Social Justice Fund Northwest supports organizations that are community based and that use community organizing to achieve their goals. Our grantees are led by people from the communities most impacted by injustice and inequality. The following organizations received grants from our 2015 Giving Projects

  • Spring Momentum Giving Project: Police Accountability
  • Gender Justice Giving Project
  • Environmental Justice Giving Project
  • Next Generation Giving Project
  • Social Justice Giving Project based in Portland
  • Fall Momentum Giving Project: Black-Led Organizing
  • Economic Justice Giving Project (grantees announced early March 2016)

Africatown Center for Innovation and Education | (Seattle, WA)

Will support the building and sustaining the local Black Student Unions in collaboration with family and community strengthening the collective power of the Black Student Unions ability to champion collaboration, advocacy, and self-determination.

Black Autumn (Seattle, WA)

Creating a youth led Media, and Garden Project. Focusing on the importance of controlling our stories and feeding ourselves.

Black Lives Matter Portland | Portland, OR

We are a group of Black and non-Black POCs and allies united in the struggle for Black and African liberation. We stand with the Black Lives Matter movement against all forms of state violence including systemic racism, police brutality and misconduct, mass incarceration, criminalization, and displacement and gentrification. We work to build power and organize in the communities that are most affected by issues of state violence and police brutality – particularly Black women, trans women, and gender variant folks.

BlackOut WA | Seattle, WA

BlackOut WA is a Washington State based Black advocacy group with a focus on building capacity around political advocacy & civic engagement for families of African descent. We seek to develop the “People’s Plan for Justice.” This plan, which has evolved out of the “No New Youth Jail” campaign, will (1) build on a holistic and relational process for black centered organizations and organizing efforts to develop alternatives to our criminal/ juvenile justice systems as well as (2) strengthen community based institution building and (3) enhance anti-racist political infrastructure.

CAPACES Leadership Institute | Woodburn, OR

CLI is a permanent part of the Oregon farmworker movement, led by PCUN. The Institute will build the leadership capacity and political consciousness to sustain and expand that movement and to propel a host of related struggles, such as immigrants’ rights. The CLI is seeking funding from SJF to continue providing and developing leadership programs aimed at grounding new leaders in social justice work and preparing emerging leaders for mid-level and top leadership for the Latino farmworker immigrant community and allies.

Causa Oregon | Woodburn, OR

Causa’s mission is to foster a society that recognizes the contributions of immigrants and upholds the values of democracy, equality, and respect. Causa requests support for our Keeping Families Together Campaign that defends recent immigration changes so that they become realities for immigrant families by organizing a coalition to fight back, lifting the voices of our families, and educating and reaching out to immigrant families to provide vital information and organize.

Center for Intercultural Organizing | Portland, OR

Center for Intercultural Organizing is a diverse, grassroots organization that leads community-based efforts to protect and expand immigrant and refugee rights through education, civic engagement and policy advocacy, community organizing and mobilization, and intergenerational leadership development. With funding from SJF, CIO will staff and continue building Resilient Connections, a group formed by LGBTQ immigrants and refugees in the Portland Tri-County area, and partner and/or launch issue campaigns that will further LGBTQ justice for immigrants, refugees, and people of color. In addition, during the 2015 Oregon Legislative Session, CIO and its partners introduced an End Profiling bill that passed. A change in law alone is insufficient to ensure community members know their new rights under the policy and utilize mechanisms to hold police accountable. With SJF’s funding, CIO will activate the coalition, leadership, and base. The public will successfully mobilize during the legislative session to demand real change and ensure the bill is effectively implemented.

Colectiva Legal del Pueblo | Burien, WA

Colectiva Legal del Pueblo uses community organizing and legal services strategies to strengthen undocumented communities to defend themselves from deportation and detention and transform the broken immigration system. Our mission is to build the power of Latino and working class communities to achieve dignity and justice through advocacy, education, and legal services. With funding from SJF Colectiva Legal del Pueblo will continue their organizing work with detainees and their families who are organizing within the Northwest Detention Center, to apply pressure to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and GEO (the private contractor that runs the detention center) to challenge detention, deportation and exploitative working/living conditions of migrants.

Community Alliance of Tenants | Portland, OR

Community Alliance of Tenants’ (CAT) mission is to educate and empower tenants to demand and obtain safe, stable and affordable rental housing in Oregon. CAT addresses the impact of Oregon’s decreasing supply of safe, affordable housing and absence of meaningful protections for tenants from unjust evictions and unsafe housing conditions.

