Announcement of Spring 2013 Grantees

May 21, 2013

New grantees mean new opportunities. It means new ways to look at problems and solutions. It means new inspirations, models for change, and it means new networks to explore.

Taking the ripple effect of our work evermore far and wide our grantees are making big splashes with prodigious accomplishments and progress;

• The Tar Sands Blockade is galvanizing direct, non-violent action in clever ways to oppose the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline,
• Haymarket Books has a boldly diverse line-up of book releases this month, including several books by Howard Zinn, Göran Olsson’s Black Power Mixtape:1967-1975, and Tariq Ali’s The Stalinist Legacy: It’s Impact on Twentieth Century World Politics,
• The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in partnership with Drilling Mora County accomplished the unprecedented goal of passing the first U.S. ban on fracking and oil drilling in Mora County, New Mexico,
• Project Survival Media is developing a catalogue of climate solutions from youth documentary teams around the world,
• The Yes Lab is tinkering away in the edit room on their new titillating film, The Yes Men Are Revolting. They are also working their fannies off on their Action Switchboard, a dynamic platform connecting tools and change agents. Both projects are sure to whet your civil disobedience appetite.

There’s an endless number of methods and practices that we can use to respond to the social, economic, and environmental concerns of our time. This season’s grantees, both new and alumni, are taking on solutions based approaches with a combination of youthful tenacity and tried and true wisdom.

Kindle Project Fund of the Common Counsel Foundation is pleased to introduce you to our lineup of inspiring change-makers for our Spring 2013 Grant Cycle.

Agriculture Implementation Research & Education

http://www.solfelizfarm.wordpress.com/

Agriculture Implementation Research & Education is working to cultivate as many fields and gardens with as many crops and as many people as possible in various communities throughout the Middle and Upper Rio Grande. For schools, service corps, and community groups we offer sustainable agriculture presentations, demonstrations, and workshops. To address our contemporary context of climate change and food insecurity, we also maintain a “living seed library” of locally adapted seeds for agricultural expansion and success.

Be Present, Inc.

http://bepresent.org

Be Present, Inc. builds collective leadership for social justice through providing trainings and systems of support using the Be Present Empowerment Model®, sustaining a national network of activists, and creating partnerships with nonprofits engaged in the work of creating a just world. We support people from diverse backgrounds to be present in their lives – to be more effective leaders in creating well being within themselves as well as their families, schools, organizations, and communities.

Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

http://www.celdf.org

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit public interest law firm and grassroots organizing organization, assists people and communities to assert their fundamental rights to democratic local self-governance and sustainability, and to recognize the rights of nature. Today, over 130 communities in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New York, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Virginia have adopted Legal Defense Fund-drafted laws. Through this work, we have become the principal advisor to communities and municipal governments struggling to transition from merely regulating corporate harms to stopping those harms by asserting local, democratic control directly over corporations.

Community Midwifery Fund

http://www.groundswellfund.org/

The Community Midwifery Fund makes high quality, culturally competent midwifery care more available, especially for low-income women and women of color.

Jibz Cameron a.k.a Dynasty Handbag

http://www.dynastyhandbag.com

Jibz Cameron/Dynasty Handbag is an exorcism of deranged characters and failures born from a patriarchal, consumer-driven society, performed on stage using pre-recorded voice overs and video interaction. Dynasty Handbag is the alter ego of performance/video artist, Jibz Cameron. She has been heralded by the New York Times as “the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years” and “crackpot genius” by the Village Voice. Her work as ‘Dynasty Handbag’ has been seen in such esteemed institutions as The New Museum NY, The Kitchen, DTW, MOMA PS1, Joe’s Pub, PS122, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and also in international dives both great and small. She is the recipient of numerous awards, and an adjunct professor of Performance and Theater studies and comedy theory at TISCH NYU. Her unique and obscure work is best understood through first hand witnessing. Check out her website to get a taste of her flavor.

Government Accountability Project

http://www.whistleblower.org/

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) was created in 1977 in response to White House scandals. Our mission is to ensure government and corporate accountability by advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers and empowering citizen activists. During this time, GAP has served as a lifeline to employees of conscience and has helped them release critical information that serves the public interest and the common good. Now in our 34th year, GAP has advanced to become not only the nation’s leading whistleblower support organization, but also an important government and corporate accountability organization both domestically and internationally. GAP’s change-oriented methodology includes representing whistleblowers, creating an effective advocacy agenda surrounding their concerns, and developing, then implementing, broad whistleblower protection policy reforms with extraordinary reach in the United States and abroad. GAP’s programs include: Environment and Energy Oversight; Food Integrity; Public Health and Safety; Corporate and Financial Accountability; National Security and Human Rights; and International Reform.

Haymarket Books

http://www.haymarketbooks.org/

Haymarket Books was founded in the year 2001 to publish original progressive nonfiction works of interest to scholars, activists, and readers interested in books related to the history of movements for social change in the United States and engaged in contemporary political debates. Among our authors are Wallace Shawn, Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Amira Hass. We take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world. Their struggle for the eight-hour day in 1886 which gave us May Day, the international workers’ holiday, reminds workers around the world that ordinary people can organize and struggle for their own liberation. These struggles continue today around the globe. Haymarket Books, a nonprofit publisher, is a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change.

