Liberation Fund Docket the Liberation Fund Is Proud to Announce $1,000,000 in Grants for Thirteen Organizations in Its Second Year of Grantmaking
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
2018 Liberation Fund Docket The Liberation Fund is proud to announce $1,000,000 in grants for thirteen organizations in its second year of grantmaking. The following grantees were curated by Groundswell staff, drawing from a list of organizations recommended for funding by Liberation Fund Advisors—fourteen prominent women of color leaders from various social justice movements. Liberation Fund grantees represent some of the most effective and powerful grassroots organizing efforts in the U.S. today. All grantees are led by women of color and/or transgender people of color. 2 2018 LIBERATION FUND DOCKet LIBERATION FUND ADVISORS Ai-Jen Poo Elle Hearns National Domestic Marsha P. Johnson Institute Workers Alliance Alicia Garza Isa Noyola National Domestic Transgender Law Center Workers Alliance & Black Lives Matter Angelica Salas Linda Sarsour Coalition for Humane MPower Change Immigrant Rights Bamby Salcedo Mary Hooks The TransLatin@ Coalition Southerners On New Ground Chrissie Castro Miya Yoshitani Native Voice Network Asian Pacific Environmental Network Cindy Wiesner Sarita Gupta Grassroots Global Jobs With Justice Justice Alliance Denise Perry Saru Jayaraman Black Organizing for ROC United Leadership and Dignity 2018 LIBERATION FUND DOCKet 3 LIBERATION FUND GRANTEES: Black Mesa Water Coalition | $75,000 Black Mesa Region, AZ | www.blackmesawatercoalition.org Founded in 2001, Black Mesa Water Coalition (BMWC) is led by young, inter-tribal, inter- ethnic people dedicated to addressing issues of water depletion, natural resource exploitation, and public and community health within Navajo and Hopi communities in northern Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. For 15 years, BMWC has worked to create a Just Transition1.for the Navajo Nation, particularly in the coal-impacted region of Black Mesa. BMWC has proven the potential of diversifying local economies beyond energy development (CJA), Grassroots Global Justice (GGJ), Indigenous through restorative economy projects like the Environmental Network (IEN), and other networks, as Navajo Wool Market Improvement Project, the Food well as coordinate and institutionalize wool market Sovereignty Project, and the Land Restoration Project. improvements and food sovereignty projects across the Navajo Nation. In 2018, BMWC hosted a Tó Be’iiná Dilzin Water Forum in Hard Rock, Arizona. The forum provided community BreakOUT! | $75,000 members with support to discuss and come to a New Orleans, LA | www.youthbreakout.org common understanding around water and water- related work rooted in the Just Transition framework Launched in 2011, BreakOUT! is a youth-led, and to build towards a restorative economy. membership-based organization working to end BMWC continued to run its Navajo Organizing the criminalization of LGBTQ youth to build a safer Fellowship program with 13 fellows in 2018; the and more just New Orleans. BreakOUT! draws on program builds the organizing skills of Navajo youth the South’s deep culture of resistance and works and adds organizing capacity to the larger region at the intersection of youth organizing, leadership by placing the fellows with partner organizations. In development, and healing justice to build the power 2019, BMWC will continue to advance its collaborative of LGBTQ youth ages 13 to 25 who are directly lawsuit against the Department of Interior’s Office affected by the criminal justice system. In 2018 and of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement in partnership with the Congress of Day Laborers, to ensure that the Navajo Generating Station site is BreakOUT! protested the expansion of a new citywide properly remediated when it shuts down. Additionally, surveillance effort being conducted through the city’s BMWC will maintain its leadership roles in movement- new Real Time Crime Center. BreakOUT! met with the building efforts with Climate Justice Alliance local office of the Department of Homeland Security and the New Orleans Police Department and educated 1. Just Transition is a vision-led, unifying, and place-based set of principles, processes, and practices that build economic and political power to shift from the public on the ways that surveillance does not an extractive economy to a regenerative economy. Learn more at https:// equal safety. BreakOUT! also graduated two cohorts climatejusticealliance.org/just-transition/ of 13 people through its Building Our Power Institute, 4 2018 LIBERATION FUND DOCKet a youth organizing and political education training Working Group, organizing community members to that supports participants to develop shared analysis fight the building of several proposed mega luxury around anti-Blackness, forced migration, and related