Community to Community Development | Bellingham, WA

Community to Community Development (C2C) is a place based, women-led grassroots organization working for a just society and healthy communities. We are committed to systemic change and to creating strategic alliances that strengthen local and global movements towards social, economic and environmental justice. We believe that another world is possible and we are active participants with other popular people’s movements. We strive to reclaim our humanity by redefining power in order to end settler colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, in their external and internalized forms. We prioritize the analysis of women of color, and the actions and solutions proposed by the most directly-affected immigrant, farmworker, low-wage worker, youth, LGBTQ communities in rural Whatcom and Skagit counties. We cultivate deep solidarity relationships with sister organizations through larger regional, national and global coalitions that move social, economic, environmental, racial, and gender justice forward. In 2015, C2C will engage in intense and deep cultivation of our constituency base and allies, to build grassroots opposition to the H2A guestworker program within current proposals for Democrat-sponsored immigration reform. This bracero program destroys domestic farmworker communities and attempts to pit domestic farmworkers against their own family members who are also fleeing military, environmental and economic devastation outside the U.S.

Critical Resistance, Portland Chapter | Portland, OR

Critical Resistance seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure. As such, our work is part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness. The success of the movement requires that it reflect communities most affected by the PIC. Because we seek to abolish the PIC, we cannot support any work that extends its life or scope. Critical Resistance, on behalf of our chapter CR-Portland (CR-PDX) will support CR-PDX’s campaign to fight the violence of policing in Portland and to augment the Portland community’s capacity to identify, resource, and build alternatives to policing. This grant will support the Portland chapter in continuing to develop a strong abolitionist base in Portland and contributing to the work of CR as a national organization as we build a movement to abolish the prison industrial complex.

Got Green | Seattle, WA

Got Green ensures that low income communities and communities of color in Seattle and South King County gain equal access to and reap the benefits of the green movement and green economy: green jobs, healthy food, energy efficient and healthy homes, and quality public transportation. We do this by cultivating community leaders to organize, educate, advocate and build coalitions. This grant will help Got Green Young Leaders in the Green Movement in leading a campaign to make internships connect to sustainable careers subject to Seattle’s new living wage; it will advance and promote the leadership of low income women and women of color through the Food Access Team; and it will support our new Climate Justice Committee in developing its and Got Green’s work in building resiliency within communities facing climate change and displacement.

Groundwork Portland (Portland, OR)

Women’s Community Action (WCA) will create urban rapid-response teams that acts directly to respond to the convergence of environmental, housing, educational, health, economic, and social crises for Black people in the Portland Metro area.

Hilltop Urban Gardens | Tacoma, WA

HUG’s mission is to develop systems for food sovereignty and create racial and economic justice. We’re doing this by building a neighborhood-based network of urban farms and gardens. HUG creates opportunities for our community to be inspired, connected, and supported. We’re working to name and transform root level causes of oppressive systems and create solutions. HUG is continuing to dive deep with their work around food sovereignty and 2015 marks the launch HUG’s Community Based Participatory Research project in Tacoma’s Hilltop neighborhood.

Incarcerated Mothers Advocacy Project (IMAP) | Gig Harbor, WA

IMAP is a coalition of law students, lawyers, social service providers, activists, and formerly incarcerated women and seek to change the rights afforded incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women in the State of Washington. IMAP seeks to provide legal education and information to help prevent the separation of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated mothers from their children. We believe that the incarceration of women, and further, the separation of incarcerated mothers from their children due to incarceration, is a form of violence and reproductive oppression. We envision a day in which women of every color, ability, class and sexual orientation are able to help shape the policies that affect them and their families. In such a world, the rights of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women as persons and mothers would not only be respected but also supported. This grant will provide a mechanism for IMAP to be advised and led by a group of formerly incarcerated individuals who will drive IMAP’s work, develop projects, and keep all participants accountable to the organization’s mission and to currently incarcerated women.

Indian People’s Action | Butte, MT

Indian People’s Action (IPA) mission is to work in Montana urban areas, border towns of several Indian reservations to organize for social, economic and racial justice. Funding from SJF will support three organizing campaigns: Promoting public education and organizing legislative and judicial action on the conditions of Native inmates and their right to religious practices; expanding political engagement of Native communities on reservations and in urban areas in preparation for 2016 elections; and organizing ongoing community action to prevent the building of the KXL pipeline and expand public education and engagement on the impact of fossil fuels on the health and safety of Native communities.

