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 Workers Alliance &

Angelica Salas 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 , 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. , 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 of over 4,000 low- identify themselves, explain the reason for the official income South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrant interaction when stopping people, explicitly convey workers, families, and youth directly affected by a person’s right to refuse a search when the person’s , immigration, educational inequity, and consent is the only legal justification for the search, economic injustice. DRUM builds the leadership of and obtain proof of consent. DRUM will also work to the most marginalized members of its communities pass an initiative that will protect and secure the data through membership-led direct-action campaigns, on undocumented communities (collected through base building, leadership development, and DACA and TPS applications) from being used for ICE membership services. purposes.

In 2018, DRUM continued its Eckshate gender justice Dream Defenders | $75,000 programs; this year’s program concluded with a public community café led by men and focused on Florida | www.dreamdefenders.org standing up against street harassment. Over 30 Dream Defenders is a statewide organization focused participants committed to intervening when they see on building power in Black, Latinx, immigrant, and harassment and to educating other men to do the working-class communities throughout Florida. same. Eckshate members will play integral leadership Dream Defenders was founded in the wake of the roles in DRUM campaigns and programs, including murder when young people from co-facilitating its 2019 organizing institute. DRUM has across the state of Florida organized to demand nearly doubled its ability to organize its membership action and accountability. Since its inception in April

6 2018 LIBERATION Fund Docket to obtain the skills and the financial and programmatic resources necessary in advocating for an end to violence against all trans people. In 2018 MPJI laid the groundwork for its two core programs: the Marsha P. Johnson Fellowship and the Freedom Beyond Imagination Coalition. The Fellowship will hold leadership institutes for Fellows in 2019, and Fellows will work with MPJI to hold a summit for trans women in the winter of 2019 to strategize around issues related to reproductive justice and trans communities. The Coalition will facilitate intersectional political 2012, the organization has grown its base of young engagement with trans communities and will build people aged 13 to 45 from a few dozen to an active power to influence the wide range of policies that membership of 150, with three chapters across the impact trans lives, from gender-based violence to state. This year, Dream Defenders surveyed 9,000 immigration. MPJI will hold a planning convening in community members through door-to-door outreach the fall of 2018 with allied base-building and advocacy and meetings with incarcerated and non-incarcerated organizations to further develop its shared curriculum members, to develop its Freedom Papers, which and to develop policy recommendations. These articulate a long-term vision for decarceration, convenings will continue quarterly in different regions divestment from prisons, and shifting towards across the country throughout 2019. MPJI was a co- restorative justice and deeper investment in schools convener of the 2018 March for Black Women’s Lives and under-resourced neighborhoods. Over the past in New York City and DC, with sister marches across several years, Dream Defenders has had several the country. MPJI is gearing up for the 2019 and 2020 notable victories, including winning federal funding elections through a civic engagement strategy that for front-facing body cameras on police officers incorporates Ball culture and House communities2 in Florida and moving Florida legislators to hold a to bring political focus back to LGBTQ youth of color special session on Stand Your Ground laws. In 2019, through voter activation, campaign engagement, and Dream Defenders will increase awareness amongst candidate townhalls. community members and elected officials about probation, money bail, the school to prison pipeline, and private prisons – all of which are challenges Mujeres Unidas y Activas | $75,000 currently facing people of color in the state of Florida. , CA | www.mujeresunidas.net In order to grow its base and advance its campaign A nationally recognized leader in the fields of work, in the coming year Dream Defenders will grow immigrant and domestic worker rights, Mujeres chapters in three to five new cities, bring in 200 new Unidas y Activas (MUA) is a 28-year-old grassroots members, and train 25 youth organizers through a organization of 600-plus Latina immigrant women new fellowship program. with a dual mission of promoting personal transformation and building community power for Marsha P. Johnson Institute | $75,000 social and economic justice. MUA empowers and Washington, DC | www.marshap.org educates its members in San Francisco and the East Bay, with the largest concentration living in Alameda The Marsha P. Johnson Institute (MPJI) builds the leadership of transgender people to heal, develop 2. The House and Ball community (aka, the ballroom scene) is a national subculture comprised of Black and Latino/a LGBTQ youth and adults. Evolving transformative leadership, and build power through from Harlem drag balls throughout the Harlem Renaissance (1930s), ballroom media advocacy, civic engagement, public policy, provides a platform that celebrates all forms of gender and sexual expression. The House and Ball scene provides many Black and Latino youth and adults with and arts culture. MPJI creates a crucial entry point a chosen kinship structure through which collective impact, resiliency, and vital resources are obtained. Definition provided by the Keeping Ballroom Community for Black trans women and gender non-conforming Alive Network

