Location: Indianapolis, IN
Region:Indiana and the Black Diaspora
Founding: 2023
Founders/leadership: Denise Abdul-Rahman

Black Sun Light Sustainability (BSLS) is at the forefront of transformative change, connecting communities through a mission that resonates both domestically and abroad. With a focus on equitable energy expertise, training, job creation, and clean energy development, BSLS is driving progress in a culturally competent manner.

With a strong commitment to fostering a diverse and equitable transition, BSLS is dedicated to creating positive impacts both locally and globally. At the core of the BSLS mission is a focus on equitable energy expertise, workforce development, and clean energy innovation.

BSLS’s multifaceted approach includes facilitation services, consultancy (spanning policy, DEI, energy, climate, and global affairs), impactful clean energy demonstration projects, and educational webinars. The team’s diverse expertise, ranging from management to healthcare and informatics, equips them to tackle complex challenges with innovative solutions. They are committed to reducing harmful emissions, advancing energy efficiency, and enhancing community resilience.

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: Bowie, MD
Region: National, Mid-Atlantic focus
Founding: 2022
Founders/leadership: Sacoby Wilson

Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health (CEEJH) is advancing environmental justice through Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), community science, Community-Owned and Managed Research (COMR) principles, and the Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) Model, with a focus on equitable planning, healthy zoning, and sustainable community development.

CEEJH’s objectives encompass leading nationally and globally in addressing environmental injustice and health inequities using CBPR, citizen science, and collaborative problem-solving principles to empower underserved populations through education, outreach, capacity-building, research, and technological solutions. They bridge gaps between communities, advocacy groups, professionals, researchers, and policymakers, primarily focusing on the Mid-Atlantic region.

The My Block Counts Environmental Justice podcast, hosted by Dr. Sacoby Wilson in partnership with WYPR Baltimore radio station, is integral to CEEJH’s outreach efforts. The podcast explores crucial topics such as air quality, climate change, redlining, and environmental hazards. It offers a platform for conversations with experts and grassroots groups, highlighting ways individuals can contribute to advancing environmental justice in their communities.

Location: Washington, D.C.
Founding: 2023
Founders/leadership: Sam Draisen, Dean Ilyas, co-founders

Democracy at Home enhances the political engagement of young leaders by promoting greater accessibility to the decision making process. 

Democracy, at its most basic level, is direct involvement in decision making. Throughout its history, American democracy has fallen short of this most basic benchmark. Increasing accessibility to politics allows us all to claim power and influence decisions made by those we elect.

Democracy at Home works on projects that put decision making at the fingertips of the youngest segments of the electorate. The organization is committed to promoting intersectionality and anti-racism in all of its endeavors.

Location: California 
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership:  Rosa E. Gonzales, project director 

Facilitating Power works to create a thriving culture of participation in which communities work together to solve social, economic, and environmental challenges; and provides essential tools, techniques, and strategy to educators, organizers, service-providers, managers, and community leaders looking to revolutionize engagement and deepen their own facilitative leadership. They are building a network of facilitative leaders with the tools, knowledge, and skills to foster authentic participation, collaborative governance, and community-driven leadership for a living democracy.

Facilitating Power cultivates collective leaps towards a living democracy, a thriving culture of participation, belonging, and transformative power, rooted in place-based knowledge and natural wisdom. Through the practices and pedagogy of a living democracy, Facilitating Power is transforming how we think about and wield power, and building the capacity of facilitative leaders to support their communities to reorganize for community ownership.

Read more about Facilitating Power’s actions on climate change on the Move Blog.

Read more about how Rosa González of Facilitating Power inspires others on the Move Blog.

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: Puerto Rico 
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Julie Quiroz

New Moon Collaborations is a home for innovation that centers the spirit, strength, vision, and creativity of Black and Indigenous people and communities of color. New Moon’s purpose is to nurture leaps in culture that transform systems and structures for generations to come, cultivating collaborations to generate strategy grounded in embodied community wisdom and story. 

New Moon recognizes that achieving a future of regeneration, resilience, and love will require a vibrant ecosystem of diverse, interrelated efforts that are:

• Deeply rooted in place,
• Nourished by conscious practice of relationships in beloved community,
• Animated by personally held narrative of past, present, and future that is not defined by white supremacy,
• And grounded in practical, specific, and audacious community wealth development strategy.

New Moon’s work reflects practices and knowledge across all four elements, with a keen focus on shaping and nurturing purpose-driven narrative. New Moon’s work takes many forms including designing and facilitating powerful cross-sector communities of learning and action, producing strategic community-centered video storytelling, conducting qualitative narrative strategy research, and guiding efforts to communicate verbally and visually with clear purpose and vision.

Read more from Julie Quiroz of New Moon Collaborations about MSC’s Transitions Labs on the Move Blog.

Read more from Julie Quiroz of New Moon Collaborations about #BlackLivesMatter on the Move Blog.

Read more from Julie Quiroz of New Moon Collaborations about Love With Power on the Move Blog.

Location: Oakland, CA
Region: National
Founders/leadership: Corrine Van Hook-Turner, Director

People’s Climate Innovation Center (PCIC) (formally Climate Innovation) has been a powerhouse supporting vibrant movements across the country using a community-driven approach to lift up grassroots communities as leading solution makers on the frontlines, in government, philanthropy, and beyond. PCIC brings a whole systems approach to movement building, cultivating a strong culture of designing transformative solutions that restore and regenerate healthy earth systems and built environments for all. Their approach emphasizes the need for solutions that are community-driven, interconnected, and intervene at multiple levels.

Read more about Corine Van Hook-Turner, Director at PCIC, on the Move Blog.

Read more about the support PCIC recieves from MSC board member Jacqui Patterson on the Move Blog.

Read more about the relationship between funders and movement leaders including PCIC’s Young Black Climate Leaders on the Move Blog.

Read more about PCIC’s actions on climate change on the Move Blog.

Read what Tamira Jones, PCIC’s Director of Capacity Building, had to say about about the passing of ibrahim abdul-matin on the Move Blog.

Another world is possible. PCIC supports governments, institutions, and funders in becoming more effective game-changers by centering equity and justice in their climate, resilience, and sustainability work. Simultaneously, they support grassroots and frontline communities and organizations to build capacity and networks to support leadership and a vision for a more beautiful, just, and sustainable world. PCIC facilitates planning processes that ultimately make climate efforts more successful and seamless, with deeper community partnerships and frontline leadership for the immediate and long-term.  

The PCIC team is Black-led and made up of a diverse group of leaders who have first hand experience of their voices and expertise being sidelined in planning processes. Their leadership possesses decades of experience in design and facilitation across the country drawing from permaculture, ancestral wisdom, and community organizing pedagogy. Their approach to community-driven processes and decision making is all about increasing capacity and relinquishing control in order for power to be shifted to communities so they may be the designers of their own community and future.