Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund Update

Published for Summer 2026 — The Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund (RESJ) is helping organizations strengthen community voice, deepen leadership pathways, and build more participatory structures that help shape strategy and programming, and move community voices closer to decision-making.

We are pleased to share an update on how contributions raised are making a positive impact in our region. With community participation, we created a grantmaking strategy and launched our first grant cycle in Fall 2025, investing a total of $155,000. As of Spring 2026, our Community Impact team has checked in with these grant recipients to learn about their work. We are delighted to share our learnings with you!

Emerging Grants

Deepening Active Organizing, Advocacy, and Base-Building

Grantees: Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Pa’Lante Transformative Justice, Neighbor-to-Neighbor and Springfield-No One Leaves

The Emerging grantees operate from a more developed power building base, as they are already engaged in active organizing and advocacy work. They are using RESJ funds to deepen that work, expand leadership infrastructure, and respond to increasingly complex external conditions.

Emerging grantees are:

• Grappling with the tension between responding to immediate harm and building long-term community power – requiring a strategy to both “defend and build.”
• Balancing immediately urgent support for families facing detention and deportation with longer-term cultivation of leaders, through women’s organizing, paid youth roles, statewide trainings, and coalition work.
• Showing explicit orientation toward systems change and public advocacy including organizing campaigns around immigration detention and ICE contracts, equitable diversion pathways for Black and Brown youth, school safety and segregation, and efforts to rebuild broader democratic organizing infrastructure.

These organizations are not only serving communities affected by injustice; they are actively creating pathways for those communities to lead by influencing policy, narrative, and public systems.

Learning Grants

Building Foundational Structures for Participation & Community Voice

Grantees: International Language Institute, Boys & Girls Club Family Center, and Our Fire Collective

The Learning grantees are at an earlier stage of power building development, still creating or formalizing the internal structures needed for more participatory, community-responsive practice. Learning grants are helping organizations experiment with practical ways to value community voice and respond to participant needs.

Learning grantees have:

• Created advisory councils and feedback loops as a first step toward deeper shared leadership, seeking input from parents and students that includes gathering feedback from peers.
• Utilizing relational engagement and monetary stipends to encourage meaningful participation.
• Building the internal conditions that could support deeper power-sharing over time, moving from informal responsiveness toward more intentional and structured participation.

This work may be early in its timeline, but it is promising, as they are strengthening the structures that are being built. The learning grants serve as a valuable entry point for organizations beginning to shift toward more participatory and community-shaped models. Sustainability will require ongoing support.

Overall Lessons Learned & Next Steps

All organizations named significant capacity and infrastructure constraints. Although the specific needs and challenges differ – staffing shortages, temporary funding streams, data management demands, and sustaining organizing infrastructure – nearly every organization surfaced some version of the same concern: meaningful work is underway, but organizations need stable staffing, stronger infrastructure, or additional resources to sustain and expand it.

Grants are helping organizations strengthen community leadership, create more intentional pathways for voice and influence, and build the relational and organizational infrastructure necessary for longer-term change.

Looking ahead, we see a strong future for the fund, as it continues to deepen its investment in community-led power-building and advocacy across the region. In the coming year, we are excited to welcome new committee members whose perspectives and lived experience will help strengthen the fund’s participatory approach and guide thoughtful decision-making.

As the fund grows, we hope to continue building on what we have learned from both Emerging and Learning grantees by supporting organizations at different stages of power-building, while remaining grounded in equity, community leadership, and long-term systems change.

Thank you so much for your support and please be in touch with ideas, questions and wisdom as we continue on this journey.

Jeffery Markham Jr.
Senior Program Officer
jmarkham@communityfoundation.org

Nigel Greaves
Director of Development
ngreaves@communityfoundation.org