Blue Heart
FUND
CHANGE
FROM THE
BOTTOM UP
Blue Heart Giving Guide 2022
Art by Celeste Byers / Amplifer Art
Welcome to Blue Heart’s Grassroots Giving Guide! We elevate the work of the under-funded, grassroots organizations who are boldly building the power across the United States.
During the end-of-year giving season, the non-profits that get the most donations are those that have big PR budgets to shout their message from the rooftops (and into your inbox).
Yet there are many organizations that have less visibility, and are doing transformational work to help Black, brown, gender-marginalized, queer, disabled, and low-income people survive and thrive.
We invite you to support these visionary organizations who are creating change
from the bottom up.
This year members of the Blue Heart community have stepped up to commit over $25,000 in matching funds. This means for every donation you make to organizations in the guide, your donation will be doubled!
We will match collective donations up to $500 total to any single organization. Any leftover matching funds will be distributed across all the organizations in the Guide. Our aim is to motivate donations to these groups, while ensuring that all groups, regardless of their website presence or popularity, receive some support.
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Most people donate to organizations that are personally recommended to them. Invite your friends and family to #GiveBoldly this season. Together we can amplify the work of these grassroots changemakers..
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How This Guide Was Created
At Blue Heart, we help people learn about and donate to grassroots, community-led organizations who are building the political power of low-income communities and communities of color across the United States (to join our community, sign up here). We also create an annual giving guide to help these visionary movement-builders get the recognition they deserve among donors.
Each organization is recommended to us through our network of partners and advisers. We researched each one further and developed this set of recommended organizations based on:
1) the trust and respect grassroots organizers and organization staff have for their work; and
2) their size (e.g., under 10 staff members) as a proxy for fundraising capacity and budget.
We recognize that grassroots does not mean small. Many grassroots organizations are international in scope and represent millions of people. We have come to understand that movement building is nonlinear and requires healthy movement ecosystems. Small, community-based organizations that fly under the radar of traditional philanthropy are often those first to creatively meet the material needs of impacted communities or most nimbly responding to local advocacy opportunities. Those organizations are in this guide.
While not comprehensive, this is a starting point for those who want to invest in the organizations doing powerful work resisting systemic injustice and building community alternatives. We recognize that the majority of wealth in the U.S. has been extracted from the Global South, and wealth redistribution needs to reflect that. This guide is limited to the U.S., and we encourage donors to check out grassroots-accountable intermediaries that work globally.
Funding social change isn't 'silver bullet philanthropy'. Rather, it requires investing in diverse strategies and long-term visions. Trusted leaders have personally vouched for the creativity, passion, and efficacy of each of these organizations. If you know of or work with an organization that you think should be considered, please tell us about them.
Art by Christina Whipple and Leilani Salvador / Blue Heart Creator Fund
How to use this guide
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Recognize you’ve started, even though it is overwhelming!
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Watch out for perfectionism. Acknowledge all the work these orgs are doing is interconnected. So, no need to agonize over what issue or organization to invest in.
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Try starting with 3 or 5 organizations to give to.
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Report your donation to Blue Heart to get it matched.
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Follow them on social media if they have it (IG and Facebook are best), and revisit their updates quarterly.
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Deepen your relationship with each organization and with time your own personal giving ethic will evolve!
Before you dive in, here are a few questions to ask yourself:
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Do you want to support organizations working near where you live and/or in places that receive the fewest philanthropic dollars? Use the icons next to the organizations to identify the organizations working in your region (West, Midwest, South, East, Puerto Rico).
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Do you want to focus your giving on a specific issue? Below you will find 12 different issue-specific portfolios. Click on the portfolios to see the list of organizations in each category.
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Do you want to get your money out of the urban bubble? Rural non-profits are dramatically less-resourced than urban ones. If you want to support grassroots organizing in rural communities, check out our "Rural Organizing" portfolio
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How can a reparations lens help shape your approach to giving? Specifically, who are the Indigenous peoples who lived/live on the land you now inhabit? How do you benefit from an economy built on the stolen labor of Black people (slavery), the land of Indigenous peoples, and the extraction of resources from the Global South? How might you move money to make amends for people’s erasure, exploitation, or native communities’ dispossession from this land?
