Reimagine!
Location: Oakland, CA
Founding: 2014
Founders/leadership: Jess Clarke, project director & editor
Reimagine! (formerly RP&E) is the national journal of environmental and social justice, serving as an essential tool for building the movements for justice through reporting, analysis, and research. Incubated at MSC in 2014, the organization creates long-form, slow-media productions including in-depth reporting and immersive journalism. Highlighted works include two interviews conducted in collaboration with the California Environmental Justice Alliance on Central and Inland Valley residents choking on the pollution generated by Amazon’s ever-expanding warehouse operations; stories and interviews from the powerful women of Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA); and multiple contributions from Kelly Curry, a fiercely independent food justice organizer from Oakland. Reimagine welcomes participation from writers and organizers committed to using a race, class, and gender analysis in their work.
The Reimagine! Workers network provides production services and infrastructure capacity for community-based organizations creating movement media. Radio Reimagine hosts podcasts from Race, Poverty & the Environment (RP&E), NOOL — Weaving the Threads, and other allied producers. And, Reimagine!’s cataloged research papers cover topics like climate change, environmental justice, economic equality, and more.
HEAL Food Alliance
Location: Oakland, CA
Region: United States
Founding: 2014
Founders/leadership: Nevinna Khann, co-founder/executive director
The Health, Environment, Agriculture and Labor Food Alliance (HEAL) is a national multi-sector, multi-racial coalition of 55 organizations led by members who represent over two million rural and urban farmers, ranchers, fishers, farm and food chain workers, Indigenous groups, scientists, public health advocates, policy experts, community organizers, and activists. HEAL’S mission is to build collective power to create food and farm systems that are healthy for families, accessible and affordable to all communities, and fair to the working people who grow, distribute, prepare, and serve our food — while protecting the air, water, and land we all depend on.
In 2016, HEAL launched the Plate of the Union in partnership with Food Policy Action, the Food Policy Action Education Fund, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, to uplift the voices of Americans who care about food and farm issues. The #ProtectFoodWorkers campaign delivered over 100,000 petition signatures calling on the next President to take bold action for a food system that rewards farmers and farming practices that protect our environment, that provides dignity and fair wages to workers, and ensures that everyone living in the United States has access to healthy food that they can afford.
Anchored by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, Real Food Generation, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, HEAL co-drafted the 10-plank Platform for Real Food, and, in 2017, they publicly launched the platform as their strategic compass. Together, these groups are building a movement to transform our food and farm systems from the current extractive economic model towards community control, care for the land, local economies, meaningful labor, and healthful communities nationwide — while supporting the sovereignty of all living beings.
Healing Clinic Collective
Location: Bay Area
Region: United States
Founding: 2017
Founders/leadership: Carla Perez, founder
Healing Clinic Collective (HCC) encourages re-engagement to a sacred way of relating to ourselves as whole people. With a network of over 130 healers and wellness practitioners, HCC’s goal is to connect people in need of holistic healing to natural and traditional healers and wellness practitioners for ongoing care. HCC aims to restore reverence and relationship to ancestral forms of healing and wellness that come from world views rooted in cultural understandings and expressions of love, interconnectedness, and a regenerative relationship to both people and the earth.
Traditional prayer ceremonies are a foundational part of how HCC seeks and implements guidance for their ongoing work and is part of their organizing process for community-based healing clinics. HCC considers prayer an important part of their work: prayers are conducted in accordance to old world instructions of how to exchange loving energy with the power of the elements, ancestors and other spirit helpers. Prayers may be up to several hours long and can be for anything from the most dire global needs to specific desires for our work on the ground in the Bay Area.
HCC offers consultations to individuals, organizations, and community-based groups who want to organize a healing clinic for their community with a focus on loving, traditional healing sessions to people from especially traumatized populations in the Bay Area. The organization works to raise awareness, including in working class communities, about the broad world of natural and ancestral healing modalities that are holistic and multi-layered. This may be for a school community, church community, neighborhood residents, or for organizations.
Just Community Energy Transition
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Region: United States
Founding: 2016
Founders/leadership: Anthony Giancatarino, project director
The Just Community Energy Transition Project (JCET) catalyzes, convenes, and facilitates community-driven strategies and practices to build transformative alignment towards an anti-racist and regenerative economy, primarily through the lens of the energy economy and its transition.
Anthony Giancatarino has led JCET for the last three years, working with community partners to strive for antiracist practices and community-driven processes in policy development, strategy, and collective governance that advances energy democracy and a regenerative economy.
Knowledge is power. JCET’s website offers a collection of resources to usher us into a Just Transition to build collective power. In partnership with insite collaborative communities, community-based organizations, academic institutions, and others, these resources can provide an understanding of where power comes from, how the electrical grid works, which can make a change, and how community visioning could create a more equitable and just energy system. Based in Philadelphia, PA, JCET works with community-based organizations, coalitions, and alliances to support policy strategies that advance energy democracy and climate justice. Regionally, JCET partners to build relationships across Pennsylvania and the Gulf of Mexico to challenge the terrible trifecta: an extractive energy economy, racism, and the urban-rural divide. Nationally, JCET collaborates with frontline national networks, alliances, and coalitions on various energy democracy and leadership projects.
