Summit 2026 – 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.

Rainbow Labs

Executive Director — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:44 +0000

The Pathhacking Accelerator, a dynamic 12-week after-school STEM Accelerator Lab in South Los Angeles for LGBTQ+ high school youth, aims to combat the profound underrepresentation and systemic challenges faced by LGBTQ+ individuals in the STEM fields. Rainbow Labs designed this program meticulously to bridge gaps in STEM education for LGBTQ+ and LGBTQI+-BIPOC youth, providing hands-on activities and mentorship in pivotal STEM areas like coding, robotics, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. By pairing students with LGBTQ+ and LGBTQI+-BIPOC mentors who are professionals in these fields, the program offers strong role models and fosters an inclusive environment that celebrates diversity and promotes representation.

The program structure is robust, featuring bi-weekly, 90-minute sessions that allow students to engage deeply with the curriculum and develop their skills through direct interaction with their mentors. Complementing these sessions are field trips to leading STEM companies and guest sessions by professionals from major corporations such as Google and Amazon, which will provide real-world context and further learning opportunities. The project’s culmination is a Youth in STEM Panel event, enabling students to showcase their projects and network with industry leaders and peers. Rainbow Labs designed this event to affirm and strengthen community connections, enhancing the participants’ confidence and encouraging them to envision a future where they are active, recognized contributors to the STEM fields. Through this project, Rainbow Labs seeks to inspire and equip the next generation of LGBTQ+ STEM professionals, ensuring they receive the support, resources, and recognition they deserve.

Children of the Rainforest

Executive Director — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 00:00:47 +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 so they can remain on their
reserve and protect the 500,000 acres of pristine Amazon rain forest.

Led by Chief Isku Kua Yawanawa, COTR raises funds to maximize the impact of Isku
Vakehuhu, Yawanawa School of Language and Cultural Studies. Isku Vakehuhu is a
traditional school in the heart of Yawanawa territory, which serves as a model of cultural
reclamation and language revitalization.

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.

Sociocracy For All

Executive Director — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:43 +0000

Sociocracy For All (SoFA) aims to spread the use of egalitarian, sociocratic governance. SoFA provides content and training, supporting networks and communities of practice among people in similar sectors and language groups.

The Metasynthesis and Research on Sociocracy (MARS) project systematizes, advances, and curates the research on sociocracy and in decentralized, consent-based organizations in general. MARS has a special focus on three focus areas:

Team performance
DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)
Psychological safety

It will provide high-quality information for practitioners on what research shows in useful measures around those focus areas in the context of self-management. We hope to build a stronger case for our work and our colleagues to strengthen the movement overall. We’re also excited about stimulating more academic research on sociocracy and helping to focus that research around questions that are particularly useful for the field.

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.

Office for Refuge, Asylum and Migration

Executive Director — Thu, 12 May 2022 00:00:27 +0000

Founded in 2008, ORAM is recognized as one of the first international NGOs to assist people fleeing persecution based on their sexual orientation and/or gender identity and expression. It has since become a thought leader in LGBTIQ migration. Our mission is to protect and empower LGBTIQ asylum seekers and refugees globally, creating sustainability and systemic change. Over the last decade, ORAM has trained NGOs, governments and the UNHCR on the unique protection needs of the severely marginalized LGBTIQ refugee population. We have supported thousands of LGBTIQ asylum seekers and refugees from navigating the long asylum process from the moment they arrive in their first country of asylum to being resettled to a safe third country.

ORAM currently supports LGBTIQ asylum seekers and refugees in Mexico, Kenya and Uganda, as well as supporting LGBTIQ displaced Ukrainians in Berlin, Germany. Our programs in each geographical location are tailored to the specific needs of the community we serve, by ensuring that those with lived experiences are included in all stages of our work.

ORAM’s main focus is on advancing economic inclusion through livelihood programs, through capacity building and training, in order to build self-reliance; however, we also provide critical emergency response where needed, as well as legal assistance and advocacy through championing the rights of LGBTIQ asylum seekers and refugees on the global stage.

Supporting Innovative, LGBTIQ Refugee-led Entrepreneurship and Empowerment Programs in Kenya

ORAM’s goal is to empower vulnerable but resilient LGBTIQ refugees around the world. We do this in Kenya by providing online and in-person skills and capacity building training sessions, as well as providing seed-funding to those unable to access education and training due to their sexual orientation and / or gender identity and expression (SOGIE), as well as their status as a foreigner and refugee. This way, we enable the community to have a fair chance at finding or creating meaningful employment. Trainings enable them to find placements in local businesses or start their own businesses and generate income to survive on a daily basis, as well as support the wider community.