1 Million Madly Motivated Moms
Location: Las Vegas, NV
Region: National
Founding: 2018
Founders/leadership: Tansy McNulty, founder and CEO
1 Million Madly Motivated Moms (1M4) is a collective of Black women working to end police brutality by increasing accountability in police officer violence and supporting a pipeline of Black talent to legal, policymaking, and other criminal justice professions. Refusing to live in constant fear or rage, 1M4 set out to change the outlook for the future of their children and organized to provide both community and financial support for victims of these crimes.
With a background in supply chain management, founder Tansy McNulty applies the same thinking to social justice, to end police violence by 2038 and reduce both the number of lives lost and the costs of wrongful death suits for taxpayers. In December 2020, 1M4 identified that severe mental illness is a factor in at least 25 percent of police violence deaths. In response, the women of 1M4 actively compiled information to help spread awareness of Mobile Crisis Units (MCU) and Co-Responders (COR). These services are trained to de-escalate such situations and properly assess individuals experiencing mental health crises. Find their guide to saving lives here.
After Incarceration
Location: Florida; Texas
Founding: 2020
Region: National
Founders/leadership: Jose Pineda, founder and project director
After Incarceration is a diverse community of people impacted by systems of oppression. Many have been incarcerated, some still are. Drawing upon their lived experiences to identify the many ways in which all lives intersect, students, professors, public defenders, peacekeepers, activists, and advocates are reimagining life After Incarceration.
After Incarceration reconciles the conflict that comes from living in the contradiction of being free yet still confronting barriers and artificial divisions on a daily basis. By stripping away labels, After Incarceration affirms the value of every human being, recognizing themselves within each other. They listen, learn, and collectively imagine restorative reentry as an opportunity to introduce people to ideas, to grapple with the significance of those ideas as a community, and empower each person to pursue a life full of purpose.
After Incarceration uses restorative practice to transform the reentry experience using a community-centered model that supports people directly impacted by policies of over-policing, excessive punishment, and mass incarceration. By structuring equitable decision-making spaces, and empowering people to emerge as the leaders their communities need, they are moving at the speed of trust, drawing upon the strength of a shared humanity, countering the false narratives that divide, and collectively restorativing ways forward.
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.
Bay Rising
Location: Oakland, CA
Region: Bay Area
Founding: 2015
Founder/Leadership: Kimi Lee
Bay Rising (BR) is a growing alliance between community-led organizations across the Bay Area. Their vision is of a healthier, more equitable society centered on grassroots organizing and social movements led by those most impacted — working-class people of color. Along with three local alliances that anchor Bay Rising — Oakland Rising, San Francisco Rising, and Silicon Valley Rising — and working in response to the mounting inequity and displacement occurring in the Bay Area, these organizations build political power that advances genuinely progressive policy solutions supporting healthy, equitable, and inclusive communities for all.
Collectively, BR represents tens of thousands of grassroots leaders of color. As BR grows beyond the core counties of Alameda, San Francisco, and Santa Clara, they are supporting emerging and existing base-building groups that represent communities of color and working class people through a network of alignment and mutual support throughout the nine Bay Area counties.
Beloved Communities Network

Location: Oakland, CA
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
Leila (she/her), executive director of the Beloved Communities Network and founder of JoyLabs, is a mama, artist, strategist, movement maker, and builder. She brings over 15 years of experience in community and campus organizing, electoral organizing, movement building, and facilitation. She is dedicated to creating spaces for deep and authentic relationships to emerge across diverse constituencies and coalitions.
In 2010, Leila was a founding member of the successful minimum wage campaign in San Jose, California that helped kick-start the national minimum wage movement. In the 2012 election cycle, Leila led a team of 20 people to register 14,000 new voters in Santa Clara County going on to be the deputy field director for a progressive mayoral candidate in San Jose, the 10th largest city in the country. She has also worked in many nonprofit organizations and partnered with multiple colleges, churches, community members, and other organizations in developing curriculum and facilitating workshops.
Leila completed a certificate in leadership and social change at DeAnza College and Bachelor’s in sociology with a concentration in community change from San Jose State University. She is currently studying to complete her certificate as a certified personal trainer from the National Academy of Sports Medicine.
In 2021, Leila founded JoyLabs, a space where physical movement meets emotional resilience in a beloved community. JoyLabs trains the resistance through embodied resistance training.
