The Rising Foundation

Modern Family Institute

Executive Director — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:22 +0000

TThe Modern Family Institute will contribute to several events aimed at advancing cooperative and community-centered housing initiatives. We will co-host the third-annual Community Living Wisdom Exchange: a two-day conference for community members, nonprofit organizations, architects, urban designers, housing lawyers, builders, and folks redesigning financial systems to explore the practicalities and possibilities of community-based housing models. Through a vibrant mix of discussions, workshops, panels, storytelling, and organic connections, we aim to consolidate and share practical skills and inspiring ideas related to community-centered housing.

The Modern Family Institute will also participate in an intensive 3-day workshop hosted by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Economy and Society called “Beyond Yimbism,” bringing together policymakers, scholars, and practitioners from the housing space to identify actionable strategies to further the development of pluralistic housing models in the United States. The Institute’s Executive Director, Dr. Lily Lamboy, will work with workshop participants to distill the conference’s findings into actionable strategies to make cooperative housing more accessible, understood, and widely adopted by uncovering innovative housing designs, addressing policy barriers, and providing practical tools for immediate use.

The Institute will host regular Cooperative Housing Fairs around the Bay Area to make these housing models more clear to the public and connect community members with opportunities to identify concrete housing possibilities.

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.

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

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.