Thank you all for your tremendous patience and support as we’ve officially launched this grant! While the grant was originally intended to open in 2023, by delaying this Giving Project and grant we were truly able to center abundance and wellness in our team and in our community. Details Grant Awards: 2-year grants of $50,000 ($25K/year)  Focus: Environmental justice organizing in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and/or Wyoming Eligibility: Environmental justice organizing in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and/or Wyoming Priority Consideration: Black, Indigenous, and people ..read more

(SJF staff photo from 2023, with Burke Stansbury & Alison Cheung) After 7 and a half years working at Social Justice Fund NW, February 22 will be my last day on staff.  I can’t tell you how honored I’ve been to serve in this role. I was deeply committed to SJF when I came on to staff in 2016, having done two Giving Projects and served on the board for 4+ years. The opportunity to expand our fundraising and donor-organizing programs at a moment of growth for SJF felt like both a daunting challenge and a fortunate gift. Surrounded by an amazing staff and community I was able to jump ri ..read more

It’s that time of year again—SJF is going on our month-long pause! Our staff are out of office starting today, Monday, December 18th and will return the week of January 15, 2024. During this time, expect delayed responses from our entire team as we prioritize rest and healing as part of our Black Liberation and wellness lens. You can read more about why we do this pause and how it feeds into our organization values and structures in this blog post. If you have urgent needs or questions that come up during this period, please send your emails to info@socialjusticefund.org and include in the su ..read more

SJF will be on pause from December 18-January 12. We adopted this practice as one part of our effort to position Black liberation and wellness as guiding principles for our organization. Our rest is explicitly political, a response to racialized capitalism’s demands on our individual and collective wellbeing to maintain its chokehold on power. But rest isn’t synonymous with checking out. The people of Palestine now enter their third month of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its rising attacks on Palestinians living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. As a community dedicated to the libe ..read more

SJF is excited to announce the awardees of our 2023 Reproductive Justice Grant! A panel of five community members from Idaho, Oregon, and Washington came together for a decision-making session to select the awardees. We are so grateful for their labor to fund and support these amazing grassroots organizations. You can read more about the grant, process, and requirements here. We understand reproductive justice as, “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities,” as originally defined ..read more

Check out Valériana’s speech at SJF’s 45th Birthday Party in October, 2023; her speech, which addresses many of the themes in this blog post, brought down the house! Content warning: this blog post references abuse, gender-based violence, death, and anti-Black violence. My name is Valériana Chikoti Bandua Estes. I am a deeply melanated Black woman with disabilities and identities that are visible and invisible. I hail from the Ovimbundu peoples of the southern Bantu peoples of the Republic of Angola. I am a former Refugee who was born in Zambia and subsequently raised in Papua New Guinea. My ..read more

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When asked to write about collective power, my initial thoughts take me back to how I experienced collective care during my childhood. When my mother became sick from cancer and was paralyzed on her left side, my grandparents and aunts from the Philippines came to live with my family here in the U.S. to take care of my mom, my siblings, and myself. Before my mom got sick she worked as a nurse, and in many ways my identity of caring for and desire to be in community with others stems from her and my upbringing. Fast forward to 25 years later when I joined GABRIELA: I was living in Seattle in l ..read more

Over three years into this pandemic (with the majority of SJF staff still working from home!), it is a rare treat to experience, real-time and multiplied by every face we had the pleasure to greet, the brilliance, humor, dedication, and passion of our community. The SJF staff sends a big THANK YOU to everyone who joined us and donated in honor of our 45th Birthday Party! Some favorite memories from the evening, in no particular order: Cackling at emcee Flo Sum’s pristine collection of dad jokes Getting a glimpse of Potlatch Fund’s 20th Anniversary Gala during leader, organizer, and SJF consu ..read more

SJF is thrilled to announce that we’re recruiting for our next Giving Project: the 2024 Environmental Justice Giving Project! The 2024 EJGP is open to anyone living in our five state region (ID, MT, OR, WA, WY) and will take place from January 23-July 14, 2024. All sessions will be online via Zoom. Click here to learn all about the Project and begin your application! The post SJF is recruiting participants for the 2024 Environmental Justice Giving Project! appeared first on Social Justice Fund NW ..read more