The Plant.org
Location: New York
Founding: 2021
Founders/leadership: Lela Goren, project director
Born out of The Plant, a mission-driven real estate development and investment company, ThePlant.org is a nonprofit organization that leverages its physical footprint in Yonkers to empower their community with climate solutions through education, job training, and art for a more environmentally, socially, and economically just future.
Housed in two historic properties and centrally located, the Plant.org will create a unique architectural fusion of meticulous historical preservation and 21st century cutting edge sustainable design where the most innovative minds will come together under one roof. It will be a model project for historic adaptive reuse with an integrated regenerative systems approach.
An abandoned coal-burning power plant built in 1907 will be transformed from a symbol of the industrial revolution and contemporary environmental problems to a monument of collaboration and innovation supporting an abundant, regenerative future that will fuel a clean economy and power a more humane, equitable, just future through development, community, innovation, art, education, and jobs. With the goal to be the hub of where climate innovations happen on the east coast, the Plant.org will provide offices, micro-kitchens, meeting lounges, a double-height gathering space, an event space all hosting exhibitions, conferences, and performances.
Thrive Network
Location: Oakland, CA
Region: National
Founding: 2021
Thrive is a community, network, and movement building Beloved Community for these times. We gather people at the intersections of meaning, belonging, music, the arts, and social change.
Thrive’s mission is to create a world where all people belong and thrive and where beloved community has been realized: love and justice have prevailed; people from all walks of life are valued, respected, and treated with dignity; and all people feel safe, cared for, and connected. Thrive shares resources openly within their network, peacefully resolves conflict, lives in balance with nature, and embodies lives of meaning, joy and wellbeing.
Thrive started in Oakland, CA six years ago as Thrive East Bay. As their community and reach has expanded, they have grown into the Thrive Network, working locally and translocally to build Beloved Community.
Thrive is guided by four core principles: 1. Thriving Lives supports each member in the network in overcoming personal challenges and injustice and creating healthy lives filled with purpose, joy, and expression. 2. Love In Action guides members toward compassion, gratitude, empathy, and community amongst diverse groups of people. 3. Shared Learning & Practice seeks to deepen the understanding of the world through conversation and critical inquiry while growing together through transformative practices and action. And 4. Systemic Change unites to build equitable systems where all network members can flourish as individuals, as communities, and as a planet.
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.
Wakanda Dream Lab
Location: Oakland, CA
Founding: 2019
Founders/leadership: Calvin Williams
Wakanda Dream Lab is a collective fan-driven project that bridges the worlds of Black fandom and #Blacktivism for Black Liberation. It functions according to a value emergence and celebrates the organic self-organizing nature of fandom. The intention is to build on the aesthetics and pop-culture appeal of Wakanda to develop a vision, principles, values, and frameworks for prefigurative organizing with a new base of activists, artists, and fans for Black Liberation. This project is rooted in the belief Black Liberation begets liberation of all peoples.
Wakanda Dream Lab catalyzes and co-creates vision-led, future-facing world-building resources like toolkits, curricula, podcasts, webinars, Twitter town halls, and events rooted in the Black Panther universe and Wakanda. Participants are invited to immerse themselves in world building and visionary solution making through design labs, hackathons, and workshops.
In October 2019, Wakanda Dream Labs published Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Reimagining Gender in Wakanda, an anthology of revolutionary social justice-oriented art, poetry, and fiction from all across the gender spectrum. In August 2021, the Oakland Museum of Art exhibit “Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism” featured work from Wakanda Dream Lab’s Calvin Williams. In a continued exploration of Afrofuturism, Williams collaborated on a film entitled Space to Dream, and it was selected as a 2021 Docs in Action Film Fund recipient.
Weyam Healing & Conflict Transformation
Location: Oakland, CA
Founders/leadership: Weyam Ghadbian
Weyam Ghadbian is a Syrian community weaver, healer, meditation instructor, and transformative facilitator. As well as a skilled instruction in trauma-informed mindfulness meditation, a secularized practice that comes out of the Theravada Buddhist lineage.
In addition to one-on-one coaching, Ghadbian is a Syntara System certified energy healing practitioner. In addition, Ghadbian facilitates transformative workshops to cultivate embodied conflict transformation capacity for social change activists. Through Weyam Healing & Conflict Transformation, Ghadbian offers skill-building training series for organizations and groups utilizing the Turning Towards Each Other Conflict Workbook Curriculum, which takes an embodied, structural power, and equity-informed approach to conflict transformation.
Recently, Ghadbian released Turning Towards Each Other, a workbook on conflict for people working to change the world together, co-authored with Jovida Ross. The booklet gathers and adapts tools that have been used to help navigate conflict while moving towards transformative change in groups with a deep belief in people’s transformative capacity to access wholeness and create new worlds based in love. Currently, Ghadbian and Ross are working towards building translated versions of the Turning Towards Each Other and developing a podcast to share their approach to conflict transformation with a wider audience.
Weyam Healing & Conflict Transformation offers workshops and has supported programs in conflict transformation, understanding, communications, and dominant culture patterns.
When Black + Brown Go Green
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Region: San Gabriel Valley, CA
Founding: 2018
Founders/leadership: Fe Love, founder; Chris Lyric, project director
When Black + Brown Go Green (WBBGG) is an intergenerational movement organization for climate action and regenerative living, supporting the self-determination of Black and brown youth around tree stewardship. When Black + Brown Go Green’s near-term goal is to plant 2,000 trees by 2024 in the San Gabriel Valley; as supported by a compassionate green force and scholarship program for youths to care for newly planted trees as they become established. Newly planted trees need three years of care to thrive.
WBBGG was founded by the late, great artist and activist Felecia “Fe Love” Lenee Williams, who worked to educate and encourage BIPOC communities to become leaders in climate and environmental justice. Fe Love imagined lush green spaces that reinvigorate and nourish communities, and WBBGG is carrying the torch by planting trees and building futures for students of color.