Beloved Communities Network
Location: Oakland, CA
Region: United States
Founding: 2021
Founders/leadership: Leila McCabe, executive director
The Beloved Communities Network (BCN) is a continuation of the years of work and wisdom that went into building the Transitions Initiative. As we continue on this journey of transitioning to a world of love, interdependence, and resilience, the Beloved Communities Network will build from the foundation that has been laid, while also strengthening, reinforcing, and designing new ways to leap into the world we imagine.
Beloved Community is not ours in conception. The concept is rooted in the legacy of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Grace Lee Boggs, and others, and is carried forward through many people investing in the idea that we can live in a world of economic and social justice. With the imagination we bring to this work, we envision a holistic approach that includes leading with bold vision and values, embodied practice, radical connection, and strategic navigation.
We know that now is a time of great transition and change. Around the globe we see unprecedented climate disruption and upheaval across economic, political, and cultural systems. We are all facing uncertainty and seeking paths to a future we can believe in. In this time we also feel a calling, an invitation, a possibility, beyond what we can presently see.
We have the capacity to answer this call. We have the capacity to bring forth a future that is kicking to be born. We have the capacity to be that future, to be the power and strength of our vision, our purpose, and our relationships.
Our communities are calling on us to recognize our undeniable interdependence and make a courageous commitment to love. Our mutual future depends on generating new solutions that reflect this recognition and commitment.
This is the calling of the Beloved Communities Network.
Leila McCabe
BCN Executive Director, Leila has over ten years of experience in community and campus organizing and electoral facilitation and is dedicated to fostering collaboration across diverse coalitions. She has worked with various nonprofits including Working Partnerships USA, was involved in a student-initiated minimum wage campaign that helped kickstart the national minimum wage movement, and, in 2012, led a group of canvassers that registered 14,000 voters in Santa Clara County. Leila joined MSC in March 2019 and has a Bachelor’s from San Jose State University. She is working on a Master’s from Mills College and lives in Oakland with her partner, young son, and their two cats. She trains capoeira and is part of the In Lak’ech dance academy.
Brown Boi Project
Location: Oakland, CA
Founding: 2010
Founders/leadership: B. Cole, founder; Matis Moore, co-director; Mariana Silva, co-director; Tiana Vargas, co-director
The Brown Boi Project (BBP) is a community of people working across race and gender to eradicate sexism, homophobia, and transphobia and create healthy frameworks of masculinity and change. B. Cole, who has worked as a community facilitator and strategist for more than 15 years, launched BBP in 2010. Centering on gender justice, with responsibility and privilege as masculine people, BBP works to change the power dynamics in our relationships, families, and communities through investment in the lives of feminine-identified people.
The Brown Boi Project Leadership Retreat, held twice a year, is a five day cohort of leaders from all walks of life, brought together to talk about race, class, culture, gender, and sexuality; and explores a commitment to social justice. Participants receive training in understanding power, communications, cross-culture coalition building, personal finance, community organizing, self-care, fundraising, relationship building, gender justice, and personal life planning; and BBP covers the cost of travel, food, and lodging.
Breathe
Location: Bay Area, CA
Region: United States
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Lawrence Ellis, board president; Tania Abdul, board secretary; Javier LaFianza, board member
Breathe understands that comprehensive, accelerated change requires the pressure of a mass movement with historically marginalized people at the center. Breathe exists to support and increase the numbers of people working for racial equity, justice, and resilience, prioritizing BIPOC and young people.
In the summer of 2020, a group of people with a wide range of experience began a synergistic process to arrive at Breathe’s unique formula for change. Everyone serving on the team is a lifelong activist, devoted to building a just, equitable, resilient world. Breathe’s current leadership includes: a concert/event producer, a teacher/community builder, an AGILE business coach/multinational venture designer, a tenants’ rights lawyer, a nonprofit executive director, the CFO of a global advertising firm, an actor/coach, and a web designer/immersive experience producer.
Breathe believes that intersectional solitary is the only way forward. An anti-racism organization at its core, Breathe utilizes media, events, interactive technology, the arts, and activist development to amplify, unify, and support impacted communities’ work for racial, environmental, and climate justice. Breathe is a network and platform that draws supporters with compelling media by and about community leaders and artists to educate and motivate audiences to act. Breathe’s web network for learning, action, and community-building provides a sense of solidarity and empowerment, with tools for recruitment and ongoing engagement. These catalytic events and action campaigns build relationships based on shared knowledge, effort, and resources, and offer constituents support networks, leadership and organizer training, and production and accelerator assistance for development and funding.
Urban Peace Movement
Location: Oakland, CA
Founding: 2006
Founders/leadership: Nicole Lee, co-founder, executive director; Xiomara Castro, co-founder; Sikander Iqbal, deputy director
Urban Peace Movement (UPM) transforms both the culture and conditions that lead to urban violence, focusing on building youth leadership for peace on Oakland’s streets. In addition to movement building, UPM’s youth members work on policy and systems change, healing, and culture change.
