Featured – The Rising Foundation

Belltower Commoning

Johnny Tumelty — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 16:10:27 +0000

Belltower Commoning is a multi-stakeholder real estate cooperative in the Rondout Valley of Ulster County, NY. Our vision is to create community-owned and governed spaces that are free from speculative market pressures and nurture the local community and ecology. This initiative seeks to foster community self-determination and stewardship by developing real estate practices that promote connection, liberation, and care. Ultimately, it intends to provide secure access to land and property for all, especially those systematically excluded, and inspire new models of non-extractive relationships with communities and the Earth. We intend this to serve as a model for development elsewhere and will openly share our process and resources with the movement.

Compostars

Johnny Tumelty — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:13:12 +0000

The Bionutrient Food Association is hosting a series of strategic convenings in Europe, North America, and Australia, bringing together thought leaders from agriculture, nutrition, business, and related fields. These events will offer opportunities for expert insight, refinement of our strategy, and formal coalition-building – inviting key stakeholders to provide guidance, endorse and actively support our approach to defining nutrient density, in order to improve the quality in the food supply.

Bionutrient Food Association

Executive Director — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:52 +0000

Fresh Approach

Executive Director — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:19 +0000

Fresh Approach collaborates with communities and farmers to increase access to locally grown food, culturally relevant nutrition education, and urban agriculture—rooted in the belief that everyone deserves nourishing food and the knowledge to support their well-being. We do this through Mobile and Traditional Farmers’ Markets with accompanying incentives programs, trauma-informed VeggieRx nutrition workshops, and community-based agriculture programs.

This grant will support monthly, hands-on cooking and nutrition classes at Bay Area food pantries, where participants will learn how to prepare and preserve culturally relevant produce. Each class includes VeggieRx vouchers to help families access fresh fruits and vegetables at local farmers’ markets. Participants will also be invited to join a 16-week bilingual “Food as Medicine” online series, providing deeper insights into nutrition and chronic disease prevention. To build long-term sustainability, the project includes a train-the-trainer model to equip pantry staff and community leaders to deliver culturally responsive nutrition education. Together, these efforts will reach ~170 households, increase access to healthy and locally-grown food, and strengthen community-based food systems through education, empowerment, and dignity.

AfriPeace

Executive Director — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:06 +0000

The 2025 Afripeace Youth Cultural Exchange Program will empower Sacramento-area high school students through peace and conflict resolution education and a 10-day cultural exchange to Ghana. By emphasizing cooperative, humanitarian, and diversity principles, this immersive experience fosters respect, compassion, cross-cultural understanding, leadership, global connections, and civic engagement through educational excursions, community service, and cultural activities with Ghanaian peers and leaders.

Doula For The People

Executive Director — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 00:00:40 +0000

Sustainable Economies Law Center

Executive Director — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:05 +0000

Based on extensive evaluations, feedback and discussions with our community partners in the Nonprofit Democracy Network, the Sustainable Economies Law Center came to recognize that one of the most substantial barriers to successful democratic self-management within social justice movement organizations are internal conflicts and the lack of skill and capacity to manage those conflicts. To create self-organizing, Sociocratic and democratic, thriving organizations, we need to build our conflict resilience skills and capacities. Through the Rising Foundation’s generous support, we were able to create and fund the Conflict Resilience Council for solidarity economy and social movement organizations.

Children of the Rainforest

Executive Director — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:45 +0000

Children of the Rainforest (COTR) is a U.S. based nonprofit operating as an
Indigenous Language and Education Fund serving the Yawanawa people of the Amazon
rain forest in Acre, Brazil. COTR is on a mission to help the Yawanawa save their critically
endangered language and strengthen their cultural traditions.

The Nuke Tsãi Initiative is an Indigenous-led three year project by Children of the Rainforest and Chief Isku Kua Yawanawa in partnership with First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR) Initiative by IndigiGenius and Mila. FLAIR utilizes immersive AI technology to create Automatic Speech Recognition models, the likes of Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri, tailored to revitalizing endangered languages with scarce linguistic resources and limited speakers. Nuke Tsãi Initiative, the first iteration of FLAIR outside of the United States, will harness AI to revitalize the critically endangered Yawanawa language. The Nuke Tsãi Initiative is centered at Isku Vakehuhu, Yawanawa Traditional School located in New Hope Village in Acre, Brazil, within the 500,000-acre Amazon rainforest reserve of the Yawanawa people.

Consciousness and Healing Initiative

Executive Director — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:35 +0000

The Consciousness and Healing Initiative (CHI) is an international collaborative accelerator of scientists, health practitioners, innovators, educators, and artists, who forward the trans disciplinary science and real-world application of consciousness and healing practices. CHI fosters a social movement to place health and healing at the center of our personal and global consciousness, in order to build healthier societies and sustainable stewardship of our planet.

This 3 year project will conduct a randomized controlled trial on Biofield Therapies for treating anxiety, with purposeful recruitment and sampling of BIPOC and LGBTQI+ communities. Our current data indicate that delivering a biofield-based sound therapy was feasible and effective for substantially reducing anxiety. However, because feasibility studies do not have control or comparison groups and are done on a very small group of people, and because we had a very brief intervention with no follow-up measurements, it is unknown whether

1) this approach is helpful for a more diverse population (including BIPOC and LGBTQI+ communities) suffering from anxiety
2) how long the effects might last after the intervention is over
3) whether reductions in anxiety are comparable to relaxation or other gold-standard approaches for clinical care.

We hope to answer these questions and provide an evidence base for holistic care for anxiety in a diverse population. If Biofield Therapies is shown to be helpful and effective for persons with anxiety, this therapy can be considered by healthcare administrators to be integrated into clinic and hospital settings, allowing us to more readily integrate holistic therapies into healthcare and self-care.

Agroecology Commons

Executive Director — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:26 +0000

Agroecology Commons cultivates knowledge sharing, community action, and global solidarity for decolonized land stewardship, collective healing, and justice within the food movement. We are building infrastructure for our incubator farm that provides participants from Agroecology Commons’ Farmer Mobilization, and annual Bay Area Farmer-to-Farmer Training a portion of the land to grow crops, hone skills, and launch their farm dreams with mentorship and cooperative support. The incubator farm offers shared infrastructure, tools, materials, and seeds while creating opportunities for beginning farmers to be in right relationship with land, place, and culturally appropriate food. For years to come, this farm will be covered with ancestral crops from around the world including Sierra Leone, Iraq, Philippines, Italy, and Japan to name a few; songs in many languages will be sung, and people will be cooperatively tending, growing, and learning together.