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Does your gift need to be tax-deductible? Organizations registered as a 501C3 or have fiscal sponsorship through a registered nonprofit allow for you to make a gift that is tax-deductible. Some organizations that are doing transformative work may not have this status – we’ve noted these on the guide with a [*]. If the tax benefit is not critical for you, consider giving to a non-registered organization.
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Having a tough time deciding on a set of organizations to donate to? You can donate to our Giving Guide here. Your contribution will be added to our matching funds which are used to match donations submitted through the Giving Guide.
Decision biases to be aware of:
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The "design bias": When evaluating organizations to give to, donors (especially urban millennial donors) tend to prefer organizations that have a slick, well-designed website. In our experience, an organization's web presence is not reflective of its efficacy on the ground - just that it's prioritizing other things or doesn't have the resources to maintain an online presence. Some rural organizations don't even have websites because their constituents don't often use computers. We encourage you to be aware of this bias when you are comparing organizations in this guide.
Recommended Grassroots Organizations
Arts & Culture
Health & Food Justice
Mass Incarceration
Black Liberation
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Indigenous Self-determination
Rural Organizing
Climate Justice
Immigrants & Refugees
Women
Economic & Housing Justice
LGBTQ+
Youth Leadership
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Want to support grassroots power-building all year long?
Join a community of over 100 member-donors who are supporting grassroots change. Each month, we send you a profile of the organization you are funding, stories from their work, and actions you can take to support them. We have channeled over $300,000 to under-the-radar changemakers, artists, and visionaries.
arts & culture
An Oakland-based arts organization that hosts the EastSide Cultural Center, dedicated to the development of young artists and fostering Black pride in East Oakland.
CALIFORNIA
An organization that educates and empowers youth through participation in the arts, offering year-round youth development programs in East Palo Alto and San Francisco.
CALIFORNIA
An organization of working class artists and cultural producers transforming politics and healing through art in Puerto Rico.
PUERTO RICO
An Oakland workspace bringing together makers, craftspeople, entrepreneurs, and programmers around project-based education.
CALIFORNIA
A poor people-led & Indigenous Peoples-led arts organization providing revolutionary media access, art, education and advocacy to folks in poverty.
CALIFORNIA
Using grassroots activism to educate people about socio-economic injustices and advocate solutions through Hip Hop culture. We raise funds for local causes that enrich marginalized and historically oppressed communities.
CALIFORNIA
A regional arts service organization providing support to more than 500 artists and countless communities in the severely under resourced American South.
SOUTH
An Oakland cooperative supporting the creative needs of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color by providing physical space for community care and collaboration.
CALIFORNIA
A disability justice based performance project that celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists.
CALIFORNIA
An arts-based alternative to incarceration for young people in King County, Washington.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST
black liberation
A Greensboro community center rooted in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy of proactive struggles for racial and economic justice, democracy, and beloved community.
SOUTH
A network fighting to create space for currently and formerly undocumented Black immigrants to not only survive but thrive.
SOUTH
A political power building organization transforming Black communities into active, interdependent, responsive public partners.
NATIONAL
An emerging organization committed to the intergenerational healing and flourishing of the Black descendant community in the Louisiana river parishes.
SOUTH
A Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color.
CALIFORNIA
An organization founded by Ruby Nell Sales, that uses the arts, research, education, action, and spirituality to bring diverse peoples together to work for racial, economic, and social justice, as well as for spiritual maturity.
SOUTH
A black-led initiative for the activation, long-term engagement, and development of new organizers to mobilize historically disengaged voters of color.
SOUTH
A South Seattle nonprofit nurturing intergenerational leaders through transformative education and social action.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST
A full service direct action organization building capacity to execute creative and effective action in service of their organizing and advocacy work.
CALIFORNIA
A Black grassroots organization organizing and empowering the community towards self determination and equity.
CALIFORNIA
A movement dedicated to helping Black People search for, identify, and reclaim land taken from them over the past 400 years.
CALIFORNIA
An Oakland-based Black/New Afrikan organization dedicated to the liberation and unification of all Afrikan people through scientific socialism.
