The Rising Foundation

Future Whenua

Executive Director — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 13:50:42 +0000

TThe Future Whenua Collective is an innovative initiative focused on regenerating the land and fostering deep community connections across Aotearoa, New Zealand. It operates on a cohort model, selecting ten proven regenerative leaders to engage in a 10-week learning journey, culminating in a three-day gathering. This process involves collaborative discussions, skill-sharing, and the creation of an archival video pitch for each project. Funded participants receive $1,000 for their time, with an additional financial pool distributed through sociocratic decision-making. Inspired by the need for grassroots-driven environmental stewardship and resource allocation methods, the Collective aims to build a bioregional fund, attracting significant philanthropic support to empower local communities and enhance ecological resilience. This initiative embodies the principles of sustainability, collaboration, and holistic care for both the land, its people, and our kin, envisioning a future where interconnected efforts lead to a thriving, regenerative society.

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.

Feed Black Futures

Executive Director — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:00:53 +0000

The project by Feed Black Futures (FBF) seeks to address systemic racism and oppression that have led to limited economic opportunities, food apartheid, and over-policing in Black communities. FBF aims to catalyze Black community interdependence by providing financial and labor support to install edible home gardens for Black Trans, cis women, and Gender Non-Conforming (GNC) caregivers. Through partnerships with Black regenerative farmers and social enterprise training workshops, the project empowers participants to grow their food, develop business skills, and access market opportunities. FBF also plans to implement a cooperative communication platform to facilitate community connections and market access. By leveraging ancestral knowledge and fostering economic empowerment, FBF endeavors to combat food insecurity and promote self-sufficiency among marginalized communities.

Youth Co-op Connection

Executive Director — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:00:39 +0000

Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project’s (ANV) mission is to elevate life for youth and their families in Oakland and beyond by challenging oppressive dynamics and environments through urban farming and access to the natural environment. Founded and led mainly by women and People of Color, ANV engages youth and families in safe and creative outdoor spaces in Oakland and the East Bay, CA. ANV strengthens young people’s understanding of nutrition, food production, healthy living, and the natural environment, and strengthens their ties to their community.

The Youth Co-op Connection project focuses on cooperative education, in practice, necessitates active learning, self-directed inquiry, and hands-on experience. It promotes learning that is relevant and connected to the lives of young individuals, nurturing their ability to question, analyze, and challenge the status quo, in collective action. This project centers underserved Black youth and will offer a nuanced and comprehensive open source curriculum for cooperative education, catered to middle school age youth. The curriculum design will be adaptable and applicable across diverse education settings, including public schools, youth entrepreneurship programs, alternative education settings, and after-school programs.

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.

Currency Designer Guild

Executive Director — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 00:00:42 +0000

The Currency Designers Guild (CDG) creates a community of practice for individuals to co-create and prototype regenerative currencies and incentive systems in service towards a more equitable, regenerative human ecosystem. CDG is an initiative by Commons Engine to create the first decentralized community of practice for currency designers committed to the creation of regenerative economies at the local, bioregional and global levels. The mission of the CGD is to:

Create an ongoing dialogue and community of practice with regenerative currency designers who are committed to creating real-world experiments.
Explore, prototype and field test structures that empower the emergence of socio-economic systems that contribute to greater abundance, equality and freedom.

Safe Place International

Executive Director — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:00:24 +0000

SafePlace International has three years of experience working to meet the needs of DMRs in Greece and other parts of the world. Greece’s bleak economic environment has meant an unemployment rate of twenty five percent, making it especially difficult for DMRs to find work. In order to assist DMRs to be competitive in a job market that excludes a significant proportion of the local population, let alone migrants, SPI has established the Dream Academy and expanded on the vocational and skills training provided in the ACC to support DMRs with attaining the skills they need to be successful in gaining employment.

The Community Center currently serves as the hub for DMRs in Athens, offering individual casework sessions to all beneficiaries, daily Greek and English language classes, basic maths and financial literacy classes, weekly workshops facilitated by fellow community center residents or partner organizations (previous workshops include dance, theater, community organizing, yoga and meditation), trauma-focused counseling, and comprehensive vocational training which encompasses CV building, computer literacy and programming, physical presentation, and finding opportunities to match skill sets and interests. In addition to the 80 residents that usually reside in the Athens Housing Collective and Moms2Moms shelters, the center welcomes up to 100 marginalized refugees in the greater Athens region daily to access the community center’s resources.