Location: Alabama; California; Tennessee
Region: National
Founding: 2018
Founders/leadership: Anasa Troutman, project director, founder

BIG We Foundation (BWF) unleashes the social imagination of those who often go unheard, and supports building a world reimagined from their point of view. It cultivates economic and cultural drivers grounded in Black imagination to foster a culture of belonging for everyone. By following the vision and leadership of those who live in or come from historically undermined communities, BWF values are their north star, guiding them on the journey of embodying the culture shift we are working to create in the world. BWF does its part to generate a thriving culture and healthy communities, where we can all experience sustained safety, joy, abundance, and love.  

BIG We Foundation is a nonprofit arts and culture intermediary built to provide infrastructure and opportunity for high potential, under-resourced communities. The organization employs a culture shift model that leverages storytelling, community building, and real world implementation. It expresses a commitment to co-creating the future by investing in people and communities aligned with and working towards a shared vision. BWF priority areas — womxn and girls, wellness equity, and restorative economics — are designed to work together in Black, Indigenous, and other BIPOC communities, forming a fully integrated, narrative-based, and holistic approach to their work. 

Read more about BWF’s Anasa Troutman’s participation in a Transfromative Movement building event on the Move Blog.

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: 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: 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: 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: 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.

Location: Durham, NC
Region: National
Founding: 2020
Founders/leadership: Yashna Maya Padamsee, project lead; advisory council: Tara Shaui Ellison; Chanda Jones; Mijo Lee; Felicia Martinez; Mae Singerman

The RadOps Network started in 2016 as an online social media group of over 500 people to build a support and resource-sharing network of like-minded operations workers within social movement organizations. The RadOps Project is the next step, building off of the RadOps network and framework, and seeks to uplift and make accessible the RadOps approach through shareable media and resources such as toolkits, social media infographics, online interviews, panels, and workshops.

Operations include the work areas of operations, administration, finance, events, development, volunteer and intern coordination, and/or the often invisible behind the scenes work in progressive and radical organizations, cooperatives, volunteer groups, and businesses.

The RadOps approach is an explicit justice-based framework and method; and RadOps has a demonstrated commitment to movement building and anti-oppression values and behavior, including centering the voices, experiences, and leadership of BIPOC, people with disabilities, women, LGBTQIA+ people, and others targeted by systems of oppression.

In many organizations, administrative work, which is historically women’s work or feminized labor, is devalued. RadOps see the operations, finance, and human resources teams and our/their labor as an integral part of the greater work. This value of respecting historically women’s work, respect for invisible labor, and honoring the dignity of all labor is put into action within each organization by valuing the work of the full team.