FRI focused its second grant cycle on supporting narrative sovereignty and story justice projects for an invited cohort of existing grantee organizations. The grant theme responds to a need broadly expressed by community organizations for support to shift the paradigm of storytelling, so that they can share and own their stories on their terms.
Including more than 190 organizations, Californians for Pesticide Reform (CPR) aims to reduce pesticide use and subsequent pesticide harm in frontline communities while advancing more sustainable and just farming practices. CPR targets interconnected issues such as environmental justice, environmental health, and food justice to support and protect impacted community members – many of whom are low-income, immigrants, and people of color. To support its efforts, CPR mobilizes power within farmworker communities across California by building grassroots leadership and linking community leaders to local decision-makers.
Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL) is an intergenerational grassroots community organization based in Chester, Pennsylvania that was formed to demand an end to harmful toxic waste facilities in their neighborhood. With a population of approximately 33,00 residents, 70% of whom are African American, CRCQL empowers and educates community members about the damaging effects of air pollution that have led to high rates of asthma, respiratory diseases, and cancers in their community. CRCQL has successfully led campaigns to shut down facilities that threaten their waterfront and community. Notably, they are the first activist group to apply the Civil Rights Act in an environmental racism lawsuit against Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection.
Dream of Wild Health (DWH), founded in 1998 as Peta Wakan Tipi, aims to restore health and well-being in the Native community by recovering knowledge of and access to healthy Indigenous foods, medicines, and lifeways. DWH seeks to accomplish this goal by creating culturally-based opportunities for youth employment, entrepreneurship, and leadership; increasing access to Indigenous foods; and engaging in community organizing and outreach around reclaiming cultural traditions, healthy Indigenous foods, cooking skills, and policy and systemic change. One of the longest operating Native American organizations in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, DWH has expanded over the years to include a 30-acre regenerative farm, native fruit orchard, and pollinator meadow.
Through collective action and a shared resources network, Haciendo Acciones Socio-Ecológicas Resilientes (HASER) promotes overall social well-being in Puerto Rico in the face of increased social inequality and disparate effects of climate change. HASER advances equity and quality of life in Puerto Rico by building transformative leadership and community power through a participatory and decentralized approach. Through comprehensive movement building, HASER supports grassroots action and the creation of community-based groups to increase access to information and resources, advance advocacy for Puerto Ricans, and encourage shared knowledge and experiences.
Founded in 1981 by garment workers and Chicana activists, La Mujer Obrera is a local organization dedicated to creating communities defined by women. Their members and leaders live in the barrio Chamizal in El Paso, Texas, a predominantly Latino and immigrant neighborhood. Rooted in Mexican heritage and local knowledge, their Familias Unidas del Chamizal and Proyecto Verde programs apply a just transition framework to organize and work directly with residents—elders, families, and children—on pressing environmental hazards and injustices, like ozone nonattainment, toxic playgrounds, and polluting bus hubs and industrial fires near public schools and public housing.
The Human Rights Coalition (HRC) was formed in 2001 when a group of formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones came together to support prisoners and their families and challenge the unjust nature of the punitive system. HRC organizes inside and outside prisons across Pennsylvania to defend the human rights of the incarcerated. Their Toxic Prisons Campaign seeks to raise awareness of and challenge the lack of access to clean water and the toxic environmental conditions in prisons and surrounding communities located near industrial energy facilities and toxic waste disposal sites.