Momentum Alliance | Portland, OR

Momentum Alliance is a youth-led non-profit, with experienced coaches, whose mission is to inspire youth to realize their power individually and collectively and to mentor future social justice leaders. This grant would provide support for the next stage of their cultural and community organizing and policy work for gender, LGBTQ, sexual and reproductive justice that began in 2013 in coalition with the We Are BRAVE Collaborative (Building Reproductive Autonomy and Voices for Equity), convened by Western States Center. Funding from SJF will enable Momentum Alliance to extend and expand their work with underrepresented youth and communities, specifically for their new Reproductive Justice (RJ) Youth Advocates cohort. This new project supports a diverse group of youth leaders to intensively engage these issues through organizing, storytelling, art and advocacy in 2015/2016.

Montana Women Vote (MWV) | Missoula, MT

MWV is a statewide coalition that organizes with and alongside low-income women as informed voters, policy advocates, and community leaders. MWV believes that civic action, policy change, and leadership development can together shift the balance of power and improve the lives of women and families experiencing poverty. Support will allow Montana Women Vote to expand and deepen economic and gender justice work through community organizing, leadership development, and political education with and alongside low-income women in Montana.

Na’ah Illahee Fund | Seattle, WA

The mission of Na’ah Illahee Fund is to advance sustainable Indigenous cultures in the Pacific Northwest through support of women, youth, artists and culture-keepers. We exist to facilitate the fulfillment of our responsibilities as caretakers of Na’ah Illahee, Mother Earth, and to catalyze the movement towards wellness-based, sustainable Indigenous cultures. Ahdanehi is a diverse circle of women from the Seattle urban and rural reservation areas. The circle blends community organizing and giving and practices grassroots fundraising. The 2015 focus is addressing violence in Native communities, and specifically the sexual trafficking of Native women and children.

NCBI Missoula | Missoula, MT

NCBI Missoula creates a more just and inclusive society by developing leaders who work to end mistreatment, correct systemic inequalities and strengthen community cohesion. NCBI Missoula seeks funding to expand the number of school based GSA’s in to the communities of Whitefish, Billings, Helena and Kalispell. NCBI selected these communities to target because there are active campaigns in each of those communities to protect the rights of LGBT people through school based anti-bullying and non-discrimination policies, city non-discrimination ordinances, or in the case of Great Falls bringing the Pride March to that city.

Northwest Community Coalition for Police Accountability | Spokane/Seattle, WA/Portland, OR

Peace & Justice Action League of Spokane, Mothers for Police Accountability (Seattle) and the NAACP Portland Chapter have formed the Northwest Community Coalition for Police Accountability. Each of our communities has been devastated by over-policing of African American, Latino and other low-income people. Each organization has enjoyed success bringing the DOJ to town, organizing community input for reform and moving policy makers to institutionalize these reforms to ensure community members’ constitutional rights are respected and upheld. We are requesting support to extend our reach throughout the region by providing training, convening and direct action to impact policing policies locally.

OPAL Environmental Justice | Portland, OR

OPAL’s mission is to build power for environmental justice and Civil Rights in our communities through grassroots organizing, education, and base-building with communities of color and low-income communities where we live, work, play and pray. OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon is the premier Environmental Justice group in the Portland metro region and across the state. Funding from SJF will help OPAL forward strategic work at the intersection of transportation, housing, and climate justice. Over the next two years, OPAL will continue to grow the Bus Riders Unite program to build off significant victories, advance local education and implementation of inclusionary housing to fight displacement, establish our Youth Organizing Project to create the next generation of environmental justice community organizers, and influence emerging climate policy to ensure it is meaningful and equitable for all communities.

Oregon Immigrant Activists | Portland, OR

Oregon Immigrant Activists (OIA) fights for the rights of Undocumented folks against the unjust immigration system and the rogue policies of ICE that target undocumented immigrants and separate our families and community. OIA is an undocumented, DACAmented and ally-led organization that uses advocacy and direct action campaigns in order to stop deportations in the Portland Metro region, and to work to create the community we envision with more dignity and justice.

Peoples Community Medics (Portland, OR)

Working to build capacity for direct action organizers to provide on-site immediate trauma care to save lives and stabilize injuries while waiting for emergency vehicles.