High Mayhem

http://www.highmayhem.org

High Mayhem creates opportunities and events for underrepresented emerging artists. We present, document, and broadcast important creative art and music to our immediate community and the broader world via the Internet. We serve as a laboratory for creative minds to meet, develop, and collaborate to create and envision new and vibrant art and music. We pursue art a means to share experiences and connect people, trigger dialogue, and to awaken the soul and the spirit.

Honest Appalachia

http://www.honestappalachia.org

Honest Appalachia is a website and resource for whistleblowers in Appalachia who wish to reveal proof of corporate and government wrongdoing. Our mission is to use web-based technology to support and defend whistleblowers, journalists and other citizens in Appalachia as they seek to hold powerful institutions and individuals accountable to the public. The website, which was inspired by Wikileaks, is focused on local and regional issues in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Its efforts will focus on a broad variety of institutions, from coal and gas companies to banks and zoning boards to local and state governments. Honest Appalachia is operated by a team of freelance journalists, computer programmers and transparency activists in Appalachia and beyond.

Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

http://www.ieer.org

Founded in 1985 to further public involvement in and control over environmental problems through the democratization of science, IEER provides policy makers, media, community/grassroots leaders with technical training and scientific/policy analyses on environmental, energy, and security issues. IEER contributes to campaigns to create efficient, renewable energy systems, clean up the messes we have made in nuclear weapons and power production, and promote a healthy environment.

MIX Santa Fe

http://mixsantafe.com/

MIX is a structure for interaction and collaboration among inspired individuals, entrepreneurs, innovators, businesses and organizations. Through monthly events that showcase talent and local resources MIX provides an avenue for personal contact and networking. Through innovative web tools, social media and micro- stimulus, MIX provides a mechanism for the development of ideas, businesses, and projects with corollary opportunities for promotion, recognition and start-up funding. The SMC (Saint Michael’s Corridor) Project is a previtalization effort aimed at creating an energetic, inclusive dialogue and pop-up visualization for the future of St. Michael’s Drive and the surrounding neighborhoods, institutions, businesses and organizations. The area in question represents the physical and population center of the state capital and yet is a blight of vacant mini- malls and dilapidated car dealerships divided by a traffic thoroughfare that limits quality of life, public safety and meaningful public usage. The project will engage Santa Fe-ans in the history of the area, the current challenges and the potential for revitalization. The goal is to emerge from a long-weekend visualization and festival event with key outcome projects in transportation, energy, public space, micro- and macro-financing potential and new zoning overlays.

The project is scheduled for September 20-23, 2012.

Planned Parenthood of New Mexico

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/rocky-mountains

Planned Parenthood of New Mexico’s Santa Fe Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Project is comprised of four programs to deliver comprehensive, medically accurate sexual health information to youth in Santa Fe. The first part of the project is a multi-session in-class curriculum delivered to Middle School and High School students. The second program, our Middle School Girls’ Groups, combines more intensive, year-long education with service learning opportunities for at-risk youth. Third, our Nuestros Cambios workshops promote communication between adults and children about the difficult changes that occur during adolescence. Finally, in order to transform the discourse around sexual health, PPNM created a peer education program that trains motivated teens to be resources of responsible sexual health information for their peers. The goal of this programming is to empower youth to avoid teen pregnancy by increasing the number of adolescents and adults that have access to accurate sexual health information and providing more channels for youth to be involved with their families and community.

Project Survival Media

http://www.projectsurvivalmedia.org/

Project Survival Media is a global network of youth journalists reporting from the frontlines of the climate crisis in the lead up to COP 15, otherwise known as the UN Climate Negotiations. Our seven new media teams, one for each continent, will report on the most compelling climate stories from around the world, amplify voices underrepresented by traditional media, and launch “Survival” to the forefront of the political debate.

We empower 93 youth journalists, on all seven continents to develop a strong narrative on the climate crisis.Pre-COP15, we are producing 6 mini-documentaries, 70 professional photographs, and 100 blogs.We are also working to send a delegation of 10 youth to the UN to act a s a rapid response media team, covering the most pressing issues and distributing our media through our growing networks.

Tar Sands Blockade

http://www.tarsandsblockade.org/

Tar Sands Blockade is a coalition of affected Texas and Oklahoma residents and organizers using nonviolent direct action to physically stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

United Roots Oakland

http://www.unitedrootsoakland.org

United Roots (Oakland’s Green Youth Arts & Media Center), is a young, but important organization that is engaging and supporting over 200 low-income Oakland youth, ages 13-24, annually in socially innovative ways. Working out of a storefront in Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood, United Roots provides youth leadership, arts, green jobs, sustainability, media training, career and workforce preparedness, and wellness services to youth that need it most, in way that are most needed. Our driving aspiration has been to offer one of Oakland’s first green youth arts and media centers where youth can envision a new world that meets all the contemporary crises, from the ecological to the economic, in the most creative and innovative ways.

Yes Lab, Inc.

http://www.theyesmen.org/lab

The Yes Lab is devoted to helping progressive organizations and activists carry out media-getting creative actions around well-considered goals.