One of UPM’s programs is Leaders In Training, a youth organizing and social justice leadership program for high school-aged youths from neighborhoods directly impacted by high rates of violence and mass incarceration. Leaders In Training members have been involved in a number of local policy issues such as raising Oakland’s minimum wage, defeating a proposed youth curfew policy, pushing to end the treatment of youth as adults in the criminal justice system, and helping pass Prop 57.
Another youth leadership program is the Determination Black Men’s Group, a collaboration between UPM and the United Roots Center. Determination Black Men’s Group involves cultural healing and social justice circle for transitioning-aged African American young men who are formerly incarcerated or who have been near or involved in street life. These circles serve as an opportunity for community members to come together to address harmful behavior in a process that explores harms and needs, obligations, and necessary engagement. Participants create media and messaging campaigns focused on the health and achievement of young men of color in partnership with the California Endowment’s Boys and Men of Color Initiative.
Most recently, in partnership with other organizations, UPM is taking action to protect the systems-impacted youth of Alameda County who are disproportionately Black and Brown. This is an opportunity to refocus our juvenile justice (or injustice) system away from incarceration and towards creating opportunities for youth to be cared for and thrive.
Art in Resistance
Location: Oakland, CA
Region: North America
Founding: 2019
The Art In Resistance fellowship was established by artists and changemakers to simultaneously support artists and movements for social change when there is a profound need to uplift beauty, solidarity, and resistance. The inaugural Art In Resistance Fellowship, awarded to Melanie Cervantes and Dignidad Rebelde, was designed to support proactive movement art, public education, and the interplay between art, community organizing, movement building, and social change.
The two year fellowship provided a stipend and benefits to facilitate innovative art production and practice that demonstrated a strong partnership with community leaders, social justice campaigns, and movements.
About the Inaugural Artist
Nationally recognized artist Melanie Cervantes (Xicanx) calls the San Francisco Bay Area home. It is where she creates visual art inspired by the people around her and her communities’ desire for radical social transformation. Cervantes’ intention as an artist is to create a visual lexicon of resistance to multiple oppressions that will inspire curiosity, raise consciousness, and inspire solidarity among communities of struggle. She holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California Berkeley.
Since receiving her stipend, she has created important work that has called attention to the atrocities occurring at the US/Mexican border and called for an end to family separation and deportation.
Her work is housed under the banner Dignidad Rebelde, a graphic art collaboration she co-founded with Jesus Barraza. Dignidada Rebelde produces screen prints, political posters, and multimedia projects. Barraza is an interdisciplinary artist with an MFAs in Social Practice and Visual Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. Dignidad Rebelde is a member of JustSeeds Artists Cooperative, a decentralized group of political artists based in Canada, the United States, and Mexico.
As the stipend wraps, Cervantes and Dignidad Rebelde will continue to influence how we think about social issues facing the world — introducing her model of art activism to the Center For Empowered Politics, a new movement capacity-building organization that aims to train and develop new leaders of color and grow our movement infrastructure.
Resonance Network
Location: Oakland, CA
Region: United States
Founding: 2017
Founders/leadership: Alexis Flanagan, co-director; Aimee Thompson, co-director
Resonance Network believes how we work together, communicate, and organize ourselves is integral to the change we want to see in the world. Through transparency, shared leadership, and a culture that values healing and developing new ideas and approaches to transform, Resonance Network connects people who are imagining and building a world rooted in deep relationship, vibrant community, and connection to our planet.
When violence keeps us disconnected from our humanity and each other, Resonance Network participants come together because they see the widespread hunger for — and possibility of — something different. Resonance Network participants work together to uproot violence that particularly affects women, girls, and gender-oppressed people. They work together to center people who most experience the impacts of historical and current systems of oppression; creating conditions for communities to be thriving, just, and compassionate through practices that foster deep connection and relationship building.
MSC works in collaboration with Resonance Network’s Oversight Circle on traditional governance tasks and roles with a board of directors. With significant input from other network members, the Catalyst Circle uses network principles of co-design, advice, and consent to make decisions about infrastructure and strategy for the network. Through power-sharing and collective decision-making, it makes room for a governance system that centers compassion, deep relationship, and collective thriving.
Since its inception in 2017, Resonance Network took root with the first cohort of movement leaders to take part in Move to End Violence, a ten year program of the NoVo Foundation. Resonance Network has supported 37 experimental projects through the Innovation Lab, hosted a series of leader convening and facilitated state-based dialogue, capacity-building, and strategy support with coalitions in the broader movement to end violence against women and girls.
One example of Resonance Network participants coming together to envision a world beyond the dominant power structures was Workshopping the Worldview, which called on participants to channel their creativity and ancestral wisdom to envision together what a reimagined world — a world beyond violence, the world we all deserve to live in — could look like, sound like, feel like, taste like, and who we would need to be to bring it into being. Now, Resonance Network is creating a new online platform for network participants to connect and work with each other.
