The Brooklyn Economic Justice Project (BEJP) is a community-based economic justice accelerator that informs local economic decision-making, educates and trains community members, and invests in their ideas for economic liberation.
Launched in 2020 with support from Fondation Chanel, BEJP is a three-year initiative that invests in organizations working to collectively interrupt the negative impacts of gentrification while strengthening economic prosperity for women, transgender, gender-nonconforming, and non-binary (TGNCNB) people, and their families in four underinvested neighborhoods: Bedford Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Bushwick, and East New York.
The second phase of BEJP is now underway!
Provide community technical assistance to grantee partners around defining economic justice, goals, and policies that affect their communities.
Provide microgrants (<$1,000) to nonprofit organizations in need of more resources and groups/individuals who are not 501(c)(3) but doing meaningful work in their communities.
Economic justice is the creation and support of stable infrastructure in communities that guarantees stable income, knowledge on land preservation, and economic opportunities—creating community autonomy through wealth building and interrupting cycles of survival to unlock thriving.
The Brooklyn Economic Justice Project provides multi-year funding to eight organizations addressing a range of interconnected issues critical to anti-gentrification and economic liberation, along with capacity building support, thought partnership, and a facilitated community of practice.
Black people, Black culture, and Black spaces exist in the future! Imagine and design the future into existence now, working inside and outside of social and political systems.
Create less hierarchy and more dialogue, inclusion, and empowerment.
Black joy is a radical act. Give due space to joy, laughter, humor, and gratitude.
Listen deeply and approach the work with an attitude towards learning without assumptions and predetermined solutions. Take constructive criticism without dispute.
Acknowledge the structures that create, maintain, and uphold inequity. Learn and practice new ways of intentionally making space for marginalized voices, stories, and bodies.
Meaningfully acknowledge the histories, injustice, innovations, and victories of spaces and places before new work begins. Reckon with the past as a means of healing, building trust, and deepening understanding of self and others.
Grow trust and move together with fluidity at whatever speed is necessary.
Walk with people as they imagine and realize their own futures. Be connectors, conveners, and collaborators—not representatives.
Cultivate a wealth of time, talent, and treasure that provide the freedom to risk, fail, learn and grow.