Announcement of Fall 2013 Grantees

Dec 11, 2013

This year has been a big one for us at Kindle Project. We shared our roots with the world, started new programs and continued to scour our networks for incredible, new, bizarre and inspiring projects. With the new grantees that came into our horizon, there are new relationships that we’re eager to explore. Furthermore, the ties with our existing grantees in this cycle have deepened this past year as we’ve been blown away by the work they created and the movements they’ve shifted in just twelve short months.

Some are working radically towards changing the systems around us that are fraying and maybe even in collapse. Others are supporting those systems that do work, ensuring integrity and respect for the planet and its creatures. We’re supporting artists pushing the boundaries of what we might expect to see from performance, installation, and media. We sought out and supported those making films to expose truths and bring about hope, resilience and replicable ideas. This group of grantees is exploding with the rumblings of inspiration and booty-kicking motivation to think, do, and create with fervor.

It is a privilege and an honor to introduce you to our Fall grantees. Read about them and their projects below. There is a lot to look forward to in 2014 as we hear more from these impressive groups.

Amazon Watch

http://www.amazonwatch.org

Amazon Watch is a nonprofit organization founded in 1996 to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin. We partner with indigenous and environmental organizations in campaigns for human rights, corporate accountability and the preservation of the Amazon’s ecological systems.

Center for Court Innovation

http://www.courtinnovation.org/

Founded as a public/private partnership between the New York State Unified Court System and the Fund for the City of New York, the Center for Court Innovation (the Center) helps the justice system aid victims, reduce crime, strengthen neighborhoods, and improve public trust in justice. The Center combines action and reflection to spark innovation locally, nationally, and internationally. The Center’s Tribal Justice Exchange launched the Peacemaking Program in the fall of 2012 in partnership with the Red Hook Community Justice Center in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Peacemaking is a traditional Native American form of dispute resolution that promotes healing and restoration.

Center for Genomic Gastronomy

http://www.genomicgastronomy.com

The Center for Genomic Gastronomy is an independent research institute that explores the genomes and biotechnologies that make up the human food systems on planet earth. We are dedicated to the advancement of knowledge at the intersection of food, culture, ecology and technology. The Center presents its research through public lectures, research publications, meals and exhibitions. The Center has conducted research and exhibited in England, Germany, India, Ireland, Netherlands, Singapore and the US.

Center for Land Use Interpretation

http://www.clui.org/

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a nonprofit organization which seeks to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. We believe that the manmade landscape is a cultural inscription that can be read to better understand who we are individually, and as a nation.

Center for PostNatural History

http://www.postnatural.org

The Center for PostNatural History is a museum and outreach organization dedicated to the documentation and interpretation of the living world that has been intentionally and heritably altered by humans through processes such as domestication, selective breeding and genetic engineering.

Cry You One

http://www.cryyouone.com

“Cry You One” is a project that combines site specific performance and digital storytelling to highlight how rapidly one of the world’s most vibrant cultures is disappearing. It is shared on the sites of erosion in South Louisiana, where water is reclaiming land once occupied by people’s homes. Part love song, part story, part procession for our lost land, “Cry You One” celebrates the people and cultures of South Louisiana while turning clear eyes on the crisis of our vanishing coast.

Free Radicals

http://www.freerad.org/free-radicals

Free Radicalism proposes imagination as a reactive agent, a bonding agent, and a catalyst for new chain reactions that are disruptive to the body politic.

Free Radicals are oddities, messengers, reactors, regulators, combustors, intermediaries, and open systems, ready to excite and bond with others in order to make wonder-inducing things.

Free Radicals models an enthusiastic refusal of the idea that the world must be organized around structures of scarcity, repression, and disequilibrium.

Generation Food Project

http://www.generationfoodproject.org

With a billion hungry and two billion overweight people on Earth, everyone knows that the food system is broken. But few people understand that it’s a system, with rules that keep things ticking along. Investors and corporations make millions. Billions suffer the consequences. But a few groups are breaking the rules of how we eat today, so that everyone can eat tomorrow. Steve James (Life Itself, The Interrupters, Hoop Dreams) and Raj Patel (Stuffed and Starved, The Value of Nothing) weave together tales of the system’s destructive creators and creative destroyers, bringing together traders, farmers, grocers and eaters from India to Malawi to Peru, Maine and Oakland to show not only how the system works, but how some unlikely people are transforming it.

Huge Trouble

http://www.hugetrouble.org/

Huge Trouble believes that all persons of the world embody innovative thinking. We, alone and collectively, possess the desire to express and apply this thinking to positively transform the objects and activities of daily living. It is the goal of Huge Trouble to excite these expressions and applications.

Huge Trouble’s “Project Hightail” will explore the possibilities kite-based off-grid electrical and mechanical power generation systems to facilitate creative works in unusual places.

May First/People Link

http://www.mayfirst.org

May First/People Link is a politically progressive member-run and controlled organization that redefines the concept of “Internet Service Provider” in a collective and collaborative way. May First/People Link’s members are organizers and activists. As a democratic membership organization, we gather together each year to evaluate the past year’s experiences, plan the coming year’s work and elect a Leadership Committee to apply what we’ve decided. Like a coop, we pay dues, buy equipment and then we all use that equipment as we need to for websites, email, email lists, and just about everything else we do on the Internet. As an organization of the social change movements of the United States and Mexico (primarily) we use our resources to fund work within the movement, its many campaigns and its convergences. We are an organization of resource sharing and activism and view those two roles as fundamentally two parts of the same.