PFLAG Portland Black Chapter | Portland, OR

Portland’s African-American/Black PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) chapter promotes the health and well-being of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons, their families and friends through: support, to cope with an adverse society; education, to enlighten an ill-informed public; and advocacy, to end discrimination and secure equal human rights. Funds from SJF will increase the number of youth accessing our programming, create more adult programming and increase our presence in the community through strengthened partnerships with other social justice organizations and joint campaign efforts.

Progreso: Latino Progress | Seattle and Yakima, WA

Progreso’s mission is to ensure that Latino communities are fairly represented in Washington State’s social, economic and political systems to improve the quality of life for all Washingtonians. The purpose of this grant is to support community organizing, research, advocacy, and civic engagement around climate change and environmental justice, focusing on Latinos and other communities of color, particularly in Central and Eastern Washington.

Red Lodge Transition Services | Portland, OR

The mission of Red Lodge Transition Services (RLTS) is to prevent the incarceration of Native Americans and provide assistance to incarcerated Native Americans who are proactively working toward creating a better life for themselves, their children, and their communities. RLTS seeks Social Justice Fund Northwest funding to support Oregon’s Native American community with unique and effective cultural programming. RLTS will work within our prisons and communities to provide direct client services to incarcerated and recently released Native Americans to reduce the root causes of recidivism.

Salem/Keizer Coalition for Equality | Salem, OR

SKCE advocates for equity, education and empowerment by providing leadership and education opportunities to English language learners and underserved families of color. SKCE will be expanding their organizing efforts to engage 40-50 new parent leadership trainees, continue their work in schools and have additional gatherings at a community center that will concentrate on organizing and current social justice issues in education like minority recruitment, discipline disparities, testing bias, and racism in schools.

Seattle Young People’s Project | Seattle, WA

Seattle Young People’s Project is a youth-led, adult supported social justice organization that empowers youth (ages 13-18) to express themselves and to take action on the issues that affect their lives. We build youth power through community organizing. Members build a political anti-oppression analysis, learn grassroots community organizing skills, and take action for positive community change. Funds will go towards supporting the building of a gender justice curriculum for YWC organizers leading up to the conference and on-going political education and community organizing skills for YWC organizers and participants post conference. Curriculum will be focused on building the political analysis of organizers towards a gender justice framework as well as organizing skills, to include but not limited to topics as: sexism and patriarchy, heterosexsism and homophobia, gender self-determination and sexuality, and the intersections of these with other forms of oppression.

TEACH (Taking Education and Creating History) (Clallum Bay, WA)

T.E.A.C.H. (Taking Education and Creating History) a prisoner-initiated education program formed by the Black Prisoners’ Caucus (BPC) at Clallam Bay Corrections Center.

Voz Workers’ Rights Education Project | Portland, OR

Voz Workers’ Rights Education Project VOZ is a workers-led organization that empowers diverse day laborers and immigrants to improve their working condition and protect civil rights through leadership development, organizing, education and economic opportunity. We operate the MLK Jr. Worker Center, which connects hundreds of workers a week with local employers and jobs. The Portland Sanctuary and Not One More Campaign is an effort led by Voz and a coalition of Faith, Community, and Labor Organizations to pass a city ordinance to make Portland a Sanctuary City. Voz will utilize education forums, leadership development, and organizing with immigrants and a cross-sector of allies.

Wind River Native Advocacy Center | Riverton, WY

WRNAC empowers Native Americans of the Wind River Indian Reservation and Wyoming through leadership development and community organizing to effectively advocate for equity, health care and economic justice. Using organizing, advocacy and community education, WRNAC will develop recycling programs by the Wind River Native Advocacy Center on the Wind River Indian Reservation for the benefit of current and future generations. Funding from SJF will also pay for a part time staff to coordinate activities for community organizing towards building a positive working relationship between the Wind River Reservation and the State of Wyoming and address issues such as tribal sovereignty, effective implementation of federal trust responsibility for Wyoming’s Native Americans, and adequate resources that will increase sustainability, racial equality and cultural understanding and decrease disparities in health, education and income for Native Americans in Wyoming.

Women of Color Alliance | Boise, ID

WOCA’s mission is to unite women of color in a common bond to achieve social, economic and political justice in Idaho. These funds would allow WOCA to continue to provide training, leadership development, and opportunities for organization for women of color in Idaho, and our allies within the LGBTQ community, and women in rural, low economic areas in Idaho. Funding will support programs that assist women and girls of color in their ability to have a voice in local and state policy, and to become leaders within their own communities.