Supporting Our Community in 2017

Our first and most important core value at Paradigm is “impact”: we believe in doing work that has both broad and deep impact in improving equity and inclusion in our communities and our world. We recognize that we have an opportunity for impact not only through our own work, but also by supporting other organizations that play a vital role in building more inclusive, diverse, and equitable communities.

This year, each member of our team identified an organization for Paradigm to support. The organizations we selected reflect our team’s broad commitment to social justice, as well as our distinct areas of focus and interest. We’re proud to support the work of the following organizations, each one chosen by a member of our team, and we hope this post inspires others to support them as well:

• Asian American Writers’ Workshop: Asian American Writers’ Workshop is a national arts organization devoted to cultivating and amplifying Asian American stories. Through their events and editorial initiatives, AAWW supports writers from a diverse range of backgrounds as it works to increase the representation of Asian American voices in our literary canon.
• Brave Initiatives: Brave Initiatives is an organization that aims to empower young women in high school through design, coding, and leadership training. Through hands-on learning, games, mentorship and leadership activities, the organization is helping empower women to view themselves as purposeful, powerful agents of change in the world through coding.
• California Coalition for Women Prisoners: CCWP is a grassroots social justice organization, with members inside and outside prison, that challenges the institutional violence imposed on women, transgender people, and communities of color by the prison industrial complex (PIC). The struggle for racial and gender justice is central to dismantling the PIC, and CCWP prioritizes the leadership of the people, families, and communities most impacted in building this movement. Some of the ways CCWP amplifies voices include organizing town halls, letters-to-the-governor campaigns, and a project dedicated to people serving Life Without Parole, A Living Chance.
• Chapter510: Chapter 510 & the Dept. of Make Believe is Oakland’s only youth writing center fronted by the world’s only magical bureaucracy. They provide free in-school tutoring, creative writing workshops, and publishing opportunities for K-12 students in Oakland, and are currently a proud part of the 826 Chapter Development Process.
• The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles: CHIRLA organizes and serves individuals, institutions and coalitions to build power, transform public opinion, and change policies to achieve full human, civil and labor rights. Guided by the power, love, and vision of its community, CHIRLA embraces and drives progressive social change. CHIRLA was formed in response to the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 which made hiring undocumented workers illegal, creating a situation ripe for worker exploitation and abuse.
• Council on American-Islamic Relations: CAIR is a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, with affiliate offices nationwide. Through media relations, lobbying, education, and advocacy, CAIR works to promote a positive image of Islam and Muslims in the United States.
• Dolores Street Community Services: Dolores Street Community Services serves low-income and immigrant communities in San Francisco by providing shelter and meal service, advocating for immigrants’ and workers’ rights, and engaging in advocacy and community organizing.
• GiveDirectly: GiveDirectly is an organization that is reshaping international giving by leveraging modern payments technology to drastically cut the costs of sending money directly to the extreme poor. They aim to make direct transfers to the poor the benchmark against which other, more expensive approaches are evaluated and to drive research that explores new ways to address poverty.
• The Homeless Prenatal Program: The Homeless Prenatal Program is a San Francisco Family Resource Center that has provided for poor and homeless families in the city for 25 years. Their focus is on women, mothers, and families, and they take a holistic approach to care, addressing areas such as mental health, substance abuse, domestic violence, stable housing, and work training.
• The International Rescue Committee: The IRC aids in the relief of some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people whose lives have been destroyed by conflict and disaster to recover and rebuild their future. Their work ranges from providing access to reproductive health care in poverty-stricken areas to resettling refugees in conflict zones.
• Lava Mae: Lava Mae supports individuals experiencing homelessness in San Francisco and Los Angeles by converting public transportation buses into showers and toilets-on-wheels to deliver hygiene and rekindle dignity for people living on the streets.
• Planned Parenthood: Planned Parenthood is one of the nation’s leading providers of high-quality, affordable health care, and the nation’s largest provider of sex education.
• Positive Women’s Network-USA: Positive Women’s Network-USA is a national organization made up of women living with HIV and their supporters, who inspire, inform, and mobilize each other to advocate for changes that will improve their lives and uphold their rights. The organization develops a leadership pipeline and policy agenda that applies a gender lens to the domestic HIV epidemic grounded in social justice and human rights.
• Positivity Tribe: Positivity Tribe’s mission is to highlight diverse narratives and perpetuate one’s higher level of humanism through simple but powerful acts. Positivity Tribe facilitates local initiatives such as The Oakland Volunteers, a group of Bay Area community members who assemble and distribute wellness kits to meet the basic needs of the homeless population in Oakland. To date, The Oakland Volunteers have distributed 1000+ kits to those experiencing homelessness in the Bay Area.
• San Francisco AIDS Foundation: San Francisco AIDS Foundation does incredible work at the federal, state, and local levels to stop the spread of HIV, and to protect the health and human rights of all those living with the disease. Through their advocacy, they aim to eliminate the stigma that prevents many from taking control and fighting the disease and to empower others to seek help and to help others.
• ScriptEd: ScriptEd equips students from under-resourced schools with coding skills and professional experiences that create access to careers in technology. ScriptEd currently runs programs in schools in New York and San Francisco, and is working to expand to other cities.
• Women’s Community Clinic: A grassroots organization meeting the health care needs of underserved Bay Area women and girls, the Clinic provides over 5,000 clinical visits for low-income Bay Area women and girls each year. They also conduct outreach to homeless and marginally housed clients, distributing supplies for safer sex and serving meals. Finally, they have an innovative volunteer training program that equips volunteer health workers in the community with progressive health care education.
• Youth Uprising: Located in the heart of East Oakland, YU is a neighborhood hub offering young people services and programs to increase physical and mental wellbeing, community connection, educational attainment, and career achievement among youth members.

In addition to the above organizations chosen by our team members, we continue to support the following organizations doing amazing work: Black Girls Code, Centro Legal de la Raza, Code2040, Equal Justice Initiative, NAACP, Southern Poverty Law Center, and UnidosUS.