2022 Grants

Longtime ally in Story of Stuff’s Troubled Waters coalition that is campaigning to reclaim public water sources from corporate water bottlers, and a previous Grassroots Grantee. Unbottle and Protect is currently engaged in active campaigning around a Chaffee County water site, and the grant is to offset some of the associated financial costs. 

Fighting the PureCycle plastic chemical recycling feedstock factory from being set up in their community, against the will of the community. 

One Winter Garden supports a concept of unity and participation whereby individuals from within East Winter Garden and other areas of Winter Garden and West Orange come together to advocate for our historic community.

Sustainable agriculture and nonprofit plant nursery, promoting locally grown food and raising awareness about how produce travels thousands of miles to reach a supermarket. Donations go toward opening more school gardens and educational programs in Northeast Florida.

Since The Story of Stuff was founded in and is headquartered in Berkeley, this grant to the Sogorea Te Land Trust acknowledges our office sits on unceded Ohlone territory of Huchiun. This indigenous, women-led organization recently reclaimed five acres of land owned by the City of Oakland. Under their Indigenous Stewardship, the land will immediately be used for natural resource restoration, cultural practices, and public education.

East Yards for Environmental Justice is a leader in the statewide effort to shut down California’s two last incinerators, one of which is based in their own backyard in Long Beach, CA. They are a key coalition partner of Valley Improvement Project. 

The Ecology Center is a nonprofit organization that focuses on improving the health and the environmental impacts of urban residents. Ecology Center has been a key partner of Story of Stuff’s in the Break Free from Plastic movement. 

The Carrizo Comecrudo live by the mission of preserving, maintaining, protecting, and offering services that will better tribal communities to overcome the erasure of the Original People of Texas. They promote wellness and health by providing services in times of crisis, fighting the fossil fuel industry and petrochemical buildout in ancestral lands.

In order to improve the health and welfare of humans, animals, communities and the environment, Plastic Free Delaware aims to eliminate the scourge of plastic pollution in Delaware through education & outreach, awareness building events, and policy initiatives with a current focus on single-use plastics and encouraging the principles of a zero waste culture.

Seed funding to support a new organization focused on supporting and facilitating unifying actions that promote healthy relationships between humans & environment through voluntary action, ecocentrism, creativity, and more. Programming includes school recycling and environmental education training, upcycling workshops, and DIY arts events that promote reuse. 

The Mission of IMPACT is to increase civic participation in impoverished communities, encouraging engaged citizenship and civic responsibility through volunteering and service-learning. This funding is to support hosting repair cafes and a community bike program called Newburg Rise and Ride. 

Cooperation Jackson is building a solidarity economy in Jackson, Mississippi, anchored by a network of cooperatives and worker-owned, democratically self-managed enterprises. The organization is deeply involved in the current drinking water crisis in Jackson, deploying methods of water catchment and filtration in community centers and homes, as well as organizing for public water reform.

For Ground Up Advocacy Bootcamp, an inclusive, engaging, and informative educational training for student activists looking to make their college campuses herbicide free.

For a grassroots campaign to inform the South Texas community about releases of ethylene oxide, a carcinogenic air toxin, by a local commercial sterilizer plant known as Midwest Sterilization Corp.

Pipelines to Plastic Project addresses the ExxonMobil Cracker Plant in Corpus Christi, and Desalination Plants in the Bay and Gulf of Texas to help the Native community survive this Pandemic of COVID, Petrochemicals, and the fossil fuel industries with goals for a more sustainable living.

Long term partner in our Nestle’s Troubled Waters campaign, funds are to help pay down the remaining balance of a legal debt from an aggressive campaign against Nestle’s privatization efforts in the Great Lakes region so they can transition their focus back to advocacy, education, and base building.

Great Plains Restoration Council (GPRC) is an ecological health organization that helps people take care of their own health through restoring and protecting native ecosystems, particularly damaged prairies, plains, and waters. GPRC is a founder of the “Ecological Health” movement, teaches Ecological Health practices and principles around the country, and uses literary arts and other media to broaden awareness and community engagement. Projects include research and healing-centric ecological restoration and nature-oriented programming for youth who are formerly incarcerated or at risk of being incarcerated.

