Welcome to our 2021 Grantees!
The Mize Family Foundation is pleased to announce our 2021 grants awarded to the following new and returning organizations:
A WARM WELCOME TO OUR NEW GRANTEES OF 2021!
UNDOCUBLACK
The UndocuBlack Network (UBN) is a multigenerational network of currently and formerly undocumented Black people that fosters community, facilitates access to resources, and contributes to transforming the realities of our people, so we are thriving and living our fullest lives.
FIRST PEOPLES FUND
Our mission is to honor and support the Collective Spirit of First Peoples artists and culture bearers. Our work recognizes the power of art and culture to bring about positive change in Native communities, beginning with individual artists and their families.
GREEN LEADERSHIP TRUST
Launched in 2013, the Green Leadership Trust works to build an environmental and conservation movement that wins. We are unique in a number of ways because we are the first cross-organizational effort focused on building power and diversity in any advocacy sector. We are guided first and foremost by our responsibility as fiduciaries of the organizations we represent.
SOUTH SEATTLE EMERALD
Founded as a platform that authentically depicts the dynamic voices, culture, arts, ideas, and businesses that fall within South Seattle’s borders, the Emerald is news as it was originally intended to be: not as business, nor as a forum for propaganda, but as a service to the community it chronicles.
WELCOME BACK TO OUR 2021 RETURNING GRANTEES!
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW ALLIANCE WORLDWIDE
The Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW) helps communities speak out for clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet. We are a global alliance of attorneys, scientists and other advocates collaborating across borders to promote grassroots efforts to build a sustainable, just future.
ELAW advocates, working in their home countries, know best how to protect the environment. By giving our partners the legal and scientific support they need, ELAW helps challenge environmental abuses and builds a worldwide corps of skilled, committed advocates working to protect ecosystems and communities for generations to come.
FRIDA
FRIDA | The Young Feminist Fund is the only youth-led fund focused exclusively on supporting global young feminist activism to advance social justice movements and agendas. FRIDA aims to bring new resources and new opportunities to girls, young women and trans youth globally; and support young feminist organizers to achieve their dreams and make the world a more just place, to disrupt the status quo and challenge power dynamics within funding institutions.
FRIDA’s vision is a world where young women, girls and trans* youth are recognized as experts of their own reality, enjoying their human rights and building a more just and sustainable world through collective power and transformative leadership.
FRONT LINE DEFENDERS
Front Line Defenders was founded in Dublin in 2001 with the specific aim of protecting human rights defenders at risk (HRDs), people who work, non-violently, for any or all of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Front Line Defenders addresses the protection needs identified by HRDs themselves.
The overriding ambition of Front Line Defenders is to enable human rights defenders – including environmental, indigenous and land rights defenders – at the local and national level to enjoy freedom and security to undertake their legitimate activities.
GLOBAL PRESS
Global Press creates a more informed and inclusive world by training and employing local women journalists in some of the world’s least-covered places to produce ethical, accurate news for local and global audiences. To date, we have trained more than 250 women journalists all over the world. We currently operate 37 news bureaus in 11 countries globally.
We build news bureaus in places where people lack independent access to information. We recruit, train, and hire professional women journalists to report on their local communities and we publish their stories in English and the local language on our award-winning news publication Global Press Journal. We distribute these stories to our local and international news partners to maximize our reach and impact. We pay our reporters strong salaries, health benefits, vacation, and paid family leave, and ensure they stay safe through our award-winning Duty of Care program.
HONOR THE EARTH
Honor the Earth is a Native-led organization, established by Winona LaDuke and Indigo Girls Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, in 1993 to address the two primary needs of the Native environmental movement: the need to break the geographic and political isolation of Native communities and the need to increase financial resources for organizing and change.
Honor the Earth’s mission is to create awareness and support for Native environmental issues and to develop needed financial and political resources for the survival of sustainable Native communities. Honor the Earth develops these resources by using music, the arts, the media, and Indigenous wisdom to ask people to recognize our joint dependency on the Earth and be a voice for those not heard.
ILLUMINATIVE
IllumiNative was founded by Crystal Echo Hawk, President of Echo Hawk Consulting, and a group of respected Native artists, thought leaders and allies, to capitalize on the findings of Reclaiming Native Truth (RNT) – the largest public opinion research and strategy setting initiative ever conducted for, and about, Native Americans. The data presented in RNT concluded that pop culture, media and K-12 education drive and perpetuate the negative stereotypes and myths and has led to the erasure of Native peoples. By honing IllumiNative’s focus on these drivers, this initiative will provide opportunities to not only substantially increase accurate and positive representations of Native peoples, but also positively impact policy and end the continued discrimination and disparities faced by Native communities.
URGENT ACTION FUND – AFRICA
Urgent Action Fund-Africa is a consciously feminist and women’s human rights Pan-African Fund established in 2001 in Nairobi, Kenya. As the first rapid response fund on the continent, UAF-Africa adds value to the work of activists and civil society organisations focusing on women’s active socio-political participation and visibility by leveraging resources and opportunities for critical engagements that advance women’s rights. Committed to working across Africa, UAF-Africa builds broader alliances with partners at national, regional and international levels.
WOMIN
WoMin, launched in October 2013, is an African gender and extractives alliance, which works alongside national and regional movements and popular organisations of women, mining-impacted communities and peasants, and in partnership with other sympathetic organizations.
XOESE
The vision of “XOESE, the Francophone Women’s Fund” is a world where women and girls fully enjoy all their fundamental human rights in a safe and sustainable economic and social environment and have equal opportunities to access resources and decision-making positions as men and boys.
Her mission is to mobilize financial, material and human resources and reinvest them to support the implementation of women’s and young women’s activists’ and organizations’ initiatives promoting women’s, young women’s and girls’ rights, their economic empowerment and gender equality in Global South French-speaking countries.
Her aim is to financially and technically support the implementation of women’s and young women’s organizations’ initiatives in Global South French-speaking countries.
ZIMBABWE ORGANIC SMALLHOLDER FARMERS’ FORUM (ZIMSOFF)
ZIMSOFF envisions improved livelihoods of organized and empowered smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe, practicing sustainable and viable ecological agriculture.
ZIMSOFF’s mission is to influence policies and to raise public awareness with regards to agroecology and the rights of smallholder farmers in Zimbabawe. ZIMSOFF’s membership, now at 19,000, is made up of smallholder farmers from four clusters in Zimbabwe; the central cluster, Masvingo and Midlands province; the eastern cluster, Manicaland province; the northern cluster, Mashonaland province; and the western cluster, Matabeleland province.
ZIMSOFF is made up of smallholder farmers working with a variety of stakeholders to ensure that issues of food sovereignty, land justice, and environmental justice are represented in local, national, regional and international spaces. ZIMSOFF’s work focuses on agroecology, biodiversity, agrarian reform, seed sovereignty, and gender parity.