2011 Rap Grantees
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE)
Fall 2010
$30,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support the Transit Justice Organizing Project, designed to build a membership- based organization that empowers low-income bus riders and riders of color to advocate for a more equitable and representative regional transit system in the Bay Area. More>>
Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice
Fall 2010
$30,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support of local grassroots organizing that links reproductive justice and climate justice with the experiences of immigrant youth in low-income communities. This grant will support the leadership development of young Asian American girls through the Sisters in Action for Issues of Reproductive Justice (SAFIRE) program and improve the health, safety and family economic security of Vietnamese nail salon workers in Oakland. More>>#asian
Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN)
Fall 2010
$150,000 – 2 year grant
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support of the work of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) to engage low-income Asian and Pacific American (APA) communities and voters in Oakland and across California to advance racial justice solutions to climate change that are sustainable and economically equitable for low-income communities of color. More>>
Californians for Justice Education Fund
Fall 2010
$150,000 – 2 year grant
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support work for education justice, including efforts to: build a base of high school and community college student leaders of color who have the power and skills to organize for change both locally and statewide; wage local organizing efforts to affect school-site and district-level policy change in Oakland public schools; and amplify the voices of Oakland students and community members in statewide policy debates on education reform. More>>
Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB)
Fall 2010
$40,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support a statewide campaign against prison and jail expansion and efforts to promote budget justice in California, including generating broad political support for changes in sentencing, parole, and credits systems to shrink the prison population, fighting jail and prison expansion plans, and building a sustainable power bloc to push for racial justice in public spending. More>>
Causa Justa/Just Cause (CJJC)
Fall 2010
$75,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support to organize African American and Latino residents of Oakland and San Francisco to amplify civic participation among low-income communities of color, increase bank accountability for and prevent foreclosures in low-income neighborhoods, and improve employment opportunities of public housing residents and habitability of public housing buildings. More>>
Center for Third World Organizing
Black Organizing Project
Fall 2010
$40,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support the new Black Organizing Project (BOP) at the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO), which seeks to create strong, cohesive Black communities effectively mobilized to address issues of structural racism and social inequity. More>>
Communities for a Better Environment
Fall 2010
$40,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support of work to achieve environmental health and justice through building grassroots power in and with communities of color and working class communities.More>>
EastSide Arts Alliance
Fall 2010
$130,000 – 2 year grant
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support the work of EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA) to advance culture as a way for communities of color to work for community development and empowerment, regenerate leadership and support the next generation of cultural workers/movement builders, and help develop Third World unity by developing and participating in collaborations among communities of color. More>>
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
Soul of the City Project
Fall 2010
$50,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support the Soul of the City Project of the Ella Baker Center (EBC) to engage local residents in decision-making processes in Oakland around the economy, environment, public safety, and opportunities for their families to thrive. In particular, the project focuses on developing alternative economic models for worker-owned businesses and increasing awareness of the importance of civic engagement in local and statewide elections. More>>
Intertribal Friendship House
Fall 2010
$30,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support to expand the impact and visibility of Intertribal Friendship House (IFH) in the Bay Area as an advocacy organization for Native American social and racial justice, including their work to implement cultural recovery programming, improve health justice, and implement strategies to counteract colonization. More>>
Movement Generation
Fall 2010
$45,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support to provide in-depth information and analysis about the global ecological crisis and help organizations forge long-term, collaborative organizing strategies that will build grassroots power in low-income communities of color in the Bay Area. More>>
Oakland Rising
Fall 2010
$50,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For support of work to build a permanent political/electoral infrastructure in communities of color and low-income and immigrant communities in East and West Oakland, exercise and expand political influence of people in those communities and of progressive social justice organizations, and align organizations and coordinate with other progressive forces to shift Oakland’s political landscape to the left. More>>
People’s Grocery
Fall 2010
$30,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support work to promote food justice and build a local food system that improves the health and economy of West Oakland by increasing the local supply of fresh foods, advocating for living-wage business and job opportunities, and developing strong relationships and community leadership. More>>
Public Advocates
Fall 2010
Bay Area, CA
$130,000 – 2 year grant
