Location: Alabama; California; 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. 

Read more about BWF’s Anasa Troutman’s participation in a Transfromative Movement building event on the Move Blog.

Location: Bay Area, CA
Region: California
Founding: 2023
Founders/leadership: Mika Cade and Evaly Long, project directors

The BIPOC Student Midwives Fund is a groundbreaking initiative aimed at promoting diversity in the field of midwifery, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. This fund is designed to provide financial assistance and educational resources to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students who aspire to become midwives.

Research has consistently shown that midwifery care can significantly reduce health disparities that disproportionately affect BIPOC birthing people and families. However, despite the growing recognition of the importance of midwifery care, the number of BIPOC midwives remains insufficient to meet the needs of the community. The BIPOC Student Midwives Fund seeks to address this critical issue by providing support to BIPOC students who are currently studying midwifery or who are interested in pursuing a career in this field. The fund will provide financial assistance to cover tuition fees, textbooks, and other expenses associated with midwifery education. In addition, the fund will also provide access to training and mentorship programs that will equip students with the necessary skills to become competent and compassionate midwives.

The BIPOC Student Midwives Fund is a powerful and transformative initiative that has the potential to positively impact the lives of many BIPOC communities. By supporting aspiring BIPOC midwives in their journey towards becoming skilled and culturally competent practitioners, the fund is helping to ensure that all birthing people and families receive the care they deserve.

Location: Bay Area, CA
Region: California
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.

Read more about Breathe’s podcast, Sandblasted at the Shipyard, on the Move Blog.

Location: Oakland, CA
Region: California
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.

Location: Oakland, CA
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Taj James, co-founder & curator; Sihle Dinani, co-founder & advisor; Rachel Burrows, co-founder & operational anchor 

Full Spectrum Capital Labs (FSL) is ​​an incubator-accelerator that brings people, ideas, and capital together to grow regenerative economies powered by impactful solutions. Vibrant solutions need capacity building and partnerships to thrive. Gaps in the capital ecosystem mean opportunities for impact are missed every day. FSL fills the gaps between communities and capital by listening to communities and offering capital strategies to achieve their vision. FSL believes the more nature and community we have, the less money we need. The challenge we face is not scarcity and its deepening relationship and flow — it’s creating the beloved community that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned. In relationship and flow, there is fundamental abundance. Through this lens, FSL connects investors to solutions with powerful impact. 

Full Spectrum Labs listens to the ideas and interests of community and capital stewards all across the capital ecosystem, helping them develop an investment vision that aligns with community values. Community Stewards include; Birth Center Equity — Black and Indigenous midwives who imagine a birth center in every community; Return to the Heart Foundation which supports Indigenous women by investing in undercapitalized women-led initiatives on reservations and cities; Justice Capital — formerly incarcerated community leaders proving that divesting from prison systems and investing in worker and community-owned enterprises transform communities. As Black organizers in Memphis know: when communities own land and buildings, they cannot be displaced. Through relationships and collaborations between community and capital, stewards can navigate and strategize with the full potential of every capital tool and achieve the highest impact. 

Location: Oakland, CA
Region: National
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.  

Read more about the relationship between funders and movement leaders including HEAL’s Candace Clark on the Move Blog.

Location: Oakland, CA; Brooklyn, NY 
Region: National
Founding: 2009 
Founders/leadership: Terry Marshall, founder/creative director; Aisha Shillingford, artistic director; Kira Joy Williams, creative project manager

Intelligent Mischief is a creative studio and design lab whose purpose is to unleash Black imagination to shape a future based on liberation, resilience, regeneration, and interdependence. Their vision is of a global, autonomous, interconnected archipelago of Black liberated zones or beloved communities that practice sacred governance at a scale necessary to transform systems. By boosting innovation and imagination, Intelligent Mischief aims to realign action logic and experiment with new forms of culture and civil society, creating atmospheres of change.

Intelligent Mischief invites creative collaboration with groups and coalitions seeking ways to align their mission, strategy, and policies with a vision of beautiful futures for all Black people. Their work is centered at the intersection of art, design, and popular culture to create spaces — such as publications, multi-platform worldbuilding and story experiences, hackathons and art installations — where Black folks can imagine and co-create beautiful futures. Their Creative Studio has nurtured many projects, including a massive multi-platform immersive story world called NationX.

Read more about the relationship between funders and movement leaders including Intelligent Mischief’s Terry Marshall on the Move Blog.

Read more about Intelligent Mischief’s Aisha Shillingford and Terry Marshall’s participation in a Transformative Movement building event on the Move Blog.

Watch MSC’s 73 Questions-style interview with Aisha Shillingford, Intellient Mischief’s artistic director, on the Move Blog.

Read what Aisha Shillingford, Intellient Mischief’s artistic director, had to say about about the passing of ibrahim abdul-matin on the Move Blog.