Project: A permanent home for Sure We Can; a campaign to raise funds to buy the site currently being rented.

Sure We Can is the only non-profit, unhoused-friendly container redemption center in New York. The space serves more than 400 canners, provides educational activities for schools and universities, and promotes sustainability, recycling, and composting. The canners – people who collect used cans and bottles to redeem a 5 or 10 cent deposit – who call Sure We Can home remove tens of millions of plastic, aluminum and glass containers all over New York City every year and are integral members of the community cooperative. 

The current space rented by Sure We Can is an ideal 12,000 sq ft lot in Brooklyn, in the heart of a community of canners. Despite this, the organization has been on the verge of eviction in the past, and its members face gentrification and displacement from the area. In response, Sure We Can is raising funds to permanently buy the lot after securing institutional grants to cover part of the purchase.

Project: PROJECT ACCESS: Compost OJT • High Tunnel Prep.

Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm (PPHUF) is a Black-led and serving, intergenerational organization that aims to:

Create a safe and healthy environment for every elementary school child and their immediate family in Park Heights.

Build “AgriHoodBaltimore,” a thriving marketplace, community shared farming (CSF) and urban agriculture training resource institute. 

Grow 300,000 pounds of food, improve our supply chain, decentralize our cold storage, expand processing and ensure sustainable food security for our community of children and older adults in Park Heights.

Claim Our Space Now is Black-led and serves Afro-diasporic immigrant communities, low-income communities, and the homeless. The initiative Claim Our Food Now seeks to provide consistent community care in the form of food security for Caribbean immigrant families living in New York City, some of whom are facing the threat of deportation. The project will donate culturally specific and nutritious foods to support the community’s immediate needs while creating sustainable community programs to educate and motivate around civic engagement.

GrowHouse Community Design and Development Group empowers Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people and their allies to become developers of their neighborhoods through collective ownership of key assets such as real estate, land, essential businesses, and cultural institutions. A current goal is to execute “When We Create” – a curriculum focused on Equity Centered Community Design.  A key part of this learning will include community ownership of long-vacant lots and their transformation into community spaces for gathering, food growing, and other activities.

“When We Create” will educate, train, and challenge Latinx, Black, and Indigenous youth to become leaders in designing healthy and racially equitable communities by guiding young leaders through a project-based, design-focused curriculum in which they develop 21st century skills and use them to enact change in their communities.

Project: East Brooklyn Pro-Environment Campaign

East New York 4 Gardens is a Black-led and serving organization, with a mission to build a better environment by educating the community through environmental justice demonstrations and instructions. This includes growing herbs, composting, teaching earth and environmental studies, water irrigation system, recycling education with the Crush it Crusade (recycling education project), a project of Can’d Aid (which distributes canned water in times of disaster).

This is a donation to the newly formed Amazon Labor Union to support their current historic organizing work. The union founder, Chris Smalls, is a former guest on Story of Stuff-produced series The Shift.

The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) is Black-led, with a multiracial membership of mostly BIPOC, low-income workers. ALU is an independent, worker-led, democratic labor union founded by Amazon workers in Staten Island, New York. The union was formed in April 2021 by a group of concerned workers led by ALU President Chris Smalls. 

ALU has grown and won a historic victory in their first election at Amazon site JFK8, with the support of over 2,500 workers. With the signed support of thousands more workers, ALU successfully filed for an election at a second site, LDJ5, and recruited over 100 people into an Organizing Committee – making historic inroads into unionizing the Amazon workforce. 

Valley Improvement Project (VIP) was founded in 2012 in Modesto in Stanislaus County in response to local incineration and waste issues in their community, and the negative health impact of the remaining incinerators in the state of California. The funding is to support their campaign to shut down the Stanislaus County Incinerator, one of the remaining two in California. Story of Stuff is currently in post- production of the documentary Burning Injustice featuring VIP’s multigenerational work.