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: 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: 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: 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.  

The Sebastopol, CA farm is a part of Thomas’ new nonprofit Sankofa Project — an FSP and member of the Movement Strategy Network. Sankofa will include Thomas’ work with Marin City and Urban  Permaculture Institute. 

Read more about MSC’s visit to EARTHSeed Farm on the Move Blog.

Read more about how Pandora Thomas, founder of EARTHSeed Farm, inspires others on the Move Blog.

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

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: Bay Area, CA
Region: California
Founding: 2017
Founders/leadership: Carla Perez, founder 

Healing Clinic Collective (HCC) encourages re-engagement to a sacred way of relating to ourselves as whole people. With a network of over 130 healers and wellness practitioners, HCC’s goal is to connect people in need of holistic healing to natural and traditional healers and wellness practitioners for ongoing care. HCC aims to restore reverence and relationship to ancestral forms of healing and wellness that come from world views rooted in cultural understandings and expressions of love, interconnectedness, and a regenerative relationship to both people and the earth. 

Traditional prayer ceremonies are a foundational part of how HCC seeks and implements guidance for their ongoing work and is part of their organizing process for community-based healing clinics. HCC considers prayer an important part of their work: prayers are conducted in accordance to old world instructions of how to exchange loving energy with the power of the elements, ancestors and other spirit helpers. Prayers may be up to several hours long and can be for anything from the most dire global needs to specific desires for our work on the ground in the Bay Area.

Healing Clinic Collective offers consultations to individuals, organizations, and community-based groups who want to organize a healing clinic for their community with a focus on loving, traditional healing sessions to people from especially traumatized populations in the Bay Area. The organization works to raise awareness, including in working class communities, about the broad world of natural and ancestral healing modalities that are holistic and multi-layered. This may be for a school community, church community, neighborhood residents, or for organizations. 

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: 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: Bowie, MD
Region: National, Mid-Atlantic focus
Founding: 2022
Founders/leadership: Tenesha Duncan

Orchid Capital Collective (OCC) is dedicated to supporting ventures led and owned by Black and Indigenous communities, with a specific focus on community driven birth and reproductive care. Their core mission revolves around achieving reproductive and economic justice by strategically allocating integrated capital to uplift Black, Indigenous, queer and trans, and people of color-owned ventures. These businesses serve as vital pillars in community development, offering transformative birth and reproductive care solutions.

OCC’s investment strategy encompasses several key areas of impact. They prioritize the creation of financial and physical structures that enhance community wellbeing and prosperity. They actively advocate for and support the growth of midwifery-centered community care as a fundamental aspect of holistic healthcare. And, they strongly emphasize nurturing community leadership capacity, ensuring organizational and financial resilience for sustained, community driven impact.

Guided by a Beloved Economy framework, OCC’s values are deeply rooted in their approach to scaling this ecosystem. This framework is instrumental in keeping communities at the forefront, emphasizing their humanity and wellbeing as the cornerstone of OCC’s vision. Their work is driven by a commitment to fostering a more just and inclusive world where reproductive care serves as a beacon of equity, allowing communities to thrive.