Woods Fund Chicago announces Fall Grantee Partners including new core grantee partners
In May, Woods Fund Chicago opened our submission process for prospective and returning grantee partners for the Fall Cycle 2022 grantmaking cycle. The team decided to renew all funding requests for returning grantee partners and recommended that three new applicants become a part of our core fall grantmaking portfolio. The renewed funding to returning grantee partners reflects our unwavering support of and commitment to the work grantee partners are doing to advance racial and economic justice through community organizing and public policy advocacy.
The three new organizations we invited into our core grantmaking portfolio this fall cycle — Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS), and Not Me We — are founded and led by people from the impacted communities these organizations center, and they prioritize community organizing, base-building, and/or developing leaders from within the community, which also reflect Woods Fund Chicago’s values and funding priorities.
Immigrant Solidarity DuPage
Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, founded in 2007, educates, organizes, and mobilizes around the rights and collective struggle of the Latino Community in DuPage County. They are founded and led by Latino immigrants, embrace culture and self-care/development to support self-determination, build relationships to ensure collective decision-making and action, focus on building power for and by their members, and are guided by principles of international solidarity, along with racial, social, and economic justice.
Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS)
MAMAS is a collective of people conducting the labor of mothering among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-based communities. By “mamas,” they mean biological and non-biological mothers and caretakers. They believe Black and Brown mamas laboring on the frontlines of families and communities targeted by state violence are among the most powerful forces of revolutionary change. MAMAS’ vision is to integrate the voices and strategies of mamas into social movements, media debates, and policy processes about the systems sustaining U.S. empire and white supremacy — from policing and immigration to colonization and war. They also believe this integration is necessary if we are to survive these systems and build the kinds of connections and alternatives needed to build a just and loving society. MAMAS uses a reproductive justice model to build power holistically among BIPOC mothers whose children were convicted by Chicago police by torture or frame-ups and a combination of trainings (activist/organizing and policy-based) and healing circles. Their trainings build power by destabilizing how abolitionist organizing tends to prioritize men inmates “living on the inside.” They have been able to create safe spaces for new members to build a strong community to support not only their own children, but all the children who have been wrongfully convicted. MAMAS organizers have been able to break free from the expectation of being “nice” to elected officials and instead apply political pressure and advocate for change on issues that matter to them and other mothers whose families have been impacted by state-perpetrated and state-sanctioned violence and incarceration. One of the mothers proudly shared in the site visit that they make waves, protest elected officials, create nurturing spaces, give hugs, and pass tissues simultaneously. They see all of this as their work. MAMAS brings a valuable perspective to our portfolio, as they center their voices as women, as mothers often ignored or reduced solely to victims or mouthpieces of the men they have lost to police violence or incarceration. MAMAS is a collective of women who refuse to allow their pain, anger, and families to be exploited by elected officials, media, and the non-profit industrial complex. They reject the “trauma porn” trope and choose to stand strong in their full humanity as women, mothers, neighbors, organizers, advocates, and architects of change.
Not Me We
Not Me We is an all-volunteer community group that organizes Black, poor, and working-class communities on the South Side of Chicago to build grassroots infrastructure that allows for collective and individual repatriation of resources and power in South Shore and adjacent neighborhoods. Their approach focuses on housing and education organizing, with a strong emphasis on organizing tenants to create housing unions and on working with parents and teachers to create more supportive schools for families most at risk of displacement. They began in the summer of 2020, with weekly free food and grocery distribution to families around Parkside Elementary. They have since sustained their mutual aid work at Parkside Elementary with monthly distributions and have four members who have joined other neighborhood schools' councils to organize better resources in public schools. In addition, they are working with residents with whom they built relationships at the school and began addressing the housing insecurity and displacement that are rampant in South Shore by organizing tenants. As an all-volunteer group, they have grown to over 20 core members who have canvassed almost every block of South Shore to organize for a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) for housing protections against displacement for renters and homeowners, due to the effects of the Obama Presidential Center; successfully organized two tenant unions; and won remedies for the residents of a building at 79th & Dante that has fallen into disrepair and whose water was shut off by the owner, former Chicago Housing Authority president Vince Lane. Inviting Not Me We to be a core grantee partner is an opportunity for us to further demonstrate our commitment to a Black-founded and led grassroots organization that is doing phenomenal work with no paid staffing. It is also an opportunity for Woods Fund Chicago to support dynamic organizing in South Shore, a neighborhood that, until now, has not been reflected in Woods Fund Chicago’s current grantmaking portfolio.
Woods Fund Chicago has awarded 38 organizations in Chicago a total of $1,310,000 in general operating support. Grants were awarded to 20 organizations integrating community-based organizing and public policy advocacy, 13 organizations committed to community-based organizing, three organizations committed to public policy advocacy, as well as the Catalyst Fund and the Racial Justice Pooled Fund.
Click here to see the full 2022 Fall Grantee Partner list.