This year as we celebrate and honor the Black community on Juneteenth, we reflect on the role we can take in working together against the lasting impact of slavery.
This year marks the third year of the Gobioff Foundation’s Juneteenth grant making. The program started initially as a reaction to the horrible murder of George Floyd and as way to acknowledge the accountability we had as philanthropists in a system that continues to marginalize the Black community. In 2021 we announced that every year on Juneteenth we would highlight 5 organizations to receive $20,000 in the form of an unrestricted grant from the Gobioff Foundation.
Today, alongside reflection, we celebrate. We celebrate these organizations and the Black community. We celebrate the people who work every day to raise the voices of those who are marginalized. We celebrate the culture makers, and advocates, and the leaders. This year we have chosen organizations working in distinctly different areas with unique populations.
Along side these grants, we continue to grow and learn. Each year we make advancements in our grant making and relationships within the community, outside of this single day.
If you have an organization you’d like us to consider in future years or if you’d like to volunteer to be on a committee to help us make these decisions, please contact us at juneteenth@gobioff-foundation.org.
The Gobioff Foundation continues to challenge everyone to stand up. Show up. Listen. Act. Be an Ally. Not just today, but on all days, Black Lives Matter.
Neil Gobioff
President, Gobioff Foundation
The five organizations receiving $20,000 unrestricted grants from the Gobioff Foundation this year are:
The Florida Coalition on Black Civic Participation
Mission: “The Florida Coalition strives to create an enlightened community by building institutional capacity at both the national and local levels that provides and develops African American leadership. By educating, organizing and mobilizing citizens in our communities, the Coalition seeks to encourage full participation in a barrier-free democracy. Through educational programs and leadership training, the Coalition works to expand, strengthen and empower our communities to make voting and civic participation a cultural responsibility and tradition.”
Center for Racial Justice in Education
Mission: “The Center for Racial Justice in Education’s mission is to train and empower educators to dismantle patterns of racism and injustice in our schools and communities. At the Center for Racial Justice in Education, we envision a world where all young people learn and thrive in racially equitable, liberating, and empowering educational spaces.”
Equity in the Center
Vision: “Equity in the Center envisions a future where nonprofit and philanthropic organizations adopt a Race Equity Culture focused on proactive counteraction of social inequities. We must build a future where white dominant culture is dismantled within all social sector organizations, institutional and structural racism have been eliminated at all levels of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, and race equity has been achieved within organizations, across the social sector, and in communities.”
Marsha P Johnson Institute
Mission: “The Marsha P. Johnson Institute (MPJI) protects and defends the human rights of BLACK transgender people. We do this by organizing, advocating, creating an intentional community to heal, developing transformative leadership, and promoting our collective power.
We intend to reclaim our relationship as BLACK trans people to our movement legacy. It is in our reclaiming of this that we give ourselves permission to reclaim autonomy to our minds, to our bodies, and to our futures. We were founded both as a response to the murders of BLACK trans women and women of color and how that is connected to our exclusion from social justice issues, namely racial, gender, and reproductive justice, as well as gun violence.”
Black Youth Project
About: “The Black Youth Project will examine the attitudes, resources, and culture of the young, urban black millennial, exploring how these factors and others influence their decision-making, norms, and behavior in critical domains such as sex, health, and politics. Arguably more than any other subgroup of Americans, African American youth reflect the challenges of inclusion and empowerment in the post–civil rights period. At the core of this project will be an exploration of what young black Americans think about the political, cultural, and sexual choices and challenges confronting them and their peer group. We are especially interested in understanding what new factors help to shape or contribute to the social and political attitudes and behaviors of African American youth.
The Black Youth Project is a platform that highlights the voices and ideas of Black millennials. Through knowledge, voice, and action, we work to empower and uplift the lived experiences of young Black Americans today”