CSFund

CSFund's Seminar Series for political education on Global Just Transitions focuses on how communities have full agency, rights and power in how they are governed and their development in a manner that advances social and ecological justice and is anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-exploitative. We feature movement and grassroots leaders from across the globe speaking on justice for climate, workers, solidarity economics, food sovereignty, Indigenous sovereignty,?LGBTQIA+ peoples, human and digital rights, and more. Our next session will be on September 10th and will focus on Digital Justice. We will be taking a broad political analysis on how digital technologies and the technology industry intersect with human rights, collective rights, social justice and ecological justice. We'll be diving into issues of digital rights, digital capitalism and colonialism, the real social and ecological impacts and hype of Artificial Intelligence, climate and ag tech, worker justice, and how grassroots and social movements are building technologies in non-extractive and regenerative ways that build community power and self-determination. The Seminar will feature the voices of grassroots and movement leaders: Anita Gurumurthy is a founding member and Executive Director of IT for Change in India where she leads research and advocacy on data and AI governance, platform regulation, and feminist frameworks on digital justice. She serves as an expert on various bodies – including as co-chair of the T20’s digital transformation working group on platform governance and has been part of the High Level Committee of the NetMundial+10 under Brazil’s leadership, the UN Secretary-General’s 10-Member Group on Technology Facilitation, and more. Barbara Ntambirweki is a Ugandan lawyer and researcher working with ETC Group under the African Technology Assessment Platform, and is Digital Civil Society Practitioner Fellow at Stanford University. Barbara is passionate about promoting technology justice within food systems in Africa, particularly with regard to the emerging developments in modern biotechnology and the digitalization of food and agriculture. She currently coordinates the African Working Group on Digitalization of Food and Agriculture to raise the collective voice of civil society organizations and movements on the governance of digital agriculture in Africa. Sasha Costanza-Chock (she/they/ella/elle) is a researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, dismantle the matrix of domination, and advance ecological survival. They are a nonbinary trans femme. Sasha is known for their work on networked social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha is presently the Head of Research & Sensemaking at One Project, and a tenured Associate Professor at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media, & Design in the United States. Register here: https://bitly.cx/jrUoG

CSFund's Seminar Series for political education on Global Just Transitions focuses on how communities have full agency, rights and power in how they are governed and their development in a manner that advances social and ecological justice and is anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-exploitative. We feature movement and grassroots leaders from across the globe speaking on justice for climate, workers, solidarity economics, food sovereignty, Indigenous sovereignty,?LGBTQIA+ peoples, human and digital rights, and more. Our next session will be on September 10th and will focus on Digital Justice. We will be taking a broad political analysis on how digital technologies and the technology industry intersect with human rights, collective rights, social justice and ecological justice. We'll be diving into issues of digital rights, digital capitalism and colonialism, the real social and ecological impacts and hype of Artificial Intelligence, climate and ag tech, worker justice, and how grassroots and social movements are building technologies in non-extractive and regenerative ways that build community power and self-determination. The Seminar will feature the voices of grassroots and movement leaders: Anita Gurumurthy is a founding member and Executive Director of IT for Change in India where she leads research and advocacy on data and AI governance, platform regulation, and feminist frameworks on digital justice. She serves as an expert on various bodies – including as co-chair of the T20’s digital transformation working group on platform governance and has been part of the High Level Committee of the NetMundial+10 under Brazil’s leadership, the UN Secretary-General’s 10-Member Group on Technology Facilitation, and more. Barbara Ntambirweki is a Ugandan lawyer and researcher working with ETC Group under the African Technology Assessment Platform, and is Digital Civil Society Practitioner Fellow at Stanford University. Barbara is passionate about promoting technology justice within food systems in Africa, particularly with regard to the emerging developments in modern biotechnology and the digitalization of food and agriculture. She currently coordinates the African Working Group on Digitalization of Food and Agriculture to raise the collective voice of civil society organizations and movements on the governance of digital agriculture in Africa. Sasha Costanza-Chock (she/they/ella/elle) is a researcher and designer who works to support community-led processes that build shared power, dismantle the matrix of domination, and advance ecological survival. They are a nonbinary trans femme. Sasha is known for their work on networked social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha is presently the Head of Research & Sensemaking at One Project, and a tenured Associate Professor at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media, & Design in the United States. Register here: https://bitly.cx/jrUoG

