Fall 2010 Grants

North Star Fund is pleased to announce our first round of grants following the  Fall 2010 launch of our new grantmaking vision and guidelines. The new guidelines build on our 32 year tradition of funding some of the most innovative, promising grassroots activist leaders and organizations.   We're excited about the work of all our grantees. And, we're especially proud and pleased to be able to make deeper investments in the work of five proven effective organizations with our new Movement Leadership grants. Through our Grassroots Strategy grants, two innovative groups will have additional resources a critical crossroads in their work.

Movement Leadership Grants

A centerpiece of our new grants vision, $50,000 grants over two years for a deeper investment of general support in effective organizations that have already shown a strong record of success in their community organizing work. In accepting the grant, a group's leadership team--both staff and members--commit to participating in bi-monthly peer learning sessions throughout the year.

• Brandworkers International

  While corporate employers in the food and retail sectors earn considerable profits, rank-and-file employees are frequently underpaid.  As a result, they often don't receive or cannot afford health insurance and grapple with work schedules that can change on a dime without warning. Brandworkers International organizes and trains non-union workers in those industries to win just treatment in the workplace. In a recent, headline-grabbing victory, Brandworkers forced high-end seafood processor Wild Edibles to guarantee its workers a living wage and a safer work environment. Now they are holding Flaum Appetizers accountable.  Brandworkers is helping  Flaum employees to demand that the firm carry out a National Labor Relations Board order to pay $260,000 in unpaid overtime, sick leave and holiday pay to workers who were  fired illegally. Brandworkers wants to focus its peer-learning on strategic planning, strengthening the organization's capacity to grow and develop a media presence.

• Domestic Workers United

  Domestic Workers United (DWU) was founded to raise the level of respect for domestic work,  establish fair labor standards in the domestic work industry, and build the power and unity across diverse communities of workers. Last year they had a historic victory in the passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and are now working on its implementation and enforcement. DWU will be expanding its organizing reach by training and installing local shop stewards throughout New York City. The organization plans to use the peer training to develop member leaders and to explore models of governance as it grows the organization to 6,000 members.

• Families for Freedom

  Family separations are a heartbreaking consequence of this country's immigration policies. Two million people are currently at risk of being deported from the United States. Most would leave behind loved ones and community ties, to live in a country that they may have left as a young child, and may not even be their own. Families for Freedom (FFF) members include current and former detainees, their relatives and those targeted for deportation. The organization focuses on the most brutal aspects of immigration enforcement, especially the constitutionally questionable collaboration of local police and federal immigration officers. Recent achievements include introducing the Child Citizens Protection Act, training hundreds in "Deportation 101," conducting know-your-rights trainings at Rikers Island Correctional Facility, and establishing a citywide speakers bureau. FFF wants to focus the peer learning training on making its organization more sustainable and their education programs more effective.

• New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE)

  Recent immigrants face multiple challenges in their effort to survive and prosper in a new country. New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE) responds to those multiple challenges of recent immigrants from Central and South America. The organization organizes to prevent hate crimes, stop financial consumer fraud, safeguard workers' rights, lobby for comprehensive immigration reform, engage their members in the election process, and ensure bilingual access to public and other information. It has succeeded at helping thousands of people exercise their right to vote, built strong relationships with elected officials, and has done significant work to advance comprehensive immigration reform. NICE wants to use the peer learning opportunity to sharpen its community organizing practices and to strengthen movement-building alliances with other groups.

• VOCAL NY (Voices of Community Activists and Leaders)

  Voices of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL) is a statewide grassroots organization that aims to empower low-income people who are living with and affected by HIV/AIDS, drug use and incarceration. VOCAL NY accomplishes this through community organizing, leadership development, participatory research, public education and direct action including press conferences, marches and demostrations. In 2010, they had three major legislative victories: expanding syringe access, ending prison-based gerrymandering and establishing affordable housing protection for thousands of low-income people with HIV/AIDS at risk of homelessness. For the peer training component, VOCAL will prioritize developing a donor base for fundraising and using grassroots media more effectively.

Grassroots Strategy Grants

These $15,000 grants enable groups to obtain additional research, legal, media, policy and organizing expertise at a critical strategic moment.

• DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Association

  Worldwide economic instability has prompted many from the Philippines to immigrate to wealthier nations, including the United States, where they left with few choices other than exploitative, under-paid jobs.  Many Filipina women are trafficked against their will to foreign countries, largely into servitude as housekeepers and nannies. DAMAYAN is in a consortium of organizations that successfully lobbied for passage of New York State's landmark Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. It won a seminal case against a United Nations ambassador who enslaved a Filipina as his household help. It has recouped more than $10,000 in illegally withheld wages for its members. With 500 domestic workers on its membership roster, DAMAYAN is now stepping up its campaign against human trafficking.

