Deadline: 3-Dec-21
The Brooklyn Economic Justice Project (BEJP) has launched a community-based economic justice accelerator that informs local economic decision-making; educates and trains low-income women, TGNCNB people, and their families; and invests in their ideas for economic liberation.
The goal is to provide financial support for project ideas that support low-income entrepreneurship, enhance neighborhood safety, and improve health, wellness, and collective healing for Black residents in Bedford Stuyvesant, East New York, Brownsville and/or Bushwick.
Focus Areas
BEJP seeks to fund projects across three focus areas: economic security and justice, neighborhood safety, and healing justice.
- Economic Security and Justice: Project ideas that promote local entrepreneurship, supports small business, and/or asset building for community residents.
- Neighborhood Safety: Project ideas that enhance the physical safety of residents, protect and strengthen sites of Black significance, and/or prevents the displacement of people and local businesses.
- Healing Justice: Project ideas that provide culturally relevant mental health wellness and healing supports to help community members process, make meaning of, and/or heal from the traumatic impacts of oppression.
How does the accelerator work?
BEJP has two Pillars:
- Education: Provide community technical assistance to grantees around defining economic justice, goals, and policies that affect their communities.
- Funding: Provide microgrants ranging from $500-$5,000 to nonprofit organizations in need of more resources and groups/individuals who are not a 501(c)(3) but are doing meaningful work in communities.
Funding Information
- This 1-year grant opportunity is open to individuals, groups without 501(c)(3) status, and small organizations with 501(c)(3) status. Individuals can apply for microgrants ranging from $500-$2,500. Organizations and groups can apply for grants up to $5,000.
Grantmaking Principles
BEJP’s grantmaking strategy and process is guided by the following principles:
- Seeking out and supporting people at the margins: BIPOC women, girls, and gender nonconforming individuals in Brooklyn. Acknowledge the structures that create, maintain, and uphold inequity. Learn and practice new ways of intentionally making space for marginalized voices, stories, and bodies.
- Planning with, designing with. Walk with people as they imagine and realize their own futures. Be connectors, conveners, and collaborators—not representatives.
- Cultivate wealth and liberation. Cultivate a wealth of time, talent, and treasure that provide the freedom to risk, fail, learn, and grow.
- Creating ownership, not hierarchy. Create less hierarchy and more dialogue, inclusion, and empowerment.
- Celebrate, catalyze, and amplify Black joy. Black joy is a radical act. Give due space to joy, laughter, humor, and gratitude.
- Manifest the future. Black people, Black culture, and Black spaces exist in the future! Imagine and design the future into existence now, working inside and outside of social and political systems.
Eligibility Criteria
- Grassroots organizations with 501(c)(3) status or a fiscal sponsor working directly in Brooklyn communities OR
- Groups/individuals who are NOT a 501(c)(3) but are doing meaningful work in communities
- Organizations/groups must have an annual operating budget of less than $250,000
- Residents or organizations serving and located in Brooklyn, specifically Bedford Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Bushwick, and/or East New York (priority given to women, transgender, and gender nonconforming led groups or individuals living in Brooklyn)
- Identify as Black led and Black serving
- While the proposed work does not have to focus solely on marginalized genders, it must have a clear connection to the advancement of economic security, safety, and/or healing of BIPOC women, girls, transgender, and/or gender nonconforming community members
Ineligible
- Campaigns to elect candidates to public office;
- Capital fund projects or endowments;
- Organizations or programs located outside Brooklyn
- Organizations that promote religious activities or agendas;
- Public or private schools, colleges, or universities
For more information, visit https://www.nywf.org/bejp/#creteriatab3