Our next Global Just Transitions Seminar will be on July 16th and will focus on Feminist Praxis. We'll be hearing about radical approaches to economics, public health, disaster response, climate justice, food sovereignty, and more that are rooted in feminist theories and practice. Our grassroots and movement speakers are also members of various feminist movements and alliances, including the World March of Women, the The Feminist Humanitarian Network, the Global Alliance For Green And Gender Action (GAGGA), and more. While I and my co-host and co-organizer Gopal Dayaneni from Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project normally host and provide an overview for each of our Seminars, for this session we are gratefully handing over our roles to the professionals. We are thrilled that feminist organizers Cindy?Wiesner from GRASSROOTS GLOBAL JUSTICE and Sara Mersha from Grassroots International will be co-hosting this session and detailing the role that grassroots feminist movements in protecting human / community rights and the integrity of our ecosystems, while also providing dreams and visions of a much better future and world that we can aspire towards. The Feminist Praxis Seminar will feature the voices of grassroots and movement leaders: - Lipi Rahman, from Badabon Sangho in Bangladesh, a women’s rights and women-led grassroots organisation working in the areas of women’s rights to land, work, water-bodies, climate justice, natural resources and sexual and reproductive health. - Alejandra Gutiérrez Valdizán from Agencia Ocote in Guatemala, a feminist led journalism and art newsroom that focuses on women and genders, media, historical memory and justice, and culture and environment. - Yildiz Temürtürkan, from the World March of Women, a feminist, anti-capitalist global social movement struggling against all forms of inequality and discrimination that we suffer as women. Register here: https://lnkd.in/gS_vpuAm The session will be translated across English, French, and Spanish. These are open sessions - please forward this to others in your networks. We hope you can join us!

Our next Global Just Transitions Seminar will be on July 16th and will focus on Feminist Praxis. We'll be hearing about radical approaches to economics, public health, disaster response, climate justice, food sovereignty, and more that are rooted in feminist theories and practice. Our grassroots and movement speakers are also members of various feminist movements and alliances, including the World March of Women, the The Feminist Humanitarian Network, the Global Alliance For Green And Gender Action (GAGGA), and more. While I and my co-host and co-organizer Gopal Dayaneni from Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project normally host and provide an overview for each of our Seminars, for this session we are gratefully handing over our roles to the professionals. We are thrilled that feminist organizers Cindy?Wiesner from GRASSROOTS GLOBAL JUSTICE and Sara Mersha from Grassroots International will be co-hosting this session and detailing the role that grassroots feminist movements in protecting human / community rights and the integrity of our ecosystems, while also providing dreams and visions of a much better future and world that we can aspire towards. The Feminist Praxis Seminar will feature the voices of grassroots and movement leaders: - Lipi Rahman, from Badabon Sangho in Bangladesh, a women’s rights and women-led grassroots organisation working in the areas of women’s rights to land, work, water-bodies, climate justice, natural resources and sexual and reproductive health. - Alejandra Gutiérrez Valdizán from Agencia Ocote in Guatemala, a feminist led journalism and art newsroom that focuses on women and genders, media, historical memory and justice, and culture and environment. - Yildiz Temürtürkan, from the World March of Women, a feminist, anti-capitalist global social movement struggling against all forms of inequality and discrimination that we suffer as women. Register here: https://lnkd.in/gS_vpuAm The session will be translated across English, French, and Spanish. These are open sessions - please forward this to others in your networks. We hope you can join us!

