To end homelessness for individuals, families and communities.

PATH's mission is to end homelessness for individuals, families, and communities. We do this by building affordable housing and providing supportive services throughout California.   Since 2013, we've helped more than 7,000 people move off the streets and

PATH - Making it Home

Delivering unconditional cash directly to the world's poorest households via secure mobile transfers. 

Since 2009, GiveDirectly has delivered more than $580 million in unconditional cash transfers to families in need. These one-time cash transfers allow recipients to invest in what they need most and have been shown to improve their earnings, children’s school attendance, health, nutrition, and mental well-being.
 
GiveDirectly uses government data to target villages where most or all residents are living in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as earning under $2.15/day. In-country GiveDirectly staff enroll one member of each household in the entire village to receive a one-time transfer of about $1,000 USD sent in two installments using mobile money. Recipients can then withdraw the mobile funds as cash with local agents and use the funds to invest in what they need – whether it’s on starting a business, education, making their home safer/sturdier, healthcare, or livestock.
 
GiveDirectly uses rigorous experimental research (randomized controlled trials) to measure the impact of their unconditional cash programs and answer public policy questions, generating evidence on key design and implementation questions across varied contexts. You can find over 300 studies on the positive impacts of cash transfers in GiveDirectly’s Cash Research Explorer.

GiveDirectly

Music library dedicated to collecting, preserving and providing information about popular music from around the world.

The ARChive of Contemporary Music is a not-for-profit music library dedicated to collecting, preserving and providing information about popular music from around the world.    Now in its twenty-eighth year of operation, ARC is the largest and most important popular music collection in the world – with over three million sound recordings and approximately four million  photographs, books, press kits, videos, memorabilia and related ephemera.   Our simple goal is to guarantee that the world’s musical heritage is preserved for future generations to study and enjoy.     We believe that all forms of popular music, jazz, be-bop, bluegrass, country, rock, rap, blues, enka, reggae, calypso, zydeco, and countless other forms are significant cultural expressions.  All musics entertain as well as reveal a people and their values to the rest of the world.

ARChive of Contemporary Music

Protecting the Amazon rainforest and our climate in solidarity with Indigenous peoples

Since 1996, Amazon Watch has defended the Amazon rainforest and our climate in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. Long-term partnerships with Indigenous, forest, and traditional peoples — the best stewards of the rainforest — are the foundation for Amazon Watch’s campaigns for climate justice, corporate accountability, and the permanent protection of the rainforest.

The Amazon is home to more than 500 distinct Indigenous peoples. As our planet’s largest tropical rainforest, it stabilizes our global climate and an immense amount of Earth’s biodiversity and flowing freshwater can be found there.

This vital ecosystem and the Indigenous peoples who have stewarded it for centuries face grave threats from deforestation, resource extraction, land grabs, and destructive development projects. The Amazon is facing a tipping point and won't be able to sustain itself as a rainforest if we remain on our current path of destruction.

To move to a turning point, Amazon Watch is advancing the Indigenous-led proposal to permanently protect 80% of the Amazon by securing Indigenous rights to their ancestral territories, challenging the major drivers of rainforest destruction, and mobilizing solidarity funds directly to Indigenous Earth Defenders throughout the Amazon Basin. Their work combines on-the-ground legal, advocacy, and communications expertise and long-term trusted partnerships with Indigenous peoples and organizations.

🌳Amazon Watch’s Amazon Defenders Fund (ADF) provides direct solidarity funding to Amazonian peoples and organizations free of bureaucratic barriers. The ADF supports Indigenous-led initiatives including community organizing, women’s leadership, communal economies, protection of Earth Defenders at risk for resisting destructive development, and crisis response including to wildfires and oil spills. The ADF is built upon a multi-decade track record as a trusted partner among Indigenous nations. You can learn more at amazonwatch.org/get-involved/amazon-defenders-fund.

Amazon Watch

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

Uses technology to simplify political engagement, increase voter turnout, and strengthen American democracy.

The largest nonprofit, non-partisan voting registration and get out the vote (GOTV) technology platform in America. It has registered more than 3.3 million new voters, verified 8.2 million voters’ registration status, and has helped over 30 million website users by providing registration links and deadlines, polling location details, and other essential voting information for each state. Vote.org also leverages its SMS-based GOTV program each year, targeting low-propensity voters in regularly scheduled and special elections.

To turn out the vote among young people and people of color, Vote.org partners with corporations and other organizations in the civic space, including Gannett Media Group's USA Today, Vote Save America, and The Andrew Goodman Foundation. Vote.org has also launched exciting new partnerships in 2020 with The Webby Awards, NAACP Youth Coalition, GLSEN, wikiHow, and Young Entertainment Activists. Many of their corporate partners have signed on to Vote.org's Election Day campaign, launched in 2018, which commits them to giving their employees paid time off to vote on Election Day. To date, 500 companies have signed the pledge.

Vote.org was originally founded as Long Distance Voter (LDV), which served as a comprehensive online resource for absentee ballot information. LDV had 500,000 viewers within six months of its 2008 launch, and in 2014, it was the official source of data for Google's "How to Vote" project, which received over 30 million views.

In 2016, LDV rebranded itself as Vote.org, with funding and support from the Y Combinator. That fall, Vote.org ran its first-in-nation SMS peer-to-peer voter registration drive, and on Election Day 2016, Vote.org ran the single largest non-partisan SMS GOTV drive in America, providing polling location information to over 1 million low-propensity voters.

With the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic in America, Vote.org recently added a page to its website, offering regularly updated, state-by-state information for voters whose primaries have been postponed or otherwise delayed. As the pandemic creates new barriers to safe and fair elections, Vote.org is working to keep voters engaged in the democratic process and prevent misinformation from dissuading them from participating in the 2020 election.

Vote.org's mission is to use technology to simplify political engagement, increase voter turnout, and strengthen American democracy. With its new leadership team, led by CEO Andrea Hailey, Vote.org is on track to serve 12 times the number of people it served in 2018. The organization plans to turn out more than 5 million low-propensity voters in this fall's presidential election.

Vote.org

Delivering medical aid where it's needed most — independent, neutral, impartial.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization created by doctors and journalists in France in 1971.

In over 70 countries around the world, MSF saves lives by providing medical aid where it is needed most—in armed conflicts, epidemics, natural disasters, and other crises.  The people who work for MSF are doctors, nurses, midwives, epidemiologists, water-and-sanitation experts and many others who combine their professional expertise with a commitment to the world’s most vulnerable people.  Each year, these medical teams run close to 470 projects where they care for millions of people.  

As an organization, MSF is neutral and operates independently of any political, military, or religious agendas. It does not take sides in armed conflicts, provides care based on needs alone, and advocates for increased independent access to victims of conflict and disaster as required under international humanitarian law. Medical teams conduct evaluations on the ground to determine a population's medical needs before opening programs, aiming to fill gaps that exist (rather than replicating services that are already offered) or reach communities that are not being assisted.  Over the years, the organization has been the recipient of several awards that recognize its work, including the 1998 Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, the 2012 J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding, the 2015 Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award, and the 2017 Pardes Humanitarian Prize for Mental Health.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 

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.