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Racial capitalism is one of the major factors that inflicts harm upon – and withholds power and resources from – people and communities who seek to stay, move freely, work, transform, and thrive. GCIR is focused on moving money and power to immigrant, refugee, and asylum seeker communities and movement groups. Understanding the proportion of philanthropic dollars that go to the immigrant justice movement is crucial to this advocacy. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) has documented the state of philanthropic funding for immigrant and refugee communities, and offers crucial recommendations for grantmakers who hope to liberate philanthropic assets in support of these communities.

Philanthropy has often conflated narrative change work with strategic communications, one-directional communications campaigns, or story projects that may have short-term effects but fail to transform cultural norms. Instead, narrative change means shifting our world view. As Pop Culture Collaborative’s Bridgit Antoinette Evans shares, narratives are all around us, “influencing everything about how we live, see, and think about ourselves in the world.” Narrative change involves the creation of a new story and communicating that story to audiences in ways that resonate with them, putting the new narrative into practice, and evaluating the efforts of that narrative shift and adapting it accordingly. The goal is to transform “the ecosystems of narratives, ideas, and cultural norms that shape the behaviors, mindsets, and worldviews of millions of people” – to transform “whole narrative oceans.”

Thank you for joining the first Legal Service Working Group meeting of 2020. 

The California Dignity for Families Fund is guided by an advisory committee with deep movement, community, government and philanthropic experience. This team has been charged with setting the Fund’s grantmaking strategy as well as selecting the partner organizations to receive grants.