Project Description
For general support of work with community partners to grow an informed, engaged base that can advocate effectively for equity in transit funding, affordable housing, and investment and development. More>>
Public Interest Projects
Communities for Public Education Reform
Fall 2010
$40,000
New York, NY
www.communitiesforpubliceducationreform.org
Project Description
To support the work of Communities for Public Education Reform (CPER) as they launch a California site to support the growing field of education organizing. As a funders’ collaborative, CPER provides grants and technical assistance to community organizations working to ensure that parents and students have a strong voice in shaping the policies that affect their public schools.More>>
School of Unity and Liberation
Fall 2010
$45,000
Oakland, CA
www.schoolofunityandliberation.org
Project Description
To support a training center dedicated to developing a new generation of leaders who can help build a broad social movement for racial and economic justice. More>>
Urban Strategies Council
Fall 2010
$30,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support completion of a web mapping and data warehouse system, as well as on-going work to provide community-based organizations with training, research, and data support to manage, plan, and implement campaigns and projects. More>>
Youth Together
Fall 2010
$150,000 – 2 year grant
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support the work of Youth Together (YT) to increase academic and civic engagement of low-income youth of color, reduce interracial and gender/sexuality-based conflict on high school campuses in the East Bay, and increase the public’s understanding of and engagement with education funding in California. More>>
Longer Description
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE)
Fall 2010
$30,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support the Transit Justice Organizing Project, designed to build a membership- based organization that empowers low-income bus riders and riders of color to advocate for a more equitable and representative regional transit system in the Bay Area.
Approach to Racial Justice
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) organizes residents and workers in working class communities of color to address racial and economic disparities. Their goal is to build strong neighborhood and issue-based groups that can take collective action to address the many by-products of structural racism that have left many of these communities stripped of resources and power for decades. Their focus on bus riders in the Bay Area emerges in response to inequities in funding in public transportation, which disproportionately affect low-income families of color.
Movement Building
ACCE builds campaigns in coalition with other community and racial justice groups to help ordinary residents organize and take action. They build alliances with civic, labor, religious, business, and policy partners that translate into the campaign infrastructure needed to win progressive tax, budget, and policy reform for California communities. While some issues are statewide, ACCE is also dedicated to overcoming the most pressing challenges that face historically marginalized neighborhoods community by community. By developing leadership, increasing civic engagement, and empowering working families, local ACCE chapters are building movement from the ground up.
Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice
Fall 2010
$30,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support of local grassroots organizing that links reproductive justice and climate justice with the experiences of immigrant youth in low-income communities. This grant will support the leadership development of young Asian American girls through the Sisters in Action for Issues of Reproductive Justice (SAFIRE) program and improve the health, safety and family economic security of Vietnamese nail salon workers in Oakland.
Approach to Racial Justice
ACRJ organizes young and adult women of color and immigrant women in order to strengthen a racial justice movement rooted in the needs and issues of local communities. As active participants in the larger Reproductive Justice Movement, they work to organize against structural inequalities of reproductive oppression, build the leadership of women of color through a comprehensive and transformative process of empowerment, and create conditions for women of color to achieve self-determination.
Movement Building
On the local level, ACRJÕs role has been to assert the voices of young Asian women and women workers in debates around worker health and safety, climate justice, and the emerging green economy. This work ensures that communities who are most affected are integral to the discussion, design, and implementation of solutions. ACRJ employs two core movement-building strategies to achieve their goals. The first is to support local organizing that builds the power of young and adult women of color, immigrant women, and their communities. The second is to develop and strengthen a reproductive justice movement capable of national impact that is rooted in the concrete needs and issues of grassroots communities and led by the most excluded groups of young and adult women of color.
Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN)
Fall 2010
$150,000 – 2 year grant
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support of the work of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) to engage low-income Asian and Pacific American (APA) communities and voters in Oakland and across California to advance racial justice solutions to climate change that are sustainable and economically equitable for low-income communities of color.
Approach to Racial Justice
Born at the intersections of the environmental and racial justice movements, APEN believes that racism is a fundamental basis for poverty and environmental injustice, and they bring that belief into the core of their organizing methodology, analysis of issues, and strategies for change. Asian and Pacific Islanders, particularly low-income APAs, have long been excluded – based on race – from decision making that most affects their lives; APENÕs focus is on developing the leadership and power of low-income APA immigrant and refugee communities to challenge this historic exclusion.