Location: New York
Region: United States
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Christina Hollenback

Justice Capital, incubated under Full Spectrum Labs — a network partner of the Movement Strategy Center — since January 2020, epitomizes collaboration and innovation in the realm of social and environmental impact. This partnership extends to pivotal projects within the Healthy, Equitable, Resilient Communities (HERC) Accelerator, showcasing a shared commitment to transformative change.

At its core, Justice Capital connects investors, foundations, public sector allies, and community-led solutions to catalyze significant advancements while fostering shared economic prosperity. Employing a unique advisory model, an ecosystem-centric investment strategy, and strategic capital deployment, Justice Capital ensures that projects not only achieve outsized impacts and community wealth building but also offer risk-adjusted returns for investors.

The Scaling Justice platform, an initiative of Justice Capital, serves as a dynamic convening and learning space. It brings together investors to explore and apply integrated capital structures for the sustainable financing of community-owned solutions. Furthermore, Justice Capital’s Local Ecosystem Accelerator, active in locations such as Standing Rock, ND, and Memphis, TN, along with the Impact Studio in Fresno, CA, and Buffalo and Syracuse, NY, spearheads the growth of community-led projects. These initiatives focus on critical areas such as divestment from incarceration, community-driven climate and reparative infrastructure projects, and Black-owned economic development, underscoring Justice Capital’s holistic approach to creating enduring, equitable change.

Location: Brooklyn, NY
Region: National, plus Canada 
Founding: November 2019
Founders/leadership: Leonora Souza Paula, project director; Mel Adún; Flavia Barbosa; Fernanda Dias; Marry Ferreira; Juliana Maia; Luana Reis; Priscila Santana

Kilomba Collective is the first collective of Black Brazilian immigrant women in the United States and connects Black Brazilians with other Black women’s organizations in the United States and Latin America to strategize, advance human rights, and uplift Black women’s political activism. 

Kilomba’s name refers to the Quilombos, self-sustaining revolutionary communities representing Black Brazilians’ liberation and resistance, memory, radical love, and affection. With that in mind, Kilomba Collective has been driven by its vision: connecting a multigenerational network of Black Brazilian women from different backgrounds and centering the experiences of Black Brazilian women and girls in the United States and Canada. 

Throughout 2020 and 2021, Kilomba supported their community with local and international organizers and activists focused on issues around health and maternal health, COVID-19, racism, police brutality, and more. During the pandemic, Kilomba launched two booklets in the Portuguese language with resources for immigrants impacted by the pandemic, in addition to supporting families through food baskets and online therapy.

With a community of more than 100 members of various ages, backgrounds, and professional backgrounds, living across the United States and Canada, Kilomba remains committed to Black people from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Location: Bay Area, CA
Region: California
Founding: 2010
Founders/leadership: Amate Perez, founder; Janvieve Williams Comrie, co-founding trainer; Heidi Lopez, project director

The Latinx Racial Equity Project (LREP) exists to train and empower Latinos to lead from a framework of decolonization and racial equity. Through an equity driven framework, LREP trains leaders to create healthier work and movement environments and build more equitable organizations and systems that reduce inequitable outcomes for everyone.

In large parts of the Latinx community, aspiring to whiteness is the norm. To challenge this, founder Ana Perez created the LREP as a space to understand how colonization has impacted communities of the global majority and the challenges they face. LREP also works to build on the resiliency and cultural strengths that have kept Latinos alive to dream up a future free from oppression. Perez is a decolonizing Indigenous and queer Latinx, a parent, and a writer who has worked in the race and equity field for over 20 years. Her expertise includes racial equity training and coaching, transformational organizational change, leadership development, and building collaborations rooted in community empowerment frameworks. Perez is also a National WKKF Racial Equity and Healing Fellow.

Janvieve Williams Comrie, the co-founding trainer, is a human rights strategist, trainer, and organizer with a deep commitment to building powerful social movements for racial justice and human rights. She is internationally recognized for her work with NGOs, grassroots organizations, and the UN. Comrie serves social movements as a facilitator, communications consultant, and strategic planning consultant.

In 2021 LREP joined forces with a collective of organizations — including CARECEN SF, Chicana/Latina Foundation, Galería de la Raza, and Instituto Familiar de la Raza — for the Caravan of Children campaign denouncing the recent reopening of detention facilities. The work uplifted the voices of the children and asked the Biden Administration to #UncageReUnifyHeal. The campaign called on communities to contact members of the Family Reunification Task Force to prioritize and expedite the process to #UncageReunifyHeal the children in ICE detention.

LREP’s goal is to nurture a growing Latino community that embraces deeply held multiracial, multicultural, and equity values to counter, and hopefully change, the possibility of a majority Latino population that continues to replicate inequity at all levels in America. When more Latino leaders understand the racial diversity and oppression dynamics of the Latino community, they can challenge those dynamics. Doing so creates healthier work and movement environments that build more equitable organizations and systems and reduce inequitable outcomes for everyone.