Trains and empowers educators to dismantle patterns of racism and injustice in schools and communities.

Center for Racial Justice in Education (formerly Border Crossers) trains and empowers educators to dismantle patterns of racism and injustice in schools and communities. We envision a world where all young people learn and thrive in racially equitable and empowering educational spaces free from racial bias and discrimination. 

In our early years, we worked directly with students, teaching them to “cross borders” and understand identity, diversity and social justice. We later grew to train educators (including K-12 teachers and administrators as well as others engaged in youth development, and parents) to build educational institutions that foster racially equitable outcomes, and ensure that all students have safe, inclusive, and culturally responsive spaces to learn. 

Our trainings support educators in: 1) deepening their knowledge about the history of race and racism in the US; 2) strengthening their analysis of how racial oppression, privilege and identity affect their lives, their teaching, and their students lives; and 3) building educational communities rooted in racial justice.

Center for Racial Justice in Education

Lil BUB is a one of a kind space cat. Since landing on Earth, she's raised over $1,000,000 for homeless pets nationwide.

Lil BUB’s Big Fund exists to advocate for special needs companion animals and build a community that celebrates and fosters the human animal bond. With a focus on animals who are the most difficult to adopt, the most expensive to care for, and who are at a high risk of euthanasia. Lil BUB’s Big Fund provides grants to shelters nationwide and partners with shelters to create special needs foster program initiatives. We visit schools to promote kindness and inclusion. Through our work, we share BUB’s message of overcoming adversity and the knowledge that the things that make us different are worthy of being seen and appreciated.

Lil BUB's Big Fund

EJI is committed to ending mass incarceration in the US and challenging racial and economic injustice.

Founded in 1989 by Bryan Stevenson, a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer and bestselling author of Just Mercy, EJI is a private, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons. We challenge the death penalty and excessive punishment and we provide re-entry assistance to formerly incarcerated people.

EJI works with communities that have been marginalized by poverty and discouraged by unequal treatment. We are committed to changing the narrative about race in America. EJI produces groundbreaking reports, an award-winning wall calendar, and short films that explore our nation’s history of racial injustice, and we recently launched an ambitious national effort to create new spaces, markers, and memorials that address the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, which shapes many issues today.

EJI provides research and recommendations to assist advocates and policymakers in the critically important work of criminal justice reform. We publish reports, discussion guides, and other educational materials, and our staff conduct educational tours and presentations for thousands of students, teachers, faith leaders, professional associations, community groups, and international visitors every year.

Equal Justice Initiative

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies supports psychedelic and cannabis research, education and policy reform.

Founded in 1986, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is a visionary 501(c)(3) non-profit organization ushering the safe and ethical use of psychedelics as tools for healing and growth on individual, familial, societal, and planetary levels.

MAPS’ top priority is ethically introducing global access to MDMA-assisted therapy as a treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) through regulatory approvals and training certification for therapy providers, as well as public education, policy reform, and building community support networks.

How Your Donation Will Help

While the MDMA drug development program is the main priority of MAPS, the organization's programs include research into other psychedelic compounds and provide critical resources for researchers around the world interested in studying psychedelics. These resources include assistance with protocol development and regulatory guidance, in addition to providing study drug and training for investigators. As part of its commitment to open science and open praxis, MAPS publishes its research protocols, treatment manual for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, published articles, and investigator's brochure on its website for free download, and actively collaborates with third-party researchers and institutions. Researchers and institutions around the world are building on the body of research that MAPS has produced.

MAPS operates a global network of intersectional education and research programs focused on the careful study of the risks and benefits of psychedelics. The education programs include: harm reduction and peer support through the Zendo Project; policy and advocacy efforts focused on community organizing and reducing barriers to research; a conflict resolution initiative for peace-building; and an active fiscal sponsorship program for fledgling mission-aligned organizations. MAPS also produces myriad educational materials, training workshops, and conferences, both physical and virtual. MAPS builds its global community of support through: outreach at events worldwide; a robust social media presence; and interviews and publications in various global media outlets. All of this work is supported by MAPS’ general operating fund. 