CALIFORNIA
Climate justice
A Flint, MI community nonprofit growing diverse environmental justice leaders to secure a healthy and sustainable future.
MIDWEST
A group of young climate justice activists fighting for a livable climate and an equitable, sustainable, and just world.
CALIFORNIA
A California nonprofit mobilizing community power to change government and industry policies to protect human and environmental wellbeing.
CALIFORNIA
An alliance of New Jersey organizations committed to creating healthy, sustainable communities by eliminating environmental injustices communities of color.
EAST
Verde*
A Portland, OR nonprofit building environmental wealth through social enterprise, outreach and advocacy.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST
A Western New York nonprofit developing grassroots leaders who organize their communities to run and win environmental justice and public health campaigns.
CALIFORNIA
An indigenous-led movement to protect communities and the climate from the Trans Mountain pipeline in British Columbia.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST
A grassroots organization working to defuel the US Navy's Red Hill storage facility and protect O‘ahu's aquifer.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST
A Philadelphia grassroots nonprofit honoring culture, community education, organizing, and advocacy to build a People’s Agroecology.
EAST
A membership-based nonprofit installing solar-powered streetlights to build an equitable energy system for the Chicago area.
MIDWEST
A Portland nonprofit building power for environmental justice and civil rights in Oregon.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST
An organization of concerned citizens working to build just and equitable communities while addressing the costs of extraction in Appalachia.
SOUTH
A regional nonprofit supporting a just transition to a regenerative economy that protects the environment, climate, and future generations.
MIDWEST
An intergenerational, women of color led grassroots organization promoting Brooklyn community resiliency through organizing, leadership development, and artistic expression.
EAST
A Detroit nonprofit building community power through environmental justice education, youth development and policy advocacy.
MIDWEST
Economic & Housing Justice
A member-based community organizing group invested in serving the communities of deep East Oakland by building racial and economic equity.
CALIFORNIA
An Eastern Iowa nonprofit uniting low-wage workers to defend workers’ rights on the job, tenants’ rights to safe and affordable housing, and just immigration policies.
MIDWEST
An Oakland grassroots organization serving curbside communities to help them participate in lasting solutions to the homelessness crisis.
CALIFORNIA
A coalition of local social justice organizations across the West Coast working to eliminate the root causes of homelessness and poverty.
CALIFORNIA
A Massachusetts nonprofit building the power low-income communities of color to eradicate environmental racism, and create healthy, sustainable communities.
EAST
An Oakland volunteer-run organization led by unhoused, housing insecure, and formerly unhoused folks providing direct services and policy advocacy.
CALIFORNIA
An all-volunteer campaign in Oakland promoting active citizenship and direct democracy by increasing community stewardship of the city budget.
CALIFORNIA
An Omaha nonprofit that develops leaders, promotes workers’ rights, and fosters civic engagement to build power with immigrant and underrepresented communities.
MIDWEST
A network of non-extractive loan funds that make loans to community-based businesses anchored in the most marginalized Southern communities.
SOUTH
A volunteer-based, sex worker-led national network of organizations and communities working in harm reduction, political advocacy and health services for sex workers.
CALIFORNIA
An Ironbound, NJ organization empowering individuals and families in realizing their aspirations, making a just and vibrant community.
EAST
A Denver nonprofit supporting day laborers and domestic workers in Colorado through education, job skills, united action and advocacy.
MIDWEST
A nonprofit helping to build a solidarity economy on California’s North Coast, supporting existing cooperative efforts and creating new solutions.
CALIFORNIA
A nonprofit advancing economic democracy and building a solidarity economy anchored by a network of cooperatives and other worker-owned enterprises.
SOUTH
A grassroot, Black-led organization devoted to locally driven development in Seattle's Rainier Beach neighborhood.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST
A South Texas worker's union that has become an organizing platform for low income workers across the region.
EAST
health & food justice
A health and human rights movement advocating for just transitions, disability justice, and climate action as interdependent goals.
CALIFORNIA
A grassroots program providing any and all human services Oakland individuals or families may need to not merely survive - but to thrive and be fed.
CALIFORNIA
A women of color-led nonprofit working to end structural racism through participatory democracy, food justice, and movement building.