Community Organizing Focus

Social Justice Fund grants focus exclusively on community organizing towards systemic social change in Ventura County. The Giving Circle seeks proposals that use a community organizing approach to advocate for community transformation.

Grassroots or community organizing is working directly with people affected by an issue to involve them in its solution. Community organizing is a long-term approach that uses education, leadership development and advocacy to mobilize poor and disenfranchised communities around a vision of a better future. In short, it is helping people to help themselves.

Organizing does two central things to seek to rectify the problem of power imbalance - it builds a permanent base of people power so that dominant financial and institutional power can be challenged and held accountable to values of greater social, environmental and economic justice; and, it transforms individuals and communities, making them mutually respectful co-creators of public life rather than passive objects of decisions made by others.
– Mike Miller, Organize Training Center

For more specific information, read the information on the first page of this link. Click here to download the 2010 RFP.