MAPS aims to transcend geopolitical and social boundaries and intentionally cultivates interactions with thought leaders in a broad range of interest areas and outlets that demonstrate the broad applications of the healing potential of psychedelics, and to proactively build trust and common ground with those most likely to have resistance to psychedelics.  

A Tipping Point for Psychedelic Medicine

MDMA-assisted therapy is poised to be a true breakthrough for psychedelic medicine and is the first psychedelic therapy to enter a Phase 3 clinical trial. This trial recently cleared a critical interim evaluation, with analysis confirming a 90% or greater likelihood that the final results will show significant effectiveness in treating PTSD. Achieving FDA approval for this treatment could be the tipping point to shifting psychedelics into the medical mainstream. This shift has the potential to unlock previously unavailable resources for the investigation of psychedelic-assisted treatments applied to our most critical mental health challenges: trauma, depression, addiction, anxiety, and more.

When administered in a clinical setting with trained therapy providers, MDMA has proven to be a powerful adjunct to therapy, which assists individuals in processing traumatic experiences in a deep and profound manner, leading to the alleviation of suffering. Clinical research indicates that MDMA may catalyze therapeutic processing by allowing participants to stay emotionally engaged when revisiting traumatic experiences, without feeling overwhelmed by anxiety or other painful emotions.

FDA approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD could help millions of people who are suffering from trauma. A long-term follow-up study published in June 2020 demonstrated that 67% of the study volunteers (N=91) who had PTSD for an average duration of 17.8 years were still in remission and no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis at least 12-months following the completion of their treatment. 

While MAPS is the engine that powers this research, passionate supporters are the fuel that feeds our fire. We are inspired to press on towards the finish line of this 35-year marathon.

If you have any questions, please email us at giving@maps.org.

MAPS

Developing the roadmap for a sustainable, secure, and just global protein supply 🧫🌱


Check out what your support makes possible at gfi.org/your-impact. 

The Good Food Institute (GFI) is a global network of nonprofit organizations developing the roadmap for a sustainable, secure, and just protein supply. Industry alone will not meet this challenge at the scale or speed we need. GFI is accelerating the transformation of the food system by identifying solutions and mobilizing resources to make alternative proteins the default way meat is made.

GFI is a network of nonprofits around the world strategically based in the most critical economies for alternative protein advancement. In Asia, Europe, Brazil, India, Israel, and the U.S., GFI’s teams are mobilizing the international community to use markets and technology to replace harmful practices with ones that are better for the climate and biodiversity, for food security, and for global health.

GFI’s Focus
As a nonprofit, GFI is uniquely positioned to accelerate the transition to alternative proteins by focusing on three programmatic priorities:

-Cultivating a strong scientific ecosystem | GFI’s science and technology teams map out the most neglected areas that will allow alternative proteins to compete on taste and price. GFI meets these challenges by developing open-access research and resources, educating and connecting the next generation of scientists and entrepreneurs, and funding research that benefits alternative protein development across the sector. 

-Influencing policy and securing government funding | GFI’s policy teams ensure that alternative proteins are a part of the policy discussion around climate change mitigation and global health. In every region where GFI has a presence, teams advocate for government funding and incentives to transition to alternative proteins and are paving the way for the approval of novel proteins such as cultivated meat.

-Ensuring industry prioritizes alternative proteins | GFI’s corporate teams are creating a transformation of our global meat supply. GFI works to replicate past market transformations by showing companies of all sizes, from startups to multinational corporations, how alternatives to animal products can be profitable while meeting environmental, social, and governance goals.

Reimagining meat
The very real threats of climate change, global food insecurity, antibiotic resistance, and pandemics require us to imagine a different future of food. Alternative proteins are the solution that will securely and sustainably feed the world.

GFI’s global community of scientists, policy experts, and corporate specialists are creating a world where alternative proteins are no longer alternative.



The Good Food Institute

The destruction of healthy forest systems causes so many different problems. Trees provide a habitat for animals, purify water sources, control flooding and erosion and help to replenish the soil with nutrients needed for farming. When farmers can’t grow anything their farms fail and they have no option but to move to the overcrowded cities looking for work. Often they have to resort to selling themselves or their families into slavery just to survive.

