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The first quarterly President Message from Marissa Tirona, GCIR President.
GCIR President Marissa Tirona speaks with Lian Cheun, Executive Director of Khmer Girls in Action (KGA) in Long Beach, California, an organization working for gender, racial, and economic justice through community and power building efforts led by Southeast Asian young women.
GCIR President Marissa Tirona speaks with Kris Hayashi, Executive Director of Transgender Law Center, the largest trans-led organization in the country.
In this edition, GCIR President Marissa Tirona speaks with Arcenio Lopez, Executive Director of Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project (MICOP). Read on as Arcenio shares his thoughts about building power for Indigenous immigrants, the importance of forging alliances with other Indigenous communities, and how philanthropy can support and strengthen the work of Indigenous migrants.
In this edition, GCIR President Marissa Tirona speaks with Magaly Urdiales, Co-executive Director of the Western North Carolina Workers' Center. Read on as Magaly shares her insights on organizing workers in her region, the innovative strategies they use to identify campaign issues and effect the changes workers want to see, and the important role philanthropy can play in building immigrant worker power and leadership in rural areas.
Cairo Mendes, GCIR's Director of State & Local Programs, reflects on the listening tour that has informed our new state & local strategy.
In her first President's Message of 2024, GCIR President Marissa Tirona shares how philanthropy can support pro-immigrant work in a challenging political and cultural context.
We’re here with issue #4 of the California Dignity for Families Fund (CDFF) Newsletter Series: Learning for Immigrant Justice. This month we’ll be spotlighting how to support BIPOC leadership of nonprofit organizations.
The recent political stunts of relocating migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Washington D.C., and New York City distract us from the urgent needs of the 2.4 million people who arrived and were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border this year. We invite you to look past the media sensationalism of these stories and learn with us as we focus on the rights, wellbeing, and dignity of migrants and share insights from the work being done at the border to support them.
2024 was a challenging year in the fight for immigrant and refugee justice. GCIR, movement leaders, and our partners in philanthropy have been preparing for an incoming presidential administration that poses an unprecedented threat to our immigrant communities. In the face of these challenges, GCIR doubled-down this year on developing programming, resources, and partnerships that reflect our dedication to moving money and power to migrant communities and resourcing a robust migrant justice infrastructure.
What do we hope to accomplish? What will success look like? What will it take to get there? These are some of the questions I grapple with as GCIR’s Programs Learning Manager. My position is new, reflecting the organization’s commitment to proactive learning throughout our work. In a nutshell, I aim to support the team in building evaluative capacity, including through the design (and constant iteration) of ways of working that make it easy for people to engage meaningfully in learning processes.
As I reflect on what brings me to this work, I am reminded that these roots run deep. As a Puerto Rican brought up in the United States, I was raised with an awareness of our nation’s history of colonialism and at times violent intervention in Latin America and beyond. I saw how the U.S. government had fought to ensure that the political and economic arrangements in Latin American countries suited its own interests, while then abdicating responsibility for the resulting destabilization.
As a native-born U.S. citizen working in the movement for immigrant justice, I often reflect on what brought me to this work out of the many social justice issues that demand our attention. Navigating the immigration system alongside my wife who immigrated from Albania to pursue her dreams of a better future opened my eyes to the complex and often challenging immigrant experience in America.
I often find myself going back to Davis’ words, especially on days when progress feels so excruciatingly slow and hopelessness begins to set in. Lately this has come in the form of news headlines of another school shooting and continued disappointment with elected officials for not delivering on their promises. Yet Angela Davis’ quote not only reminds me that the fight toward a liberated world takes time, but also that, even on the most difficult days, you must be as bold and far reaching as possible. After all, there is a role for everyone, including those of us in philanthropy, in the long-term fight for equity and justice. Given the considerable influence and power of philanthropy – a $90 billion sector – funders are well-positioned to play a key role in its radical transformation.
Welcome to Amplify, where we feature interviews with immigrant justice field leaders to showcase their work and provide a platform for their perspectives. In this episode of our Amplify podcast, GCIR President Marissa Tirona speaks with Maria Ibarra-Frayre, Co-Director of We the People Michigan. The organization is committed to building power and strengthening civic engagement for communities across Michigan through disciplined, rigorous, long-term community organizing.
In her quarterly message, GCIR President Marissa Tirona calls on philanthropy to step up in this critical moment and leverage its power in service of communities under attack by the current administration, including immigrants and refugees. She also shares how GCIR is stepping up in this moment to expand our state and local strategies, advance pro-immigrant policies, amplify power-building efforts and expand protections for migrants in the long-term.
GCIR’s recent webinar "Building Worker Power for Migrant Women" did something important beyond providing valuable content and timely insights: it gave us hope. The program,” showcased the miracle-making work being done in Arkansas, California, New Jersey, and New York to safeguard the rights of migrant women workers in the agriculture and poultry industries, and in the domestic work sector. In last month’s webinar, which was moderated by Carmen Randolph at Women’s Foundation of the South, we heard from local organizers at the California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.’s (CRLA) LGBTQ+ Program; Damayan, a group that serves and empowers low-wage Filipino workers living and working in New York City and New Jersey; and Venceremos, a worker-based organization in Arkansas whose mission is to ensure the human rights of poultry workers.
GCIR joins our philanthropic partners in condemning the administration’s stated intent to undermine the organizations that do the essential work of protecting and caring for our communities. This impending attack on nonprofits is an obvious extension of the assault we are seeing on law firms, universities, diversity initiatives, and others - a clear attempt to dismantle civil society institution by institution.