Immigrant Rights and Advocacy Fellowship.
Background and Overview
The Immigrant Rights and Advocacy Fellowship recognizes and supports individuals with a demonstrated commitment to immigrant rights advocacy work within the State of Oregon.
Fellowship funds provided monetary support for professional development and immigrants rights advocacy work, such as:
- training, workshops, or coaching;
- skills development in leadership, community organizing;
- continuing education or study;
- development of a new community-based organization or initiative.
The Immigrant Rights and Advocacy Fellowship was established from funds managed by Seeding Justice due to the dissolution of Causa. The dissolution of Causa was a huge and disruptive loss to the Immigrant Rights Advocacy community. Our charge was to manage the distribution of assets and to steward these funds into immigrant advocacy and organizing.
As part of this effort, we previously made Immigration Rights and Advocacy Fund Grants to Vision Comunitaria, Centro de Servicios Para Campesinos, Oregon for all (Willamette Valley Law Project), and MERIT (Prosperidad).
Seeding Justice prioritized individuals who:
- through their immigrant rights and advocacy work address root causes of injustice and focus(ed) on changing systems, or built collective power in their work.
- are intentionally anti-racist, anti-oppression, and intersectional in their thinking, approaches and solutions;
- are Black and Indigenous people or from other communities of color, especially those people who identify as LGBTQIA2S+, immigrants and refugees, folks living with disabilities, people living with low incomes, folks that are currently or formerly incarcerated, houseless people, and those living in rural communities.
- have a demonstrated commitment to Immigrant Rights work in Oregon;
- work or have worked in an immigrant rights and advocacy focused non-profit organization in the last five years, whether in a paid or volunteer capacity.