Description

Mariko,
I am pleased to recommend the special grants below. As you know, we invited our democracy grantees to nominate partners for consideration of support. We asked grantees to identify organizations that they collaborate with to advance shared goals or rely upon to carry out their own work. We believed that this approach to grantmaking in an exploratory initiative would be educational for us, helping us to understand better the networks and alliances that shape and define the democracy field. We also wanted to experiment with participatory approaches to grantmaking.
We received more than two dozen nominations. You and I reviewed the endorsements prepared by the democracy grantees and agreed to invite full proposals from six organizations. I have reviewed those proposals and supporting materials and am recommending general operating grants of $100,000 for each of the following:
Asian Prisoner Support Committee (APSC), San Francisco, CA. Nominated by Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAAJ), APSC provides education, reentry support, and legal assistance to and advocates on behalf of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated AAPI people. APSC was founded in 2002 to support three incarcerated individuals who sought access to ethnic studies education in San Quentin. The organization continues to teach ethnic studies to prisoners and to provide a range of other services, including assistance with deportation proceedings. APSC is led and staffed by former AAPI prisoners. Their work is closely allied with that of AAAJ, the leading AAPI civil rights advocacy organization. Both entities approach democracy work from the perspective of a community that has been disenfranchised in the past and continues to be targeted for violence and harassment today.