Announcing Our Spring 2023 Grants
2023 is a year of exciting and urgent opportunities. While community groups are preparing to access billions in funding through the Inflation Reduction Act and other new federal climate investments to build out their visions for a just transition to cleaner energy, many are also redoubling their efforts to stop the rapid expansion of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and oil export facilities, petrochemical plants, and other polluting industries. We’re supporting groups working on both these fronts this spring, as well as providing supplemental grants to ten existing grantee partners for expanded healing and security tools and practices.
This spring marks our first opportunity to make grant renewals since we made our first three-year grants in 2020. Seeing everything our current grantee partners have accomplished alongside their visions and plans for the next three years underscores how vital long-term support is to advancing work that has immediate impacts in people’s lives at the same time it incrementally changes underlying systems.
Georgia
Photo credit: Jordan Rose
West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (WAWA) improves the quality of life within the West Atlanta Watershed by protecting, preserving, and restoring the community’s natural resources. WAWA serves low-wealth communities and communities of color that are overburdened with environmental stressors but often least represented at environmental decision-making tables. It sits on the Justice40 commission of the Atlanta City Council, and its Renewable Energy Equity Fund supports affordable energy upgrades alongside local economic development.
Louisiana
Finance New Orleans (FNO) is a community-based lending institution with a nonprofit arm that leverages public resources with private and philanthropic capital to create lasting impact, including green building certifications, green job creation, substantiable and affordable housing, clean energy production, stormwater mitigation, and more. FNO operates in three core programs areas: single family, multifamily, and infrastructure.
Housing NOLA’s Own the Crescent platform aligns policy advocacy, community engagement, and investment to create affordable, resilient, and green housing for underserved communities in New Orleans’ urban core. The platform works with local community development finance institutions and philanthropy to pull together blended capital stacks that address a range of persistent barriers to financing energy efficiency and solar.
The Vessel Project of Louisiana organizes in Southwest Louisiana to achieve environmental and climate justice; voting rights; and access to housing, affordable energy, clean water, safe fresh produce, and healthcare. They plan to step up organizing against several newly proposed LNG export facilities in the region.
North Carolina
Texas
BRIDGE Infrastructure Fund (Building Resourced Infrastructure for Diverse Grassroots Engagement) is a state-based civic engagement innovation hub building the next generation of progressive leadership and organizations in Texas. Empowering BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and youth leaders, BRIDGE is holistically supporting movement building in Texas from the ground up.
Deceleration is a nonprofit online journal producing original news and analysis going to the roots of climate disturbance in historical systems of oppression while expanding and deepening solutions for protecting and creating the commons.
Texas For All is the largest progressive coalition based in Texas. Its member groups are strategically aligned and committed to the long-term goal of creating a Texas that truly works for all communities. Texas For All defends democracy, advances racial and climate justice, protects workers’ rights, and makes abortion and all healthcare accessible.
The Barbara Jordan Leadership Institute (BLJI) is a Black-women founded and led civic community-based organization in Dallas/Fort Worth, East Texas, and Greater Houston. Its work focuses on providing a comprehensive approach to community-based leadership in action through voter education, advocacy, and leadership development. BJLI strengthens the current generation of Black women leaders while recruiting and preparing the next generation.
Trucha is an independent multimedia organization dedicated to the people, the culture, and social movements of the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost tip of the US-Mexico border. Trucha creates and curates community journalism, videography, and creative programming to craft holistic regional narrative that counters the region’s harmful mainstream framing.
Photo by: Dina Nunez
Vecinos para el Bienestar de la Comunidad Costera (a committee project of Border Workers United) trains the Spanish-speaking immigrant community near Brownsville — including mothers, fisherpeople, and plant workers — to conduct community outreach and education on the health and environmental impacts of the LNG buildout in the region. The organization was involved, alongside other grantee partners in the area, in litigation against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency.