Grantee Profiles
BAY-Peace (Better Alternatives for Youth) empowers California youth to resist aggressive military recruiting and war. BAY-Peace focuses on fighting back against aggressive military recruiting in schools. They provide workshops and trainings to give young people real information about the military that recruiters wouldn’t want you to know. They are reaching out to youth all over the Bay Area to organize for better alternatives.
Ex-Prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement (EPOCA) is a group of ex-prisoners and current prisoners, along with allies, friends and family, working together to create resources and opportunities for those who have paid their debt to society. Working beyond issues of incarceration and re-entry policy, EPOCA members are leaders in the social movement as a whole and particularly as strong allies to youth organizing. In 2010, EPOCA celebrated a major victory in their years-long struggle to change the way criminal records are reported in Massachusetts, paving the way for former prisoners to pursue more just job opportunities.
Fuerza Laboral (“Power of Workers”) builds worker power. A Rhode Island-based organization of immigrants and low-income workers who organize to end exploitation in the workplace, Fuerza Laboral trains workers in their rights, develops new community leaders, and takes direct action against injustice to achieve real victories.
The HONK! Festival is a revolutionary street spectacle of never-before-seen proportions that converged for the fifth time in Massachusetts in 2010! Across the country and around the world, a new type of street band is emerging. Acoustic and mobile, borrowing repertoire and inspiration from a diverse set of folk music traditions, they honk their horns for the same reasons motorists honk theirs: to arouse fellow travelers, to warn of danger, to celebrate milestones, and to just plain have fun. Just as important, they honk their horns because it’s the best way they know to protest a world of violence and oppression. The bands are inspired to travel great distances, at great personal expense, to joyously celebrate our hard work to reclaim public space—the world over—for all people. The bands at HONK! Fest long to connect in honor of our struggles for justice.
The Justice Committee is a Latina/Latino-led organization dedicated to building a movement against police violence and systemic racism in New York City. Using leadership development, political education, base-building and direct action, the Justice Committee prioritizes developing the leadership of both youth and elders. They also build strategic alliances with other antiracist, immigrant and people of color-led organizations to build a broad-based movement for social justice in New York City.
Kentucky Jobs With Justice is a broad-based coalition of community groups, faith-based organizations, students and labor unions united to promote, protect and improve the quality of life of all workers by empowering individuals and organizations to engage in collective action for economic and social justice. The organization was founded in 1992 when community and church activists joined to support UNITE! in a fight for a fair contract for workers against Louisville Manufacturing. Kentucky Jobs with Justice has since grown to a coalition of more than 50 organizational members and 1,800 individual activists who have pledged to "be there five times for someone else's fight as well as my own."
The National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) is a federation of LGBT Asian American, South Asian, Pacific Islander, and Southeast Asian organizations and allies. In 2005, leaders from 37 of the nation’s LGBT Asian Pacific Islander organizations came together to build cross-organizational connections and lay the foundation for ongoing collaboration. That roundtable became NQAPIA, which has been supporting, nurturing and developing existing and emerging LGBTQ Asian Pacific Islander leaders since then.
Neighbor to Neighbor – Lynn is a progressive organization of working class, multiracial, and multi-ethnic people working together to build political and economic power to improve the quality of lives in our communities throughout Massachusetts. Member-led and -driven, Neighbor to Neighbor leads the change through education, training, issue and electoral organizing, policy advocacy, alliance building, community-controlled economic development and holding decision-makers accountable.
Peace Action Wisconsin is a peace and justice organization which works for a world where human needs are met, the environment is preserved, and the threats of war and nuclear weapons have been abolished. Committed to nonviolence as a way of life, Peace Action Wisconsin offers its members opportunities for education, lobbying and public witness. “It takes active involvement in other people's issues to build friendship and trust over many years," writes Julie Byrnes Enslow, a founding member of Peace Action Wisconsin. "By taking seriously Dr. King's call to address the three evils of racism, militarism and poverty, we can successfully build a unified movement for a more just and peaceful world.”
The work of Power in Community Alliances (PICA) has helped to make Maine a state leader in addressing the effects of the global economy on the lives of Maine residents. For nearly 25 years PICA has been building grassroots community alliances that address global problems of economic justice and human and worker rights. A recent project of PICA's is “kNOw US AND THEM,” built on a Listening Project of in-depth interviews of recent economic immigrants, small farmers and displaced manufacturing workers in Maine.
Sand Mountain Concerned Citizens oppose the proliferation of corporate factory hog farms in densely populated rural areas, near rivers and streams and recreational waters, and near drinking water supplies. Run entirely by volunteers, Sand Mountain Concerned Citizens works to influence Alabama legislators to improve and enforce the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) regulations and to protect the social infrastructure of Rural Alabama. Sand Mountain's current issue is to get more high school students involved in water monitoring of ponds, wells, creeks, streams and the river in our area, in an effort to protect their water supply. Check out their 2010 resource, "In Community Defense of Hog CAFO Encroachment: A Battle Plan," now available for download as a PDF. In the photo above, a volunteer is collecting samples at a hog lagoon.