2018 LIBERATION Fund Docket 7 County, to provide mutual support; offers trainings indigenous leaders in the fight to protect their lands to build economic security and leadership; and leads through organizing and convening. In spring of 2019, organizing campaigns to win immigrants’, workers’, Native Movement will host a Just Transition Alaska and women’s rights. MUA has built a strong base Summit, which will create space for cross-sector of leaders to increase its capacity in immigrant and collaborations amongst Indigenous and grassroots worker rights campaigns. In 2018, MUA launched a leaders, elected leadership, labor unions, education new membership site in Union City, with more than advocates, and healthcare professionals. The 230 participants. Also in 2018, MUA helped pass Summit seeks to build inter-sector collaborations, AB 2314 Domestic Worker Rights Enforcement Act lift up community-based justice solutions, and in both houses of the State Legislature catalyze action at local, state, and regional levels before it was vetoed by the governor. In 2019, MUA for transitioning to a just and equitable economy. will continue to advance in its core campaigns on Native Movement is also organizing to end violence immigrant and worker rights and will implement against Indigenous women and children. The rates of an organizing curriculum for staff and member missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls leaders. MUA will work to deepen its relationships in Alaska is staggering, and many go unreported or with LGBTQ organizations like Somos Familia and unrecognized. Alaska Native women experience the El/La para Translatinas, which may result in joint highest rates of sexual violence of any other gender projects. MUA is also considering applying its or race in Alaska and have reported rates of domestic transformative peer-led immigrant rights model to violence up to 10 times higher than in the rest of the organize a growing refugee base of Indigenous Mayan . Mam women. Racial Justice Action Center | $75,000 Native Movement | $75,000 Atlanta, GA | www.rjactioncenter.org Fairbanks, AK | www.nativemovement.org The Racial Justice Action Center (RJAC) builds the Based in Fairbanks, Alaska, Native Movement grounds grassroots leadership and power of women, trans its work to build grassroots power in Indigenous people, and low-income communities of color to place-based knowledge and in decolonization and fight for and win political and social transformation Just Transition3 frameworks. These frameworks build in Georgia. RJAC has two grassroots organizing an understanding of the historic and current impacts projects: Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative of colonization and offer a regenerative vision of the (SNaP Co.), a Black trans-and queer-led power- future, while outlining a practical path for how to get building organization; and Women on the Rise (WoR), there. Native Movement plays a key role in uplifting a membership-based organization of women targeted Indigenous leadership in the fight to protect Native and/or impacted by the criminal justice system. land, the environment, and the safety of women and girls, while filling critical gaps in grassroots organizing capacity across the state. Native Movement collaborates with local groups to train hundreds of organizers and provides organizational support to emerging and long-term projects and initiatives.In 2017, President Trump signed a tax bill that would open up the Arctic Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling for the first time; Native Movement is supporting

3 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 an extractive economy to a regenerative economy. Learn more at https:// climatejusticealliance.org/just-transition/

8 2018 LIBERATION Fund Docket In 2018, RJAC introduced city council legislation to close the Atlanta City Jail and create a community- based process to determine the building’s new use. Since the legislation’s introduction, RJAC has been meeting with stakeholders to hold deeper dialogues around criminalization in support of the legislation. In a show of support for the bill, the Mayor of Atlanta Keisha Lance Bottoms has announced that she intends to close the long-standing jail.

In 2019, RJAC will continue its campaign to shut down the Atlanta City Jail and repurpose the facility into something that improves the health, Early in 2018, SONG won the passage of a local wellness, and safety of Atlanta’s most marginalized ordinance that would end money bail for arrests communities. A key focus will be reallocation of the related to city level violations. SONG bailed out 30 $32.5 million spent on the jail annually to support incarcerated mothers through its second national restorative justice programs that help communities Black Mama’s Bail Out Action, which raised more than thrive. This will further RJAC’s mission of systemic $150,000 from more than 1,500 donors. SONG also divestment from the United States’ prison-industrial scaled up its Black leadership development program, complex and investment in services. The Lorde’s Werq, to a cohort of 50 members who are trained and supported to step into deeper movement leadership across the South. In 2019, SONG will Southerners On New Ground (SONG) | continue to focus on anti-criminalization work, $100,000 working to abolish the ways in which black and brown U.S. South | www.southernersonnewground.org bodies are policed and building collaboration with politically aligned organizations such as: Movement Southerners On New Ground (SONG) is a political 4 Black Lives, Mijente, Georgia Latino Alliance for home for LGBTQ liberation across all lines of race, Human Rights (GLAHR), and Agitarte, a Puerto Rican class, abilities, age, culture, gender, and sexuality arts and cultural organizing group. SONG also plans in the U.S. South. SONG is building power through to launch invest/divest campaigns, demanding that innovative grassroots campaigns developed in southern governments divest from prisons, detention response to current conditions. SONG’s campaigns centers, and policing, and invest those resources back are rooted in regionally specific demands, incorporate into communities. direct action, and center leadership development, coalition building, and cultural organizing. Free From Fear is SONG’s pledge to fight and defeat fear and Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex violence in towns, cities, the region, and the country Justice Project | $75,000 that stem from state, interpersonal, and institutional California | www.tgijp.org violence. Under the Free From Fear campaign banner, SONG is demanding an end to money bail in Atlanta, The Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Georgia; similar campaigns are in development Project (TGIJP) is one of the first and only legal in Kinston, North Carolina, Richmond, Virginia, advocacy and support organizations led by formerly Charlottesville, Virginia, and Nashville, Tennessee. incarcerated trans women of color, especially Black SONG is also piloting electoral organizing projects trans women. TGIJP works to end the human rights to add tools and tactics to its work and membership abuses committed against transgender, gender in Richmond, Virginia, Birmingham, Alabama, and variant, and intersex (TGI) people in California prisons, Nashville, Tennessee. jails, detention centers, and beyond by decreasing the number of TGI people in prison, reducing recidivism,