  DAMAYAN will use their Grassroots Strategy Grant to research and develop a campaign to end the practice of trafficking women from the Philippines to the U.S.

• VAMOS Unidos

  New York City's strict licensing of no more than 4,000 street vendors at a time leaves 16,000 unlicensed vendors subject to police harassment and arrest, regular fines and confiscation of their merchandise. VAMOS Unidos works with street vendors to increase access to permits and monitor the behavior of law enforcement officers to curtail abuse. Its membership is almost entirely Latino immigrants; 80% are women and 20% represent indigenous groups from Latin America.

  VAMOS Unidos was awarded a Grassroots Strategy grant to advance their campaign to increase vendor licenses available in the outer boroughs. First, with the help of an NYUhistory professor, they will develop an educational curriculum that builds on street vendors' culture and experiences, connects  struggles in New York to social justice struggles in Latin America, and encourages more vendors and their families to get involved. Second, Vamos Unidos will train more experienced members in grassroots media skills to produce eye-opening videos for use with city officials, police, and other public officials.

Grassroots Action Grants

These $5,000 and $10,000 grants focus on new, emerging groups who are reaching out through the tools of community organizing to engage more people as leaders and grassroots activists in New York City's most marginalized communities.

• Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice

  $10,000
  A quarter of Nepali immigrants residing in New York City are undocumented. Half of the adults among them have no health insurance. Two-thirds of those with full-time jobs earn less than $600 a week. Those doing menial labor often earn less than minimum wage and frequently are paid off the books, which is used regularly used by unscrupulous employers to withhold or deny duly earned wages.  For women-led Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice, worker rights, immigrant rights, access to health-care and youth development are the core concerns. Adhikaar was one of several groups that successfully worked for passage of New York State's landmark Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010, and remains deeply involved in efforts to enforce that law. As its next major workplace initiative, Adhikaar is organizing underpaid nail salon workers who are also at risk from toxic work environments. 

• Al Awda New York

  $5,000
  In a post-9/11 world, Muslims, Arabs and those advocating for Palestinian rights are often wrongly presumed to be terrorists and, on that basis, are racially profiled by police and even harassed by their neighbors and classmates. Al Awda New York aims to protect the human and legal rights of the Palestinian Diaspora and Arab immigrant communities. Al Awda NY has reached hundreds of Arab New Yorkers through its public forums, community actions, know-your-rights workshops and legal services. On the horizon for Al Awda NY are a hotline and an intake clinic that will receive Arab New Yorkers' confidential complaints of police misconduct. Al Awda will also create  a coalition of legal workers, law students and civic organizations strategizing on how to handle public and private sector misconduct.

• Black Women's Blueprint

  $5,000
  In the debate over policing of many black communities, one area that has been overlooked is police brutality against black women. Black Women's Blueprint is tackling the subject as the female prison population soars. According to the FBI, the female prison population jumped by 832 percent during the past three decades. Black women are incarcerated at 3-1/2 times the rate of White women, and more than twice the rate of Latino women. Black Women's Blueprint provides training and resources to help concerned African American women use the tools of grassroots organizing to inform women of their rights when they are stopped, detained or arrested by police. The organization also works with the police department to properly train officers on the rights and respectful treatment of women detainees.

• Brooklyn Congregations United

  $10,000
  In Brooklyn, population 2.5 million, three-quarters of households pay more than a third of their income in rent. Since the 2000 Census, the tally of Brooklynites living at or below the official poverty rate has risen from 19 percent--twice the national average during that period--to an estimated 25 percent. That surge in the number of poor in Brooklyn has aggravated existing concerns over a lack of affordable housing and health-care, overcrowded and neglected public schools and other daily essentials. Christian, Jewish and Muslim clerics, lay leaders and grassroots supporters of the multi-racial Brooklyn Congregations United have long clamored for change that benefits poor and immigrant communities, turning out local residents for public rallies, marches and other events. For 2010, BCU weighed in locally and nationally on health-care and immigration reform. It's now pressuring the powers-that-be in New York to ramp up "green jobs" and other forms of economic development and extend workforce training to communities in dire need of more employment. It also is campaigning to increase the count of registrants for Temporary Protected Status, which was granted to undocumented Haitians living in the United States before the catastrophic January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

• Brooklyn Food Coalition

  $5,000
  In Brooklyn, where half of all residents cannot afford to buy fresh, healthy food for the dinner table, students face the added quandary of eating free or reduced-price lunches that are high in calories and low in nutritional value. This heightens their risk for obesity, diabetes and other nutrition-related diseases. In ten mostly low-income neighborhoods, the Brooklyn Food Coalition has launched campaigns to inform parents on the hazards of not eating well and empower them to hold more sway in what is served in the school cafeteria. The coalition also strives to make nourishing food more available through community gardens, urban farms, farmers markets and food co-ops; by supporting food workers; and by encouraging bodegas and other local stores to stock more nutritious foods.