Movement Building
APEN currently works on three levels: direct organizing in local communities, building a network of APA organizations, and working in multiracial alliances to affect regional and national social change. Though their strength is in neighborhood-rooted organizing projects, APEN is committed to being flexible and strategic about operating at whatever scale will leverage maximum impact for the families and communities they organize. They provide leadership for progressive multi-racial alliances of community-based and policy groups in the Bay Area to promote an environmental and racial justice policy agenda, including Oakland Climate Action Coalition and Oakland Rising. They also recently launched the Asian and Pacific American Climate Coalition (APACC), a statewide vehicle to build power and win state level policies that already has engaged 100 APA organizations in climate policy trainings across the state.
Californians for Justice Education Fund
Fall 2010
$150,000 – 2 year grant
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support work for education justice, including efforts to: build a base of high school and community college student leaders of color who have the power and skills to organize for change both locally and statewide; wage local organizing efforts to affect school-site and district-level policy change in Oakland public schools; and amplify the voices of Oakland students and community members in statewide policy debates on education reform.
Approach to Racial Justice
Californians for Justice (CFJ) challenges racial disparities in public education by building a movement for equity and access to resources for all oppressed communities in California, and helping to institute proactive, positive and inclusive anti-racist policies, culture, and practices that promote equity and justice for all people. Their local educational justice campaigns focus on challenging institutional racism in public schools and advancing policies for racial justice and equity, and they work to highlight the voices and experiences of students of color facing structural racism in education.
Movement Building
CFJÕs regional, statewide, and national alliance- and movement-building efforts seek to advance racial justice by building the collective power of racial justice base building organizations to collectively shape education policies. Their base building efforts focus on recruiting low-income students of color – both in high school and community college – who are most directly impacted by structural racism within the public education system and create a pipeline for those students to become lifelong racial justice movement leaders. They also promote collaboration and a shared racial justice analysis among grassroots education organizing groups in the Bay Area such as the Campaign for Quality Education (CQE) alliance and Communities for Public Education Reform (CPER), which explicitly addresses educational equity for low-income students of color across the state.
Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB)
Fall 2010
$40,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support a statewide campaign against prison and jail expansion and efforts to promote budget justice in California, including generating broad political support for changes in sentencing, parole, and credits systems to shrink the prison population, fighting jail and prison expansion plans, and building a sustainable power bloc to push for racial justice in public spending.
Approach to Racial Justice
CURB understands that the racial disparities inherent in mass imprisonment are both a result of structural racism within the criminal legal system as well as within institutions ostensibly for the public good, including education, housing, and health care. They emphasize that state budget decisions, rather than individual behavior, fundamentally determine how many – and which – people go to prison, an approach that helps people and organizations make the shift to a structural understanding of racism and identify a way to move toward a common target. Their efforts are grounded in intersectional feminist, anti-racist analyses and organizing strategies that link individual and structural violence.
Movement Building
CURB uses the state budget process to connect social and racial justice organizations and campaigns across every sector and issue as it relates to state funding. They bring together member organizations fighting mass imprisonment from across the state to build geographic and issue-focused unity, which is particularly important given historic urban-rural divides around prison expansion. CURB also endeavors to connect those fighting against ÒbadÓ state spending – exemplified by prison expansion – to those fighting for ÒgoodÓ state spending – on education, health care, employment, housing, and other basic resources. These efforts serve to build the broadest alliances possible of racial justice organizations to demand comprehensive budget justice.
Fall 2010
$75,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support to organize African American and Latino residents of Oakland and San Francisco to amplify civic participation among low-income communities of color, increase bank accountability for and prevent foreclosures in low-income neighborhoods, and improve employment opportunities of public housing residents and habitability of public housing buildings.
Approach to Racial Justice
Causa Justa/Just Cause (CJJC) supports multiracial organizing to generate more equitable economic development across lines of race, ethnicity, and income. Specifically they bring together African American and Latino members from both Oakland and San Francisco in an effort to increase the organizing capacity of both ethnic and geographical groups. They contextualize their work within racialized histories of economic development and exploitation, migration, and circulations of wealth to understand and challenge who gets displaced, who faces linguistic and economic obstacles, and who experiences discriminatory treatment by social institutions.