2018 LIBERATION Fund Docket 9 easing re-entry through access to housing, increasing leadership in social justice movements, and working to end the criminalization of TGI people.

In 2018, Black Girls Rule, TGIJP’s national convening for Black trans women and femmes, brought together 25 participants to focus on political education, discuss Black trans safety issues, and engage in peer-to-peer learning. As violence in the trans community continues at an alarming rate, TGIJP plans to hold its 2019 convening in the South, with a special emphasis on groups from the region, to draw special attention to the trans community, including healthcare, housing, growing trans communities there and to invite more economic justice, and ending state violence and trans people to be supportive of work in the South. criminalization, among others. TLC produced a report TGIJP also works to support community members that focused on reframing the high prevalence of through re-entry by connecting them with economic HIV and AIDS among the trans Latin@ community opportunities, employing several directly at TGIJP and within a broader context of systemic inequity and taking eight people through a restaurant management presented its recommendations to the Centers for program run by Restaurant Opportunity Center (ROC). Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). TLC also made After celebrating the passage of SB 310: the Name recommendations to the City of Los Angeles Workforce and Dignity Act for Incarcerated Trans People in 2017, Development Board about the workforce needs TGIJP worked to ensure that the new law was being of trans and gender nonconforming people; these implemented throughout 2018. The new law allows recommendations were included in the city’s workforce formerly incarcerated people to change their name and development plan and informed a set of trainings for gender marker. TGIJP is currently campaigning to pass city employees. In 2019, as part of the TransformCA SB 990, which would allow incarcerated people to have coalition, TLC will ensure the implementation of trans access to programing while in solitary confinement inclusive policies such as SB 396 Transgender Work or administrative segregation. The legislation would Opportunity Act and AB 1732, which requires that also require that prison staff use the correct name and all single-stall toilets in California be gender neutral. pronoun for people inside. TLC will demand trans-specific housing for homeless community members and will provide trans cultural TransLatin@ Coalition | $75,000 competency trainings to homeless shelters and transitional housing programs in Los Angeles County. U.S. | www.translatinacoalition.org TLC will also embark upon a multiyear strategy to Founded in 2009 by trans immigrant women in legislatively decriminalize sex trade/work, starting with cities across the country, the TransLatin@ Coalition the formation of a working group in 2019. (TLC) uses a hybrid model of direct service delivery, grassroots organizing, and policy advocacy to improve quality of life for TransLatin@ immigrants. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, TLC has To learn more about Groundswell’s chapters in Arizona, California, DC, Florida, Georgia, Liberation Fund, please contact Program Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, , Officer, Cecilia Sáenz Becerra at Washington, and Virginia. In 2018, TLC created a six- point policy agenda that addresses issues affecting [email protected]

Photos courtesy of Brooke Anderson Photography, Survival Media Agency, CAAAV, City Life/Vida Urbana, DRUM, Dream Defenders, Racial Justice Action Center, SONG, TransLatin@ Coalition.

10 2018 LIBERATION Fund Docket 2018 Groundswell LIBERATION Fund Grantees RI VT NH MA NJ ME D.C. MD NY VA PA NC SC FL WV GA OH KY MI AL IN TN PR MS IL Local or state grantees Regional or national grantees WI LA AR MO IA MN OK KS TX NE ND SD CO NM WY MT UT AZ ID NV WA OR assachusetts D.C. ashington LOUISIANA BreakOUT! M City Life/Vida Urbana NEW YORK CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities DRUM - Desis Rising Up & Moving C arolina N orth Southerners On New Ground (SONG) T ennessee Southerners On New Ground (SONG) VIRGINIA Southerners On New Ground (SONG) W Johnson Institute Marsha P. CA HI AK Justice Project ALABAMA Southerners On New Ground (SONG) A laska Movement Native ARIZONA Coalition Black Mesa Water CALIFORNIA Mujeres Unidas y Activas and Intersex Gender-Variant, Transgender, Coalition TransLatin@ FLORIDA Dream Defenders GEORGIA Racial Justice Action Center Southerners On New Ground (SONG)

2018 LIBERATION Fund Docket 11 Groundswell supports a stronger, more effective U.S. movement for reproductive justice by mobilizing new funding and capacity building resources to grassroots organizing and policy change efforts led by low income women, women of color and transgender people.

www.groundswellfund.org