Movement Generation

http://movementgeneration.org

Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture. We are rooted in vibrant social movements led by low-income communities and communities of color committed to a Just Transition away from profit and pollution and towards healthy, resilient and life-affirming local economies.

New Economy Coalition

http://www.neweconomy.net

NEC is a coalition of over 140 diverse organizations, federations, trade associations, community development funds, and socially responsible businesses coalescing around the framework of a new economy. Faced with interconnected ecological and economic crises, we believe that shared prosperity, sustainability, and an equitable society require deep, systemic changes to our economy, our politics, and our communities. We support a just transition to a sustainable, democratic and just new economy.

New Mexico Environmental Law Center

http://www.nmelc.org

The New Mexico Environmental Law Center (NMELC) was founded in 1987 by attorney Douglas Meiklejohn. Since that time, its attorneys have represented clients on nearly 300 cases throughout New Mexico, primarily working with residents of low-income communities and communities of color. We have expertise in solid waste, hard-rock mining, uranium mining, air quality, urban sprawl, water quality and quantity, dairies, oil and gas extraction, and climate change. The Law Center’s goal in each case is to achieve the environmental protection objectives of its clients.

Other Worlds

http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org

Other Worlds is a collaborative that works to inspire hope and knowledge that another world is possible, and helps build it. It compiles and brings to light political, economic, and social alternatives that are flourishing throughout the world, and helps the public open up new pathways to adapt and replicate them. The team of five women is currently focused on three programs: (1) Harvesting Justice, strengthening and publicizing the transformation of food, land, and agricultural systems in the Americas; (2) Another Haiti Is Possible, offering alliance to social movements in Haiti as they work to raise a more equitable and just country from the rubble of the 2010 earthquake; and (3) Alternatives Education, documenting and broadly sharing victories and alternatives surging around the world. All Other Worlds’ work has an emphasis on women.

Seed Broadcast

http://www.seedbroadcast.org/

Seed Broadcast is a generative project exploring grassroots food and seed sovereignty through collective inquiries and hands-on creative practices. Throughout the year, we initiate community projects to examine critical issues surrounding seed and food sovereignty, visit local farms and gardens to experience what is happening first hand in the field, and engage in creative strategies to dig deeper into the real, often unheard, stories of local agriculture. Seed Broadcast believes that local communities hold a genius of place that nourishes the core of sustenance. We seek to reveal this innovative knowledge, while pollinating creative practices, which animate the saving and growing of local seeds, to provide an avenue for the revitalization of localized, sovereign, food sources.

Sins Invalid

http://www.sinsinvalid.org

Sins Invalid is a disability justice based performance project that celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. Our performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body. Led by disabled people of color, we develop and present cutting-edge work where paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities.

Sins Invalid recognizes that we will be liberated as whole beings – as disabled/as queer/as brown/as black/as genderqueer/as female- or male-bodied – as we are far greater whole than partitioned. We are committed to social and economic justice for all people with disabilities, moving beyond individual legal rights to collective human rights. Our stories, embedded in analysis, lay the foundation for a collective claim of liberation and beauty.

Virunga

“Virunga” is a feature documentary of the incredible true story and gripping exposé of the realities of life in eastern Congo. Following a group of brave individuals, risking their lives to build a better future and save the last of the world’s mountain gorillas in the midst of renewed civil war and a scramble for Congo’s natural resources.

Women on Waves

http://www.womenonwaves.org/

Women on Waves, a Dutch non-profit organization was founded in 1999. On the invitation of local women’s groups, Women on Waves sails with a Dutch ship to countries where abortion is illegal. Outside the territorial waters, the abortion pill can be provided safely and legally to women with unwanted pregnancies. While in harbor, the ship also hosts several programs, such as contraceptive distribution, counseling, education and workshops for different professionals organizations. The ships campaign in Ireland (2001), Poland (2003), Portugal (2004), Spain (2008), and Morocco (2012) created enormous public interest. The campaign in Portugal catalyzed the legalization of abortion in February 2007.

In recent years Women on Waves initiated safe abortion hotlines in Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, Poland, Thailand and trained grassroots women’s organizations in several African countries. Additionally, we develop art projects, engage in legal actions, give sexual education and medical knowledge workshops.. In 2006, we initiated Women on Web, a telemedical service was set up to support women around the world access safe medical abortions.

Yansa

http://www.yansa.org

The Yansa Group is working to create a model for community-based energy generation that is locally sustainable and scalable at a global level. Our projects embody values that include environmental sustainability, community partnerships as a driver of impact, democratic decision-making and cultural diversity. Our model ensures that each project is self-sustaining and can contribute to successful and long-term economic advancement, community development, and social empowerment.

The Wildfire Project

http://wildfireproject.org

The Wildfire Project trains, supports, and links grassroots groups in order to lay the foundation for a network that helps grow a powerful movement for social, political, economic, and ecological justice. Wildfire develops leadership in and of front-line groups, maintains long-term contact with the communities with which it works, and creates frameworks for work between groups and across issue lines to prepare organizers stand up to turn crisis into opportunity to win the world we all deserve.

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