Location:  Albany, NY
Region: New York
Founding: 2020
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.

Read more about the relationship between funders and movement leaders including After Incarceration’s Jose Pienda on the Move Blog.

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: 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
Founding: 2014
Founders/leadership: Rufaro Gwarada; Aparna Shah

The reSet Project cultivates imagination and builds power toward inclusive and participatory governance that centers people and the natural world. Working with tribal, community and state leaders, artists, cultural workers, organizers, communicators, academics, and advocates, they seed cultural shifts and intentionally integrate arts and cultural organizing to ensure that decision making power and influence reside within communities and tribes. Rooted in their unwavering love and collective strength, the reSet Project activates whole people, thriving families, and interconnected communities from a place of expansive vision. Together, they’re rebuilding a world of care, joy, and belonging.

Launching in Summer 2021, reSet and the Resonance Network are working with organizational partners across the country in a collaborative learning community to deepen their understanding and practice of collective governance, guided by the WeGovern agreements. 

Resources:

The reSet Project builds on many years of experience and partnerships, as described in these reports which articulate their grounding ideas:
Cultural Strategy: An Introduction and Primer, 2019
The what, why, and how of Cultural Strategy. Commissioned from Art/Work Practice with the support of Unbound Philanthropy. 
Until We Are All Free: A Case Study in Cultural Strategy, 2019
A summary of Until We Are All Free, our culture-led racial justice initiative with CultureStrike in partnership with Black Alliance for Just Immigration. Commissioned from Art/Work Practice with the support of Unbound Philanthropy.

Location: Sacramento, CA
Region: California
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: An Nguyen, program manager, liaison; Josephine Young

The President’s Youth Council (PYC) is a body of youth ambassadors from across California that serves in partnership with the CEO of the California Endowment to ultimately shape the Endowment’s investments and culture. Dr. Robert K. Ross formed PYC in a genuine effort to integrate youth input and decision making into the Endowment. PYC members work as thought partners in redefining wellness for young Californians and provide a youth perspective in advancing health equity and health justice campaigns while strengthening youth voice and leadership across communities, statewide and nationally. 

PYC envisions a world where young people of color are at the center of an intergenerational movement to create a healthy, just, and equitable California. These ambassadors provide community perspective by centering youth voices and cultivating narrative and systems change through storytelling while supporting health equity for underserved communities across the state. PYC members earn a yearly stipend, further their skills, and gain access to networking and mentoring opportunities. They also participate in youth development opportunities that strengthen their leadership skills and help them be more effective advocates for their communities.

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. 

Read more about UPM’s Scratch and Fade event in Oakland, CA on the Move Blog.

Read more about UPM’s history in youth organizing on the Move Blog.

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.

Read what Calvin Williams, founder of Wakanda Dream Lab, had to say about about the passing of ibrahim abdul-matin on the Move Blog.

Location:  Las Vegas, NV
Region: Nevada
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.

Read more about Tansy McNulty, founder and CEO of 1M4, and the launch of 988 on the Move Blog.

Catch up a year after the launch of 988 with Tansy McNulty on the Move Blog.