• Bushwick Housing Independence Project

  $5,000
  Predatory lending, fraud, real estate speculation and foreclosures have hit Brooklyn's poorest renters in Bushwick particularly hard, and resulted in 58 percent of the neighborhood's previously rent-regulated apartments being slashed from rent-stabilization rolls in recent years. This removal of an apartment from rent regulation when a tenant moves - or is forced out - is known as vacancy decontrol. The Bushwick Housing Independence Project (BHIP) has taken a leadership role to repeal vacancy decontrol and preserve affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families. Its work is two pronged. First, BHIP organizes residents in Bushwick and surrounding neighborhoods to challenge impending evictions. Residents are schooled in housing court protocols, including how to decipher the legalese contained in eviction documents that sometimes are as many as 20 pages long. Second, BHIP also actively involves tenants in determining and executing the campaign strategies to remove vacancy decontrol laws once and for all.

• Coalition for Parole Restoration

  $5,000
  New York State's arcane criminal justice policies result in many rehabilitated prisoners being denied parole or not being adequately prepared, upon their release from prison, to reintegrate into what usually are their communities of origin. Consequently, many formerly incarcerated people return to crime and to prison. Led by the formerly incarcerated and those who had loved ones who served time, Coalition for Parole Restoration's Leadership Program preps prisoners for parole; trains the incarcerated to become community leaders after they are released; and extends community outreach, education and other services to prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families.

• Community Connections for Youth (CCFY)

  $10,000
  Overwhelmingly, incarcerated juveniles in New York State hail from low-income communities of color that would be better served if the $200,000 spent annually to jail each of those young people went instead to more constructive alternative-to-incarceration projects. Studies show that, after their release, 89 percent of boys and 81 percent of girls return to New York's detention system that federal officials have found guilty of widespread abuse of youth. Based in the Bronx, the staff of Community Connections for Youth include those who lived through the intransigencies of foster care andwere ensnared bythe courts. They advocate for more community participation and the rights of youth to have a say in how youthful offenders are handled by police, the courts and detention facilities.

• DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Association

  $10,000
  In addition to a grassroots strategy described above, DAMAYAN was also awarded a Grassroots Action grant in recognition of their promising track record using community organizing to strengthen grassroots democracy in New York City and beyond. 

• Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees

  $10,000
  A stretch of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn is known as Little Haiti.  It ishome to a population of Haitian immigrants that, according to the latest available U. S. Census data, numbers 200,000 and is growing. Many in the Haitian immigrant community lack even basic access to human services.  With limited economic opportunities for a better life, those who do land jobs fall prey to workplace discrimination and exploitation. Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees (HWHR) is battling for needed services and opportunity, fairness and parity on the job for its constituents.

• Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ)

  $5,000
  Answering Judaism's clarion call to "heal the world," JFREJ engages individual Jews and Jewish institutions in the fight for social justice. Since 2002, JFREJ has focused a major part of their work on organizing employers in support of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.  . With the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights now law in New York, JFREJ is helping to establish Domestic Worker Justice Zones where employers and their household employees raise the law's visibility in the media and other public spaces. Likewise, JFREJ's Domestic Workers Dialogue lets employers and employees determine how the Justice Zones function; propose guidelines for the Department of Labor to enforce the law; and create a means for domestic workers to engage in collective bargaining.

• Movimiento por Justicia del Barrio/Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB)

  $10,000
  Rising rents and unscrupulous landlords are pushing low-income residents out of East Harlem. Movement organizes the people of color and immigrant tenants of El Barrio to lead the fight for dignified housing. The group recently celebrated a major victory against the multi-national corporation Dawnay Day, Group, which had attempted to hike rents and illegally evict tenants from 47 buildings in East Harlem. Through extensive organizing and legal and direct actions, Movement's members outlasted Dawnay Day. The corporation collapsed and its former buildings, which are currently in foreclosure, are overseen by a court-appointed receiver. Movement is making sure that the tenants have a voice in this process, and that their immediate concerns for maintenance, repairs, and a landlord that will provide dignified housing are met. In the upcoming year, Movement also plans to continue organizing tenant associations in new buildings across El Barrio. Among their  various campaigns for housing justice, include their annual Campaign Against Frozen Homes, which responds with rapid actions to the community's heat and hot water needs.  The winter of 2011 has been especially cold, and many residents of East Harlem do not have heat and hot water. These individual building committees are integrated into a neighborhood-wide movement against displacement and for housing justice.

