Werd I/O

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I’m donating to the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance. CIYJA is an organization run and developed by undocumented youth organizers. It describes its work as follows:

CIYJA is a statewide immigrant youth-led alliance that focuses on placing immigrant youth in advocacy and policy delegations in order to ensure pro-immigrant policies go beyond legalization, and shed light on how the criminalization of immigrants varies based on identity.

Its work includes pressure to divest from private prisons and to prevent deportations and family separations.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Peg Hunter.

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I’m donating to the California Environmental Justice Alliance. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Abolitionist Law Center describes its mission as follows:

The California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) is a statewide, community-led alliance that works to achieve environmental justice by advancing policy solutions. We unite the powerful local organizing of our members in the communities most impacted by environmental hazards – low-income communities and communities of color  – to create comprehensive opportunities for change at a statewide level. CEJA builds the power of communities across California to create policies that will alleviate poverty and pollution.

Particularly in the wake of the UN climate change report, climate change and establishing environmental justice is the key issue of our time. Low-income communities, and disproportionately people of color, will be the worst hit by climate change. Organizations like CEJA are crucial to solve the underlying problems and advocate for the vulnerable.

CEJA's campaigns include climate justice, advancing energy equity in California, and establishing green zones.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

#justice

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I’m donating to the Abolitionist Law Center. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Abolitionist Law Center describes its mission as follows:

The Abolitionist Law Center is a public interest law firm inspired by the struggle of political and politicized prisoners, and organized for the purpose of abolishing class and race based mass incarceration in the United States.

I became aware of the ALC through its Director of Operations, Dustin McDaniel, who was also the lead investigator of the organization’s report into exposure to toxic waste at a Pennsylvania state correctional institution.

Its programs include ending solitary confinement, supporting the political rights of the incarcerated, healthcare rights, and perhaps most importantly, releasing people from prison.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Joe Piette is of the release of Debbie Africa, which the ALC worked on.

#justice

I’m posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week I'm donating to NDN Collective. Based in Rapid City, South Dakota, NDN Collective describes its mission as follows:

NDN Collective is an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power. Through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking, capacity-building and narrative change, we are creating sustainable solutions on Indigenous terms.

As part of a journey to bring my mother's ashes to New England (which I'll write about soon in another post), I've been traveling through Montana and North Dakota. I've been profoundly struck by the level of poverty experienced by Native American communities there. Native Americans suffered a genocide at the hands of European colonizers, and have experienced generational injustices that continue to this day.

NDN Collective's restorative justice work includes climate justice and racial equity campaigning, as well as an important campaign to regain Indigenous land ownership. It has played a key part in campaigns against oil pipelines on Indigenous land. The Collective also makes grants and impact-orientated loans and investments.

I donated. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Joe Piette.

#justice

Inspired by Fred Wilson’s Funding Fridays, which highlight a new crowdfunding campaign that he’s contributed to every week, I decided to start a series of my own. This isn’t a knock on him: I genuinely enjoy those posts. But I also felt like there was room for something else.

Starting this week, I’m going to be posting Fairness Fridays: a new community social justice organization each week. I will donate to each featured organization. If you feel so inclined, please join me.

This week, I’m donating to Southerners on New Ground. Based in Atlanta, SONG describes its mission as follows:

We build membership (or our base) as a way to build the skills, connection and leadership of thousands of Southern rural LGBTQ people of color, immigrant people and working class people – united together in the struggle for dignity and justice for all people. In order to transform the South we must build our collective power, our people power, which comes from thousands and thousands of us uniting to make the South the home our communities need it to be.

Its work includes bail reform, Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming leadership work, and electoral justice. It’s all good stuff.

I donated, became a member, and offered to use my tech skills for community members who need them. If you have the means, I encourage you to do the same.

Photo by Nathania Johnson

#justice