towers along the waterfront and ultimately pass a issues. In 2019, BreakOUT! will re-launch its We community-driven rezoning plan. CAAAV will also Deserve Better housing campaign for LGBTQ youth, work to advance language access within NYCHA continuing its work to train local shelters on how to procedures, starting with Queensbridge, and to serve LGBTQ youth, as well as advocating for the hire on-site interpreters for Bengali- and Korean- opening of an LGBTQ youth homeless shelter. speaking tenants. CAAAV’s year-round integrated voter engagement work will continue, focusing on CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities empowering tenants and community members in | $75,000 anticipation of the 2020 election cycle. New York City, NY | www.caaav.org City Life / Vida Urbana | $75,000 CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA | www.clvu.org Organizing Asian Communities is an intergenerational, grassroots organizing powerhouse in New York City. For the past 45 years, City Life / Vida Urbana (CL/ For three decades, CAAAV has addressed issues of VU) has worked with tenants to win community poverty, gentrification, and displacement by engaging control of land and housing and to build a movement thousands of Asian residents in three primary for systemic changes that prioritizes the needs of programs: the Chinatown Tenants Union (CTU), the working-class tenants of color over the profit of big New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) organizing banks and developers. Today, that work focuses project based in Queensbridge, and the Asian Youth in on stopping the mass displacement of working Action program. In 2018, members of the CTU joined class families of color by increasing the number of hundreds of tenants from across New York City in permanently affordable rental housing units. CL/ support of a rent freeze at a Rent Guidelines Board VU accomplished this through winning agreements meeting, which resulted in a much lower increase that put property previously held by speculative of 1.5 percent on one-year leases and 2.5 percent investors into community land trusts under the on two-year leases than the standard 7-percent control of non-profit developers who are part of the increase. CAAAV organizing staff also began to anti-displacement movement. CL/VU uses a method it partner with a researcher to conduct a study on the has been refining for over 20 years called, “the sword, viability of establishing a community land trust model the shield, and the offer.” The sword is organizing in Chinatown, which would help preserve affordable campaigns for policy and systems change such housing for community members in the face of as expansion of rent control. The shield is creative rapid gentrification and rising costs. In 2019, CAAAV legal defense that is coordinated in support of the plans to continue its work within the Chinatown organizing strategy. The offer is returning ownership 2018 LIBERATION FUND DOCKet 5 of the land and housing to working class families and communities most impacted by displacement. In 2019, City Life / Vida Urbana will work with allies to create the Massachusetts Anti-Displacement Network (ADN), a coalition force of community organizing, legal support, and other groups uniting to fight displacement. Through this network, CL/VU will scale up its existing stabilization hubs in Boston and Chelsea, and start local organizing groups in Lynn, Springfield, and Brockton. These new groups base, going from engaging 60 to 80 members through will be supported by participants in CL/VU’s new two membership meetings per month for 16 years, Tenant Organizing Fellowship program. City Life / to now engaging 130 to 150 members through Vida Urbana will also work with statewide partners five membership meetings per month. Building who are leading the creation of a renter’s voting bloc community defense systems to protect community for multi-city grassroots advocacy by canvassing in members from workplace raids, deportations, neighborhoods to repeal the ban on rent control. CL/ and other systemic violence, DRUM continues to VU is a bilingual organization (English and Spanish), expand and strengthen its Hate Free Zones (HFZ) and is expanding to become multilingual, with the across four major NYC neighborhoods. This model addition of Creole, to ensure that language is not a is being replicated by organizations in New York barrier in organizing the growing Haitian community. and Virginia. In 2019, DRUM will continue to ensure proper implementation of the previously passed Desis Rising Up and Moving | $75,000 Community Safety Act, legislation that combats New York City, NY | www.drumnyc.org discriminatory policing and calls for greater NYPD accountability, including enforcement of the recently Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) is a passed Right to Know Act, which requires officers to multigenerational organization