities Campaign
Organization: Idaho Abortion Rights
Grant Cycle: 2023, October
Fake clinics, Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), claim to offer free, unbiased, neutral pregnancy options to pregnant people and communities. Instead of providing pregnant people with facts, CPCs provide inaccurate information, employ coercive tactics, and divert resources from legitimate healthcare providers. Targeting vulnerable demographics exacerbates existing disparities. Education is vital to expose their deceptive practices and ensure access to accurate reproductive healthcare information and services.
STREET LAW BOOTCAMP
Organization: JUSTUS JUNKIE Inc.
Grant Cycle: 2023, October
STREET LAW BOOTCAMP is a two-day long, culturally relevant, trauma-informed workshop series, offered by JUSTUS JUNKIE, INC. SL BOOTCAMP teaches the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution to African-American teens ages 13 – 18 on the Southside of Chicago. Sessions are taught by licensed criminal defense attorneys, police torture survivors, activists, and restorative justice practictioners. The linchpin of the program is the original educational board game about police encounters created by JUSTUS JUNKIE CEO, April Preyar, called Trials & Triumph.
Trans Prisoner Leadership Development
Organization: Beyond These Walls
Grant Cycle: 2023, April
Beyond These Walls will be facilitating several leadership development programs for transgender women who are currently incarcerated. Our movements and organizations need leadership from transgender people who are justice-involved. We believe in developing these leaders before they are released and empowering them to organize in their prisons and communities.