Leila lives in Oakland California with her husband Calvin and son Malik. She serves on the advisory board to In Lak’ech dance academy and, to bring balance and healing to her life, Leila trains capoeira, lifts weights, and dances.
BIG We Foundation
Location: California; Louisiana; Tennessee
Region: National
Founding: 2018
Founders/leadership: Anasa Troutman, project director, founder
BIG We Foundation (BWF) unleashes the social imagination of those who often go unheard, and supports building a world reimagined from their point of view. It cultivates economic and cultural drivers grounded in Black imagination to foster a culture of belonging for everyone. By following the vision and leadership of those who live in or come from historically undermined communities, BWF values are their north star, guiding them on the journey of embodying the culture shift we are working to create in the world. BWF does its part to generate a thriving culture and healthy communities, where we can all experience sustained safety, joy, abundance, and love.
BIG We Foundation is a nonprofit arts and culture intermediary built to provide infrastructure and opportunity for high potential, under-resourced communities. The organization employs a culture shift model that leverages storytelling, community building, and real world implementation. It expresses a commitment to co-creating the future by investing in people and communities aligned with and working towards a shared vision. BWF priority areas — womxn and girls, wellness equity, and restorative economics — are designed to work together in Black, Indigenous, and other BIPOC communities, forming a fully integrated, narrative-based, and holistic approach to their work.
Breathe
Location: Bay Area, CA
Region: National
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.
Brown Boi Project
Location: Oakland, CA
Region: National
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.
Climate Justice Alliance
Location: Berkeley, CA
Region: United States
Founding: 2013
Founders/leadership: Ozawa Bineshi Alber, co-executive director; Monica Atkins, co-executive director; Marion Gee, co-excecutive director
The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) is rooted in the cultural wisdom of Indigenous, African American, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, and working-class white communities throughout the United States. CJA unites frontline communities and organizations into a formidable force by applying the power of deep grassroots organizing to win local, regional, statewide, and national battles that work toward building a Just Transition. With decades of frontline wisdom and organizing, CJA members made local versions of the Green New Deal from New York City to Oregon, centering traditional ecological and cultural knowledge and creating pathways for a regenerative future.
Formed in 2013, CJA emerged from a three-year process of grassroots groups and movement support organizations in the racial, environmental, and economic justice spaces working together for global climate justice. With the goal of aiding more than 100 million people, many living near toxic, climate polluting energy infrastructure, CJA centers racially oppressed and low-income communities — those who have suffered disproportionately from the impacts of pollution — through organizing, mass direct action, electoral work, cultural revival, and policy advocacy.
CJA milestones include convening a climate justice assembly at the 2nd United States Social Forum in Detroit (2010) attended by 400 people representing over 118 organizations; sending movement delegations to the recent UN climate accord conferences (Copenhagen in 2010, Cancun in 2011, Durban in 2012); participating in the climate summit in Bolivia, which produced the Cochabamba Protocol; and the UN Rio+20 Earth Summit (2012). Most notably, the CJA joined 64 other organizations in 2019 for the Frontline Green New Deal Climate and Regenerative Economic Policy Summit. CJA Policy Fellow Kari Fulutron was a speaker along with Senator Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and climate and housing advocates.
EARTHseed Farm
Location: Bay Area, CA
Founding: 2021
Founders/leadership: Pandora Thomas, founder
EARTHseed Farm is a 14-acre solar-powered organic farm and orchard located on the ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Peoples in Sonoma County, CA — the only all-Black owned permaculture farm in the county, where only 2% of land is Black-owned. It aims to heal generations of historical harm through educational programs that prioritize people of African descent and other communities of color.
EARTHseed honors all beings and their role in stewarding their communities and looks to nonhuman kin for guidance. With the permission and blessings of Graton Rancheria Tribe, EARTHseed is operated and rooted in Afro-Indigenous permaculture principles and built on the long legacy of earth wisdom traditions of people of African descent. Permaculture is a relationship-based ecological design system embedded in Indigenous wisdom that elevates ecosystem health while meeting human needs.
EARTHseed is managed by a group of likeminded practitioners and is home to a variety of apples, pears, persimmons, plums, pluots, guavas, and mixed berries. In addition to a wholesale program, the farm is open to the public from May to November for berry and fruit-picking. EARTHseed has been featured in several media outlets, including Made Local magazine, Sonoma magazine, the Podship Earth podcast, and KQED.