August 23, 2016
The Voqal Fund is pleased to announce five new grants to organizations working to enhance the community and strengthen social equity. The grants to Fight for the Future, OUR Walmart, Mijente, Community Organizations in Action and Race Forward reflect the Voqal Fund’s commitment to support progressive movements for social change.
Fight for the Future
Fight for the Future’s (FTFF) mission is to ensure the web continues to hold freedom of expression and creativity at its core. It envisions a world where everyone can access the internet affordably, free of interference or censorship and with full privacy. With Voqal’s support, FFTF seeks to build a messaging tool that turns mobile phone users into social justice and GOTV campaigners, hooking people through hot issues they care about—rather than candidates they often don’t.
OUR Walmart
With Voqal’s support, OUR Walmart will develop a mobile platform that will build on its innovative use of online organizing to connect workers, build community and mobilize collective action. OUR Walmart works to ensure that every Associate, regardless of his or her title, age, race or sex, is respected at Walmart. The platform will allow workers to instantly connect for workplace support, self-organize into communities of shared issues/identities and take distributive action.
Mijente
Mijente is a new national hub for Latinx and Chincanx organizing. Using a hybrid offline and online platform, it is creating a political home that brings together leadership, advocacy, culture and media to spark culture and policy change. With support from Voqal, Mijente will expand upon its successes with the #Not1More campaign to offer new tools to mobilize, amplify and connect rising Latinx changemakers. By launching a new multilingual hub for Latinx online engagement to facilitate and amplify hybrid digital and offline organizing it aims to build political power, support local leaders, and shift Latinx values in a progressive, intersectional direction on issues of racial, economic, climate and gender justice.
Community Organizations in Action
Community Organizations in Action promotes economic, racial and social equity through national, regional and local advocacy campaigns. With support from Voqal, it will develop an expanded national digital organizing program that can advance its People & Planet First Campaign, which aims to address the triple crisis of expanding inequality, a broken democracy and a planet in peril. Through this digital program, it plans to animate and mobilize a multiracial coalition in cities from across the country that can advance an agenda that prioritizes the well-being of people and the planet.
Race Forward
Race Forward builds awareness, solutions and leadership for racial justice by generating transformative ideas, information and experiences. Its anti-criminalization project is a visionary movement-building endeavor to bridge movements working towards ending mass incarceration and mass deportation. The grant from Voqal will support Race Forward in advancing multiracial, systemic solutions by supporting the technological infrastructure of the project: the development of a public narrative stand-alone website and a criminal justice vertical on its Colorlines website.