Excited to be speaking at the upcoming convening, "Imagination Infrastructure 2024: The Role of Imagination in the Time of Collapse," hosted by Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and curated by the brilliant Alixa Garcia (https://alixagarcia.com/). Lots of great insights and practices for funders and movement orgs! I'm speaking on a panel about post-extractive economics and imagining new structures of right relationship and liberatory pathways. Check out the full schedule here and register for the day of July 2nd: https://lnkd.in/gwEifRdC

Join us! In response to our grantee partners, CS Fund's newly launched Just Transitions program is starting a Seminar Series for political education on Global Just Transitions that focus on how communities have full agency, rights and power in how they are governed and their development in a manner that advances social and ecological justice and is anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-exploitative. The Seminar Series will feature movement and grassroots leaders from across the globe speaking on justice for climate, labor, workers, migrants, food sovereignty, Indigenous sovereignty,?LGBTQIA+ peoples, digital rights, and more. We're bringing together an audience of organizers, practitioners, funders, researchers, and government staff to hear directly from movement voices and expertise. Our next session will be on May 14th and will focus on Community Governance and Self-Determination, a critical component of Just Transitions, but one that is less discussed and even less resourced by private and public donors. We know the evidence that Indigenous and grassroots communities protect the majority of the world's biodiversity, grow the majority of the world's food, and more, yet we rarely hear about the historic governance and cultural practices that enable them to protect their sociocultural and ecological systems. This session will present specific practices that show how communities govern in alternative ways to the current dominant, extractive systems, as well as a wider focus on how social movements are advancing alternative pathways at scale. This second Seminar will feature the voices of grassroots and movement leaders: - Marcus Briggs-Cloud of Ekvn-Yefolecev, an Indigenous Muscogee ecovillage in the US stewarding over 4000 acres of land through decolonized LandBack practice. - Shrishtee Bajpai from the Global Tapestry of Alternatives that weaves together local, regional, and global alternative practices to the dominant regime of?capitalist, patriarchal, racist, statist, and anthropocentric forces. - Leadership from the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) in Brazil, who have built radical alternative agroecological, housing, educational and economic infrastructure that supports and sustains over a million people in the majority of Brazilian territories. The session will be co-facilitated by Samir Doshi of CS Fund and Gopal Dayaneni of Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. With the feedback from our first session, we are expanding these remaining seminars to 90 minutes, with the last 30 minutes for Q&A. The session will be recorded and sent out to registrants. The session will be translated across English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. We will send a recording to all registrants. Please forward this to others in your network. We hope you can join us! Register here: https://lnkd.in/gHstwvSj In community, Samir

CS Fund announces inaugural Just Transitions grant partners CS Fund is inspired by movement leaders in environmental justice, worker justice, climate justice, Indigenous Sovereignty, Black Liberation and more in their collective framing of Just Transition: “Transition is inevitable. Justice is not.” We launched our program at the end of 2023, with a core focus on community power building and community self-determination that transforms our current extractive, supremacist culture to one of justice, joy, belonging and liberation for all living beings. We acknowledge the many visions toward liberation that are grounded in cultures around the world, from Buen Vivir to Ubuntu to Ahimsa, and recognize that a pluralistic view of transformation is needed to build across our cultures. With this initial round of grantmaking, we are committing $4.5 million USD in general support grants over three years to 88 grassroots and movement organizations from around the world. In response to continued requests for long term funding, our intention is to renew funding to these same organizations for another four years and $6 million USD. We are using a place-based strategy that funds grassroots and movement power building focused on social and ecological justice across 20 different sectors, including racial and caste justice, climate justice, worker justice, digital justice, LGBTQIA+ justice, Indigenous sovereignty, food and land sovereignty, human rights, humanitarian response, arts and media, and more. Overall, the Just Transitions program is providing multi-year general support funding for 88 organizations across the regions of (1) Mesoamerica and the Caribbean, (2) South Asia, (3) West Africa, and (4) the United States, as well as international movement organizations. Of these 88 organizations, 70% are women led, 90% are Global Majority led, 50% are Indigenous led, and 75% are grassroots organizations working directly in their own communities. The remaining 25% are regional and global social movements, networks, and alliances recommended by and accountable to grassroots communities. In response to conversations with grantee partners, we have launched an optional virtual Community of Praxis for this grantee cohort that brings the different Just Transitions partners together to build relationship, share tactics and strategies, and build collective power with new partners and novel practices. CS Fund is also seeding a fund for the Community of Praxis cohort to co-govern, experimenting with new pathways for how communities would resource themselves, as well as how communities in direct relationship would resource each other. We are calling this the “Co-Govern to Co-Liberate Fund.” See the full list of grantee partners and links for the Seminar Series here: https://lnkd.in/gqWbRZ33 #justtransition