Learn more about the past and current projects and organizations that have received Sparkplug grants.
| Grant Cycle | Project or Organization | Summary | Amount | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 Fall | Education and Training Institute Inc. (New Labor) | Wage theft clinic and training program designed to address the epidemic of stolen wages in low wage industries and to empower workers across industries, languages, and national origin to come together to organize beyond single wage theft cases and into system wide organizing campaigns that challenge division and win big. | $10,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Teens Take Charge | We will use this funding to build a new initiative that engages our program alumni in continued skill-building, advocacy, and career-oriented opportunities. We will hire three Teens Take Charge interns for two semesters (a total of 10 months), to provide support in operations and in programming. | $10,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Housing Justice League | Around 800 evictions are filed against tenants every week in Fulton County, Georgia. In response to this eviction crisis, these funds will be used to support our eviction defense programming. These programs include community discussion on our Tenant Bill of Rights, Canvassing in high-need neighborhoods, and mass direct mailing campaigns | $20,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Tallahassee Community Action Committee | TCAC will use Sparkplug funding to improve the organizing power of its committees, introduce its People’s Budget to city commissioners, and produce and distribute its documentary. TCAC’s committees include the: Police Accountability Committee (PAC) Free Them All Committee (FTAC) LGBTQIA+ Committee Medics and Marshals Committee Progressive Parent-Teacher-Student Alliance (PPTSA) | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Grassroots Al-Quds | This project joins 9 partners working to promote tourism in marginalized Palestinian communities in Jerusalem, strengthening local economy and delivering the Palestinian perspective on the city. This is important within the colonial context where Israeli occupation propaganda in tourism systematically hides the Palestinian presence from the tourist experience here. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | PRISM Ensemble, Inc. | After going into hibernation due to COVID, PRISM choral ensemble is excited to reemerge with a concert celebrating revitalization and rebirth. This hour-long concert will feature early choral music of the Renaissance with a 17-singer conductorless, professional ensemble. | $6,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Camp Migizi | Camp Migizi seeks to become a permanent locale for training youth leadership, prioritizing Indigenous youth. Educators will provide crucial decolonization and land back workshops for Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, BIPOC, and queer community members, along with accomplices. Migizi will facilitate cross-generational and cultural sharing, deepening cultural connection and decolonized community building. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, Inc. | Sparkplug Foundation funding will support the collaborative composition and performance of original music for Queendom. Written by artist-scholar Dr. Juhanna Rogers, Queendom is an interactive outdoor performative experience that explores the dream and possibility of reparations for Black Americans. Dr. Juhanna Rogers is writing and developing Queendom as a 2021-2022 visiting artist at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park. Grant funding will support Black artists composing and performing original music for this seminal work. Young composer, Ebun Oguntola will write three original songs. The premier of Queendom will unfold across 40 acres at Stone Quarry in the fall of 2022 with audience participation and follow-up conversations around the historical traumas and the realities of race, gender, and opportunity. Final performance dates are dependent on the status of COVID-19 and public gathering restrictions. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Pierce County GrassRoots Organizing | We are recruiting and training leaders from our community to address the greatest needs identified by our community: climate change and the environment. First step is to participate in an organizing training to gain skills, identify the goal and create a strategy. Second step is to implement. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Proyecto Faro | Proyecto Faro’s Count Every Kid Campaign develops leadership and builds power among immigrant students and parents who, because of racism and classism, have little power in school board decisions. We facilitate a stakeholders’ alliance, provide training and stipends for grassroots leaders, and work in coalition to galvanize winnable campaigns. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Hindus for Human Rights - USA | This grant will enable HfHR to strengthen and expand three initiatives tackling caste-based discrimination in the United States: a virtual conference, an essay contest for South Asian American students, and a public campaign about exploitation in the US-India temple building industry. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Elephant Circle | The comprehensive 2021 Colorado Birth Equity Bill Package establishes the Protection of the Human Rights of Pregnant People in the Perinatal Period. Elephant Circle is mobilizing community members to ensure facilities understand these new laws and increase access to reproductive healthcare and education for incarcerated people during the perinatal period. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | finEQUITY | finEQUITY advances the financial futures of those impacted by long-term incarceration. We co-create free financial justice tools with justice-impacted community members. Our New York State in-prison correspondence course will cover strategies for avoiding extractive financial services and first-hand experiences on navigating financial barriers after incarceration. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | School Board School | At School Board School, we are activating a diverse network of aspiring school board members and education advocates, and equipping them with the knowledge and network to drive systemic change. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Athens Immigrant Rights Coalition | Athens Immigrant Rights Coalition’s (AIRC) organizing work is centered around housing rights, driver's licenses for all, and higher education access for immigrant youth. We achieve this through coalition-building locally, state-wide, and nationally. AIRC serves to coordinate the actions of our coalition members and ally organizations to achieve maximum collective impact. | $12,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Missouri Workers Center | The Missouri Workers Center is organizing a multi-racial movement of low-wage warehouse workers in the St. Louis area to reverse a decade of decline in wages and working conditions driven by Amazon's race to the bottom in the rapidly expanding e-commerce sector. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Troy 4 Black Lives | T4BL is catalyzing movement for Black life by nurturing Black organizers, building critical mass and leading a coalition to increase police accountability and transparency. We’re igniting a new infrastructure for Black leadership by mentoring Black youth, hosting community events that offer healing, connection, education, and developing sustainable mutual aid networks. | $15,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Detroit Disability Power | DDP will lead a disability-focused power/landscape analysis in Michigan in partnership with a coalition of disability organizations. We will collect, analyze and synthesize information about decision makers’ values, priorities and commitments to disability rights. This will benefit our collective power, allowing us to chart paths to winning policy victories. | $12,000 | Website |
| 2021 Fall | Elmahaba Center | The funds will go towards building a Justice School to launch in the summer of 2022 that will be SWANA-centered and based in the South. Specifically, the funds will support the making of a dynamic curriculum and paying facilitators and speakers, while connecting SWANA peoples across the US. | $10,500 | |
| 2021 Fall | Dissenters | We will use the funding to support the expansion and further development of Dissenters’ leadership development program, which includes these five key elements: our training program, our coaching program, tool development, the introduction of a detailed ladder of engagement, and evaluation mechanisms as we scale. | $15,000 |