Kindred Spirit Organizations - Southerners on New Ground

All of Us or None

All of Us or None is a grassroots civil and human rights organization fighting for the rights of formerly- and currently- incarcerated people and our families. They are fighting against the discrimination that people face every day because of arrest or conviction history. The goal of All of Us or None is to strengthen the voices of people most affected by mass incarceration and the growth of the prison-industrial complex. Through our grassroots organizing, we are building a powerful political movement to win full restoration of our human and civil rights.

BYP100

Founded in 2013, BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100) is a member-based organization of Black youth activists creating justice and freedom for all Black people. BYP100 was, at one point, just a hashtag for the 2013 “Beyond November Movement Convening” developed through the vision and leadership of Cathy Cohen.

CIMA (Compañeros Inmigrantes de las Montañas en Accion)

The Compañeros Inmigrantes de las Montañas en Acción (CIMA) connects, strengthens and organizes communities to take action for immigrants’ rights in Western North Carolina. CIMA strives for inclusive communities with justice, freedom, and equality for all.

Esperanza Peace & Justice Center

The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center is a grassroots, community-based arts & cultural organization, built around a vision of social justice and cross-cultural understanding. They are committed to serving marginalized communities and preserving San Antonio’s unique cultural heritage. They produce and present programs that provoke dialogue, honor traditional cultures, nurture new aesthetics, renew the soul, break stereotypes, and strengthen communities.

Familia Trans Queer Liberation Movement

Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement works at local and national levels to achieve the collective liberation of trans, queer, and gender nonconforming Latinxs through building community, organizing, advocacy, and education.

Free Hearts

Free Hearts is an organization led by formerly incarcerated women that provides support, education, and advocacy to families impacted by incarceration, with the ultimate goals of reuniting families and keeping families together.

Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights

The Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights educates, organizes, and empowers Latinos in Georgia to defend and advance their civil and human rights.

Highlander Research and Education Center

Highlander serves as a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the U.S. South. Through popular education, participatory research, and cultural work, we help to create spaces — at Highlander and in local communities — where people gain knowledge, hope and courage, expanding their ideas of what is possible.

House of GG

The Griffin-Gracy Educational Retreat & Historical Center – a.k.a. “House of GG” – is the first educational and historical center solely dedicated to Transgender and gender nonconforming people in the USA. House of GG is the brain-child of world-renowned Trans revolutionary Miss Major Griffin-Gracy. As a survivor of the historic Stonewall Riots in New York City in 1969, she helped to pioneer the TLGBQ liberation movement. She continues that work five decades later.

ICE Out of RVA

ICE Out of RVA was created as an organized community response to the raids, deportations, abuses and criminalization against our community. They are individuals from different nationalities, race, socio-economic status, religion, sexual orientation and life styles, that have come together to say NOT ONE MORE!

Jacksonville Area Sexual Minority Youth Network (JASMYN)

JASMYN supports young people ages 13-23 and works to create a safer, more affirming community for them in Northeast Florida. While programs and services are designed for those who identify as LGBT or Questioning, all youth are welcome at JASMYN!

Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective

Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective is a project conceived by healers and organizers of color in the Southern United States in 2007, as a response to the crisis of trauma, violence and social conditions in that region. Kindred was organized shortly after Hurricane Katrina and set up healing salons for activists during the 2007 and 2010 social forums, offering body work and counseling. Collective members also created the recording Good Medicine, which contains interviews with healers and activists in the South.

Law for Black Lives

Law For Black Lives is a Black femme-led national network of nearly 4,000 radical lawyers and legal workers committed to building a responsive legal infrastructure for movement organizations and cultivating a community of legal advocates trained in movement lawyering. Law For Black Lives staff is a team of strong Black and Latinx femmes who are deeply committed to supporting the leadership of directly impacted communities and transforming the legal field to represent the values of movement lawyering, which are centered in building community power and democratizing the law.

MediaJustice

MediaJustice (formerly Center for Media Justice) is a national racial justice hub for media and technology rights, access and representation and home to the MediaJustice Network. Launched in 2009 by veteran leaders Malkia Devich-Cyril, Amy Sonnie and Jen Soriano — MediaJustice is boldly advancing communication rights, access, and power for communities harmed by persistent dehumanization, discrimination and disadvantage. They envision a future where everyone has sustained and universal access to open and democratic media and technology platforms; a future in which we are all connected, represented and free.

National Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights (NNIRR)

The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) works to defend and expand the rights of all immigrants and refugees, regardless of immigration status. Since its founding in 1986, the organization has drawn membership from diverse immigrant communities, and actively builds alliances with social and economic justice partners around the country. As part of a global movement for social and economic justice, NNIRR is committed to human rights as essential to securing healthy, safe and peaceful lives for all.

National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA)

The National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) is a federation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Asian American, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) organizations. They seek to build the organizational capacity of local LGBT AAPI groups, develop leadership, promote visibility, educate our community, enhance grassroots organizing, expand collaborations, and challenge anti-LGBTQ bias and racism.

Project South

Project South was founded as the Institute to Eliminate Poverty & Genocide in 1986. Our work is rooted in the legacy of the Southern Freedom Movement, and four primary work areas achieve our mission of cultivating strong social movements in the South powerful enough to contend with some of the most pressing and complicated social, economic, and political problems we face today.

Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP)

QWOCMAP uses film to shatter stereotypes and bias, reveal the lived truth of inequality, address the vital, intersecting issues that concern multiple populations, and build understanding and community around art and social justice.

ReFrame Mentorship

ReFrame is building a narrative infrastructure, grounded in power building organizing, that will, along with others, create a common sense where the structural forms of society can’t be anything but liberatory. At the center of this infrastructure are hundreds of thousands of networked strategists, artists, organizers using innovative technologies to tell, place, create, curate culturally grounded stories that point back to a North Star narrative lighting the way to justice and freedom for all people and the Earth.

Resource Generation

Resource Generation organizes young people with wealth and class privilege in the U.S. to become transformative leaders working towards the equitable distribution of wealth, land and power.

Sanctuary Collective

Across the country people facing deportation are moving into churches and seeking sanctuary in an effort to fight their deportations. The Sanctuary Collective is comprised of 15 families in sanctuary and they are leading the charge to not only stop their own deportations, but to force the Trump Administration to change its harsh anti-immigrant policies.

Silicon Valley De-Bug

Silicon Valley De-Bug is a community organizing, advocacy, and a multimedia storytelling organization based out of San José, California. Since its’ inception in 2001, De-Bug has been a platform for Silicon Valley’s diverse communities to impact the political, cultural, and social landscape of the region, while also becoming a nationally recognized model for community-based justice work.

Sister Song

SisterSong is a Southern based, national membership organization; our purpose is to build an effective network of individuals and organizations to improve institutional policies and systems that impact the reproductive lives of marginalized communities.

Southern Movement Alliance

The Southern Movement Assembly is made up of a broad base of Southern-based leaders and communities who live and fight on many frontlines. They believe that we are stronger together, and we participate in grassroots democracy to exercise political power at the community, city, state, and regional levels.

Southwest Workers Union

As an organization of low-income, working class families and youth, SWU unites in one collective struggle for self-governance based on dignity, respect, justice and liberation. SWU organizes its grassroots members through de-colonization, emancipatory education, leadership development and direct action for worker rights, environmental justice, and systemic change.

Spark

SPARK’s mission is to build new leadership, change culture, and advance knowledge in Georgia and the South to ensure individuals and communities have resources and power to make sustainable and liberatory decisions about our bodies, gender, sexualities, and lives.

Student Action with Farmworkers

SAF works with farmworkers, students, and advocates in the Southeast and nationwide to create a more just agricultural system. Since 1992, we have engaged thousands of students, farmworker youth, and community members in the farmworker movement.

The Audre Lorde Project

The Audre Lorde Project is a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Non Conforming People of Color center for community organizing, focusing on the New York City area. Through mobilization, education and capacity-building, they work for community wellness and progressive social and economic justice. Committed to struggling across differences, they seek to responsibly reflect, represent and serve our various communities.

The Ordinary People’s Society (TOPS)

T.O.P.S. is an innovative, faith-based community program founded in 1999. T.O.P.S offers hope and creates an environment that provides a continuum of unconditional acceptance and care to individuals and their families who suffer the effects of drug addiction, mass-incarceration, homelessness, poverty, unemployment, hunger and illness-without regard to race, sex, creed, color, religion or social status.

The Southern Center for Human Rights

The Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) is working for equality, justice, and dignity in our criminal justice system. The mission of SCHR is to end capital punishment, mass incarceration, and other criminal justice practices that are used to control the lives of poor people, people of color, and other marginalized groups in the Southern United States. They do this through death penalty representation, impact litigation, policy advocacy, and public education.