We start by hiring the local community to plant trees. This gives them a decent income so they can provide for their families again. As the reforestation effort goes on, healthy forests begin to emerge and all the negative effects of deforestation begin to disappear.

Eden Reforestation Projects

Tackling acute childhood malnutrition through treatment and innovation.

What we do: 

Acute malnutrition is the leading cause of under-five childhood deaths globally. We're working to change that.

Taimaka is a joint Nigerian-American NGO operating in northeastern Nigeria, where we 1) treat thousands of children with acute malnutrition and 2) incubate cost-effective interventions, designed to improve the cost and quality of malnutrition treatment globally.

To improve the cost-effectiveness of global malnutrition treatment, we collaborate with academics to rigorously test and incubate a portfolio of candidate innovations each year in our CMAM program. If these candidate innovations prove effective, we advocate for changes to global standards of care and help other implementers adopt our innovations at scale. If we can reduce the cost of treatment by 1% through innovation, we can free up $3.4 million already spent on malnutrition globally and treat an additional 50,000 children a year, in perpetuity. 

We have won acclaim from Founders Pledge, which recommends us as an early-stage charity; USAID, which funded us through its Feed the Future program; and the D-Prize, which we won. The Center for Effective Global Action at U.C. Berkeley wrote that Taimaka “combines the rigor of academia with the dynamism of a startup,” and Innovations for Poverty Action commended Taimaka’s “commitment to evidence-based impact.” 

Why we do it: 

45.4 million children globally suffer from acute malnutrition, resulting in over 1 million preventable deaths every year. In Nigeria, where we work, over 100 children die every hour from malnutrition. Children that do survive suffer from permanent setbacks to the neurodevelopment, immune systems, and future earnings potential. 

At the same time, highly cost-effective treatment exists. Children can be treated for around $60 with program-wide recovery rates of over 90%. We work to make treatment 1) accessible to children who would otherwise have zero access to it in Nigeria and 2) make treatment cheaper and more effective through innovation, so that more children globally can access it. 

Taimaka Project

NTI designs innovative threat-reduction projects that show governments the way and build momentum and support for action.

We work with presidents and prime ministers, scientists and technicians, educators and students, and people from around the world. We collaborate with partners worldwide. And we use our voice to raise awareness and advocate for creative solutions.

Nuclear Threat Initiative

Developing open source privacy technology that protects free expression.

Long before we knew that it would be called Signal, we knew what we wanted it to be. Instead of teaching the rest of the world cryptography, we wanted to see if we could develop cryptography that worked for the rest of the world. At the time, the industry consensus was largely that encryption and cryptography would remain unusable, but we started Signal with the idea that private communication could be simple.

Since then, we’ve made some progress. We’ve built a service used by millions, and software used by billions. The stories that make it back to us and keep us going are the stories of people discovering each other in moments where they found they could speak freely over Signal, of people falling in love over Signal, of people organizing ambitious plans over Signal. When we ask friends who at their workplace is on Signal and they respond “every C-level executive, and the kitchen staff.” When we receive a subpoena for user data and have nothing to send back but a blank sheet of paper. When we catch that glimpse of “Signal blue” on a metro commuter’s phone and smile.

However, we’ve always wanted to do much more, and our limitations have often been challenging. Over the lifetime of the project, there have only been an average of 2.3 full-time software developers, and the entire Signal team has never been more than 7 people. With three client platforms to develop, a service to build and run, a growing list of integrations to assist with, and millions of users to support, that has often left us wanting.

Even so, Signal has never taken VC funding or sought investment, because we felt that putting profit first would be incompatible with building a sustainable project that put users first. As a consequence, Signal has sometimes suffered from our lack of resources or capacity in the short term, but we’ve always felt those values would lead to the best possible experience in the long term. The Signal Foundation completes our vision of Signal operating as part of a full 501(c)(3).

Signal Technology Foundation

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Ex-cofounder and Head of Engineering at Every.org. I work so others can receive the level of support I've personally benefited from.

effective altruism, xrisk, ai safety, longevity research.. 

We are what we eat!  Supporting the movement. 