Movement Building
As a multiracial base building organization, CJJC actively promotes cohesion and unity in action among many groups by identifying common goals and strategies. They increasingly use an organizing model that combines base building with service provision, and they participate in several local, regional, and national strategic alliances that prioritize housing justice and immigrant rights. These include: Oakland Rising, whose mission is to educate and mobilize voters in OaklandÕs low-income flatlands; the Bay Area Bank Accountability Coalition, a regional effort comprised of organizations, unions and residents; and Right to the City, a national coalition working to synchronize efforts to affect social justice in cities across the United States.
Center for Third World Organizing
Black Organizing Project
Fall 2010
$40,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support the new Black Organizing Project (BOP) at the Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO), which seeks to create strong, cohesive Black communities effectively mobilized to address issues of structural racism and social inequity.
Approach to Racial Justice
CTWO believes that overcoming racism is at the root of building grassroots democracy, which includes increasing voter participation, creating a more diverse system of political representation, and ensuring that people most directly impacted by social policies have a voice in creating them. Though low-income Black people were somewhat successfully mobilized in the last presidential election, there was insufficient movement infrastructure afterward to successfully demand policy changes, even at the local level. The BOP was formed to provide a protected space for low-income Black people to thresh out issues, develop leadership skills, and become engaged in larger social justice movements in order to successfully mobilize Black communities for concrete policy changes.
Movement building
CTWO is building the BOP in Oakland as a model for member-led groups throughout the country to successfully mobilize Black constituents and build Black leadership. CTWO advances the racial justice movement locally by adding capacity to existing campaigns through their core training programs and by creating new grassroots organizing efforts in response to community need, such as the BOP. The BOP uses a people-based approach to organizing, as opposed to an issue-based approach: rather than taking a specific issue to the community to organize around, they bring people together in a series of listening sessions to identify their own issues for the eventual launch of campaigns to address them. In Oakland, the BOP will mobilize the base to carry out its own member-led campaigns, as well to support policy change work with ally grassroots organizing groups and labor unions.
Communities for a Better Environment
Fall 2010
$40,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support of work to achieve environmental health and justice through building grassroots power in and with communities of color and working class communities.
Approach to Racial Justice
Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) understands that low-income communities of color historically have had to bear the burden of economic, environmental, and public health inequities where they live, work, play, pray, get food, and go to school. In response, CBE focuses on outreach and leadership development in the communities most impacted by industrial pollution, disenfranchisement, and gentrification, and fights for healthier and more resilient communities while also mitigating the impacts of environmental harm.
Movement Building
CBE uses a three-pronged movement-building model that uses community organizing, science-based research and advocacy, and legal strategies. They build on-the-ground capacity of community residents to fight for and win pollution reductions, jobs, and long-term policy changes, and organize in coalitions around climate change, public health, and land use. They work locally to enhance public health outcomes of East Oakland residents, and statewide to represent thousands of people in low-income working class communities of color to improve their environment, health, and quality of life.
Fall 2010
$130,000 – 2 year grant
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support the work of EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA) to advance culture as a way for communities of color to work for community development and empowerment, regenerate leadership and support the next generation of cultural workers/movement builders, and help develop Third World unity by developing and participating in collaborations among communities of color.
Approach to Racial Justice
Through theater, dance, poetry, visual arts, and music, ESAA allows communities of color to tell their own stories of struggle, setbacks and victories. Their work foregrounds the inextricable link between culture and self-determination for communities of color and challenges the marginalization of the histories of indigenous, enslaved, and indentured immigrant populations in mainstream American culture. As a grassroots, community-based organization, they strive to educate, challenge, and mobilize communities of color to develop a progressive vision of social justice based on a clear historical analysis.
Movement building
Through progressive programming and cultural organizing, ESAA serves as a unifying, neighborhood gathering-place and promotes community sustainability for future generations through promotion of self-determination, political and cultural awareness, and leadership development. They work with veteran artists and movement leaders from the Civil Rights struggles, Third World liberation, and Black Arts and Chicano Arts movements to help teach and inspire young leadership and the community as a whole to develop a new movement for social change. In addition to presenting a year-round schedule of community cultural events and town hall forums, they work to document, preserve, catalog, and make accessible the cultural production of social justice movements, particularly of communities of color from the 1960s to the present.
