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: 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: 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. 

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: Oakland, CA
Region: National
Founding: 2017
Founders/leadership: Alexis Flanagan, co-director; Doris Dupuy, co-director

Resonance is an ever-expanding network of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, women, femme, trans, and two-spirit people and their co-conspirators who are building a world beyond violence — a world rooted in mutual care, where all people live in dignity, and all beings can thrive. 

Resonance’s worldbuilding draws on the lineage of radical feminist, BIPOC movement leaders who have, alongside communities, developed powerful ways to oppose and resolve violence. Today, Resonance practitioners are taking the next step toward transformation, by uprooting the complex and interrelated causes of violence, and supplanting them with ways of being in our families and communities, cultural norms, and systems of governance that reflect our values. 

Resonance participants are healers, leaders, artists, survivors, and storytellers creating visionary spaces to access creativity and radical imagination, and practice what it means to thrive.

Resonance Network participants believe that liberation is a practice, and are building the world we know is possible, by: 

• Activating Radical Imagination: co-creating community-rooted action spaces that interrupt the current dominant worldview, and cultivate mutual care in ourselves, communities, and collective systems.

• Claiming Collective Governance: practicing — in our families, tribes, teams, and communities — a set of principles that affirm our sacred responsibility to care for one another and the earth.

• Building Reach and Resonance: building authentic relationships, a shared vision, and collaborative action with individuals and communities who share a commitment to building a liberatory future.

Resonance Network first took root in 2013 with the first cohort of movement leaders to take part in Move to End Violence, a ten year program of the NoVo Foundation. Their shared vision of a world beyond violence made it clear they would need to work beyond the constraints of mainstream anti-violence approaches, taking the longer, more emergent path toward transforming violence and cultivating thriving individuals and communities. 

Resonance Network’s founding members also recognized that transforming the roots of violence meant centering the people whose communities were most impacted by interpersonal and institutional violence. This intention remains a guiding force today.

From its founding, Resonance made the intentional choice to configure ourselves as a network. Unlike traditional organizations, networks hold the capacity to adapt, evolve, and scale in response to changing contexts and current events. This dynamic form not only mirrors the way change happens in natural networks like mycelium or a coral reef — it also makes broad transformation possible.

Today, MSC works in collaboration with Resonance’s core team and Navigators Circle as the network continues to evolve and grow. Made up of network participants, the Navigators Circle uses network principles of co-design, consent, and collaborative practice to support the Resonance team in choice-making about infrastructure and strategy. Through consent-based decision-making, Resonance practices the governance it hopes to see in the world: centering compassion, deep relationship, and collective thriving.