• Resilience Advocacy Project (RAP)

  $5,000
  The Resilience Advocacy Project (RAP) trains and organizes low-income youth of color to get the resources they need to succeed in life. They have trained scores of young peer advocates to effectively challenge conditions in education, healthcare, workforce development, and public benefits. They are looking at the plight of young parents who are stigmatized as sexually promiscuous, unintelligent, aimless, misguided, and bound for failure. To lessen the damage that such a wholesale dismissal can do to low income kids of color, Resilience Advocacy Project's Youth Leap Program will organize young parents to know their rights to school-based child-care,  high school education, b and to fair treatment in Family Court. RAP also plans to work with young dads to more proficiently and peaceably settle issues of child custody and support.

• Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities (RIPPD)

  $10,000
  Mentally ill Iman Morales, 35, was wielding a fluorescent tube-light and ranting nonsensically when an NYPD emergency worker shot him with taser gun, causing him to fall face-first to his death from the second story of building. That 2008 tragedy spotlighted NYPD's lack of training in handling the mentally ill. RIPPD's members include formerly incarcerated people with mental illness and their relatives. RIPPD aims to reform how the police and courts deal with the mentally ill by creating crisis interventions that will train NYPD officers to more compassionately and effectively manage police encounters with people suffering a mental health crisis.

• SEVA Immigrant Community Advocacy Project

  $5,000
  The South Asian and Indo-Caribbean seniors of Richmond Hill, Queens have long complained of a lack of human services tailored to meet their needs. SEVA is using grassroots community organizing and local leadership development to meet its constituency's needs. SEVA asked community elders what they lacked in the way of human services and, based on their findings, is developing a culturally sensitive plan to help meet those needs, end the isolation and loneliness of seniors in the community, build membership and train leaders in how to gain broader access to public services.

• Streetwise & Safe (SAS)

  $5,000
  New York Police Department officers routinely profile LGBTQ youth and young adults as sex workers, falsely accusing them of prostitution merely because they are carrying condoms. Streetwise & Safe is pressing the NYPD to stop that harassment, which especially targets transgender and homeless youth. As it develops leaders and encourages a sense of community among LGBTQ youth, SAS trains them to "know their rights," and to organize for an overhaul of NYPD policies and practices regarding transgender youth.

• Trinity Lutheran Church

  $5,000
  In the midst of middle to upper income families on the Upper West Side sits Manhattan Valley, a  pocket of povertywhose residents are mostly low-income and Latino. Trailblazing Trinity Lutheran--which was on the forefront of AIDS-HIV advocacy when few others were willing to take that risk--is now organizing Manhattan Valley's women residents. Their 2011 goals include grooming at least a dozen members to be community leaders. The project will create a local leadership council to work with Trinity's staff to identify and correct an array of social and economic challenges confronting Manhattan Valley.

• Ugnayan

  $10,000
  Ugnayan ng Mga Anak ng Bayan, or Linking the Children of the Motherland, is a robust grassroots organization bent on educating, politicizing and mobilizing to secure the civil and human rights and welfare of Filipino youth in New York City. Already, Ugnayan youth have been deeply engaged as English translators for Filipina domestic workers as those women lobbied for New York State's landmark Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. In the next year, Ugnayan aims to increase membership, hire a full-time staff member, and  hone their membership's organizing skills through training programs. They will also seek to build a solid financial base for their youth organizing work through  individual donors and foundations.

• Women on the Rise Telling HerStory WORTH)

  $10,000
  Women with criminal records often encounter prejudice when seeking employment and housing. In turn, women who are still in prison face challenges, including not being adequately prepared to succeed once they are released. Building on their track record of success that led to the enactment of  New York's Anti-Shackling Law in 2010, which bans the previous practice of shackling women who are pregnant or who have just given birth in the prison system, WORTH will address gender specific policies and practices in the prison system.  They are building a collaboration  with researchers to delineate the barriers to successful re-entry to their home communities for straight, lesbian and transmasculine women and they will be  developing a re-entry guidebook.