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
Soul of the City Project
Fall 2010
$50,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
To support the Soul of the City Project of the Ella Baker Center (EBC) to engage local residents in decision-making processes in Oakland around the economy, environment, public safety, and opportunities for their families to thrive. In particular, the project focuses on developing alternative economic models for worker-owned businesses and increasing awareness of the importance of civic engagement in local and statewide elections.
Approach to Racial Justice
EBCÕs analysis of racism in Oakland reveals decades of disinvestment and marginalization of low-income communities that have created a city in which stark differences can be seen across racial lines. In the Òflatlands,Ó where communities are predominantly African American, Latino, and Southeast Asian, access to quality education, family-sustaining employment, and healthy food is limited, while pollution, policing and pipelines to prison are abundant. They build the collective power of communities of color in Oakland and shift cultural norms by engaging communities that often are not given the tools to participate in civic engagement and left out of important decision-making processes.
Movement Building
EBC engages marginalized communities to help create solutions by providing them with tools to promote experience-sharing to uncover common struggles across cultural differences, organize and advocate, empower them to speak out, and increase civic participation. The Soul of the City Project in particular uses three main strategies: leadership development, political education training and civic engagement. EBC advocates for investment in communities of color and low-income communities through local policy initiatives and often plays the role of convener in bringing together organizations across various sectors – including labor, business, and social/economic/ environmental justice organizing – to push for solutions to the crises that low-income communities and communities of color face.
Fall 2010
$30,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support to expand the impact and visibility of Intertribal Friendship House (IFH) in the Bay Area as an advocacy organization for Native American social and racial justice, including their work to implement cultural recovery programming, improve health justice, and implement strategies to counteract colonization.
Approach to Racial Justice
IFH serves as a community anchor for Bay Area Native American families and provides a safe haven from the dominant society where Native Americans can feel safe, nourished, supported, and able to share their traditional values. IFH provides the opportunity for Native families and youth to heal from the original stressors of relocation, historical trauma, racism, and oppression, and to promote their participation at the policy table to ensure their survival. IFH recognizes that the continuation of their political organizing and work to preserve their culture in an urban environment is critical for addressing issues of structural racism, historical trauma, oppression, and neo-colonialism, particularly when the dominant society treats Native people as invisible.
Movement Building
Because for the American Indian community culture and spirituality are inextricably linked to movements for social and racial justice, IFH is committed to the restoration and preservation of Native cultural heritage as a means to improve the communities' collective self-esteem and promote self-sufficiency and knowledge. Because they view land and culture issues as inseparable, IFH sees their efforts to revitalize traditional food systems as a decolonization strategy. They also partner with organizations like the Bay Area Collaborative for American Indian Resources (BACAIR) and Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) that address racial justice for Native children in foster care and youth in the juvenile justice system. IFH works in coalition with other people of color organizations to forge and build strong alliances, particularly to develop meaningful leadership formations, collective strength, and the capacity to engage in social action and advocacy in communities of color.
Fall 2010
$45,000
Oakland, CA
Project Description
For general support to provide in-depth information and analysis about the global ecological crisis and help organizations forge long-term, collaborative organizing strategies that will build grassroots power in low-income communities of color in the Bay Area.
Approach to Racial Justice
Through analysis of the intersecting root causes of racism, poverty and environmental destruction, and by learning from inspiring environmental justice movements from around the world, Movement Generation (MG) hopes to build the people-power needed to construct local, living democracies rooted in equity and ecological sanity. By fostering the integration of an ecological justice lens into racial and economic justice movements, MG is building a vision, platform, and agenda that can advance equity while addressing the global ecological crisis. They have popularized a racial justice analysis and critique of our industrial growth-based economy, to expose how its exponential growth harms people, places, and the planet. MGÕs cultural diversity approach has made this discourse relevant to racial justice actors and provides a cultural context that both ties their analysis to long-standing indigenous and cultural practices, and connects it to communitiesÕ material needs and struggles in a U.S. urban context.
Movement Building
MG believes that vibrant and visionary movements for social change are built from the bottom up. They also believe that space to do long-term analysis and strategy development that will lead to pro-active policy change and grassroots organizing capable of shifting the balance of power is central to movement-building work. They provide training and analysis to grassroots organizations, help build strategic alignment among grassroots groups working in different communities and issue sectors around an ecological justice agenda, and provide tools to construct community resilience.
"Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle."
- Malcolm X