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: 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: 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: 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: 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.

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.