Announcement of Fall 2014 Grantees
Dec 18, 2014
2014 is coming to a close and we’re all exhaling in inspired confusion at the fascinating planet we live on. Have you all had a very full year, too? It’s been a year of reaching new apexes of struggle for all those working tirelessly for justice, conversation, and human rights. In the face of the grandness of our challenges, how can we stay hopeful and continue on in inspired action? For us, hope lies in the innumerable groups, artists, thinkers and individuals who are actively making the change our world needs.
Our fall grantees this year have been a part of the Kindle family for quite some time and our commitment to them is because of the hope and impact they create through their work.
We’ve shared many of their stories with you over the past year, and it’s been an incredible learning experience to see just how deeply these organizations dig to reveal the roots of the systemic problems we’re facing. We would like to take a moment to shine some light on the work of our grantees.
- Amazon Watch has acknowledged women in the Amazon for their high level contribution to climate change.
- Wildfire Project has used experimental education to make the movements they support sustainable and connected.
- May First/People Link empowers us to protect and develop the Internet in ways that serve the common good.
- Sins Invalid demonstrates creativity bringing disability justice to the forefront of public discourse.
- New Mexico Environmental Law Center perseveres with their unceasingly vibrant, tireless and creative practice of law, making massive change for our New Mexico communities.
- Generation Food inspires us with their groundbreaking food justice media work.
- The Center for PostNatural History expands their  impressive archive of living things altered by genetic modification.
- Yansa reminds us about the power of innovation and collaboration.
- New Economy Coalition grounds us in what kind of transformation is truly possible.
- Movement Generation mobilizes communities of color across the country.
- CoClimate, our newest grantee partner, imagines new ways for us to re-engage with the most challenging issues in a positive way.
Following the work of grantee partners has lifted our spirits and energized our work to carry us through 2014 and begin 2015 with gusto. We truly feel privileged to work with a such an amazing team of radical, world changing super heroes. Happy New Year, Kindle community!
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.
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.
CoClimate’s mission is to provoke, stimulate, and inspire new connections between people, technology, and the environment. We inspire curiosity, cultivate questioning, and re-engage exhausted audiences around climate change. We undertake research to unearth insights, unique perspectives, and emerging practices, and use that knowledge to create imagery, experiences, and objects that are beautiful, compelling, imaginative, and legible for people from different worldviews and frames of reference.
“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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.