Please join us in celebrating the 2025 Giving Project Fund for Community Organizing Grantees:

• JustME for JustUS
• Niweskok: From the Stars to Seeds
• Out in the Open
• Portland Outright
• Presente! Maine
• Southern Maine Workers Center

Each of these organizations is doing important and inspiring work that shows how community organizing is a powerful lever for making change from the bottom up. Their work is democracy in action led by and for their communities, and focuses on critical justice issues, including:

• Rural youth political engagement; 
• The rematriation of Wabanaki lifeways; 
• Rural LGBTQ+ community building; 
• Food and land access for displaced or dispossessed Afro/Indigenous Latines; and 
• The conditions and terms of employment for the poor and working class.

We are pleased and proud to support each of these organizations with a one-year, unrestricted grant of $20,000 to support their work. 

We encourage you to learn more about each of these organizations and consider supporting their work directly. 

The grantmaking decisions were made entirely by our inaugural donor organizing cohort, a cross-class, muti-racial, multi-generational group of 18 dedicated individuals who also raised the funding to support these grants. We celebrate this collective effort to resource the critically needed social change organizing desperately needed at this moment.

The Giving Project is a model of social justice philanthropy that engages people across race and class to support community organizing in their community. At its essence, a Giving Project is a mechanism for donor organizing, wealth redistribution & community accountability. Learn more about this Maine Initiatives’ program here.

Photo credit: Niweskok