Some of Chahara Foundation’s past grantees included:
Adbar Ethiopian Women’s Alliance
Ethiopian women organization to convince Ethiopian refugee/immigrant women that it is OK to be organized on behalf of our own personal, social, economic and cultural growth.
Ana da Hora Workers Center
The fundamental purpose of the Workers Center is to help empower our marginalized sisters and brothers in the workplace and in the community.
Association of Eritrean Women
Encouraging the Eritrean-American women in engaging on programs that are designed to empower women and informing and mobilizing Eritrean girls and owmen ways to achieve gender equality in today’s society.
Association of Haitian Women in Boston
Believe that everyone regardless of race or sex should have equal rights and equal opportunities. We believe that it is human rights to have representation, to have health, education, and decent housing.
CAPAY
The Coalition for Asian Pacific American Youth is a youth empowerment organization that motivates and mobilizes Asian American high school students to get active in their schools and communities. We do this through consciousness raising, coalition building, activism, and identity awareness. www.capayus.org
Cape Verdean Community UNIDO
The goal of VALOR is to recreate a sense of community where violence ceases to exist. Through a series of Healing Circles, a group of mothers and daughters that have lost a loved one to incarceration, deportation or murder, will build a common sense of values that promotes shared responsibility and strenghtens both the Cape Verdean community and the broader Roxbury and Dorchester communities.
Chinese Progressive Association
Organize and develop the leadership roles of Chinese immigrant women in the workplace, in our organization, and in the community at large.
The City School
Grant to support three young women to attend an Incite conference in Chicago. The young girls work in Boston around the issues of incarceration, rape and sexual assault, and popular education for youth around issues of racial and economic justice.
Cooperative Economics for Women
Organizes low-income immigrant refugees and battered women of color in self-sustaining, worker-owned cooperatives and organizing groups identified by language to achieve livable wages, heighten political consciousness, and fully participate in civil society.
Crossing Communities Collaborative
The project fosters spiritual and educational growth of women activists from Boston to Havana, Cuba and vice versa to enable cross-cultural enrichment, and develop a network of progressive women for sharing and reflecting strategies of community struggles and organizing.
Development Leadership Network
A national membership organization of individuals working in community building and economic development (CED) dedicated to developing and implementing practices which integrate a broad social, economic and racial justice vision into the CED field.
Freedom House
Sisters Circle a girls-project centers on leadership development and physical health, which helps girls develop healthy self-esteem, develop new skills, and realize the world of opportunities available as they grow into tomorrow’s leaders.
Haitian Women in Action
Brings together Haitian women who do not have a background in community organizing or a formulated political agenda, but who are motivated to make changes in their community.
Hermanas/Kinship
A new initiative that promotes equity and empowerment for poor/low/moderate income/and homeless women and their families in Cambridge. The projects overall goal is to mobilize and establish a network of women who will be involved in developing community resources and be involved in the political processes of the city and their lives.
Homes for Families
Work on ending family homelessness; prioritize leadership development of homeless mothers so they can create social change and affect public policy.
Immigrant Workers Resource Center
Supports the development of leadership skills for immigrant women, who historically have the least access to resources, and who are excluded from full participation in their workplaces and communities because of their race, class, gender and ethnicity.
Irish Immigration Center
Launching “Women of the Rainbow Project,” a unique pilot program that incorporates a variety of forms of artistic expression to foster meaningful connections among a diverse group of women. By providing an opportunity for women of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds to come together around their own creativity and artistic expression.
International Institute of Greater Lawrence
The Mirabal Sisters’ Educational Center was created to respond to the need for Latina childcare providers in Lawrence. This needs response includes having instructors, staff and the curriculum reflect the socio-economic backgrounds and racial diversity of program participants.
Massachusetts Asian & Pacific Islander AIDS Prevention Project
Provides culturally and linguistically appropriate education, training, and empowerment, and has initially been funded as a HIV/AIDS demonstration project through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Minority Health.
Massachusetts English Plus Coalition
Organization to counter the efforts of the English-only movement to make English the official language of Lowell and Massachusetts. The organization opposes English-only efforts because they lead to the discrimination and disenfranchisement of language minorities, and engender feelings of bigotry that threaten the very foundation of a healthy community.
Massachusetts Vietnamese American Women’s League
A group of active Vietnamese immigrant and refugee women felt the need to critically respond to issues that were marginalized both within the mainstream and Vietnamese community. We advocate for a voice and a constructive space to intimately dialogue about issues such as domestic violence, sexism, cultural and socio-economic barriers, and discrimination against Vietnamese women.
Mission Safe
Youth development organization that works primarily with highly at-risk African-American and Latino youth in Mission Hill and the surrounding neighborhoods. Our mission is to work with at-risk youth and their families to help them gain the skills and confidence to thrive, not merely survive, and to work to improve their community and the larger world.
Mujeres Unidas en Accion
To help women to break the barriers that stand in the way of the social and economic growth of Latina women.
Navarasa Dance Theater
Organization that promotes, nurtures and participate in cultural activism. Navarasa believes that art is an effective and powerful medium to convey political messages and engage and mobilize people to affect positive social change. Navarasa works to create social justice awareness and to empower people to make change, especially people of color. www.navarasa.org
The Network/La Red
Organization on the East Coast that serves as a local and national model for battered women’s programs, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (GLBT) health care and service providers and other GLBT domestic violence groups.
New Freedwoman Project
The project is currently engaged in arts workshops at Women’s prison to develop work with participants that will be used in performance or become a visual installation of the work of Women at the Center.
On with Living & Learning, Inc. (OWLL)
OWLL provides a theater based leadership training program for women and youth infected and affected by HIV/AIDS with the goal of developing artistic community presentations which weave their true stories into prevention messages that address the systemic roots of poverty, racism, and gender inequality fueling the staggering increase of new infections among women of color and to decrease the stigma so unjustly stapled to them.
Older Women’s League (OWL)
An organization that educates, advocates and mobilizes women to fight on their own behalf. The organization is an advocate of and on behalf of midlife and older women.
PeaceWatch Ireland
Works to support peace, justice and equity in Ireland by linking struggles, information, and resources across cultures, borders, and issues.
Raising Our Children’s Children (ROCC)
Serving grandparents and other relatives who are raising their children’s children. ROCC serves this particular population in large part because the issue of relatives raising children was not on the radar screen of the larger social service delivery system. ROCC was uniquely situated to help newly formed families deal with the variety of difficult legal, financial, medical and emotional issues that need to be addressed when relatives assume these parenting responsibilities.
Religious Coalition for Reproduction Choice of MA
We affirm women’s ability to make moral decisions about their health and their lives. Therefore, we activate religious communities to work to ensure the availability of a full range of reproductive health services for all.
Reflect & Strengthen
To create a support circle for young women to share our experiences and create art from them. Through discussion and writing, we will share our struggles and begin to heal from our mental and emotional scars. Such struggles as the murder of sibling, the incarceration of us or loved ones, low self-esteem, rape, drug abuse, promiscuity and other such tragedies.
Refugee & Immigrant Assistance
Serves the health and socio-economic and cultural needs of refugees and immigrants from the born horn of Africa (East Africa). Serving new immigrants attempting to reside in the USA, the absence of community organization makes it difficult to effectively advocate changes in services and opportunities available to them.
Revealing Artistic Works (RAW)
RAW is a stepping-stone to bring positive paradigms to young girls who are otherwise subject to the negative messages in the media and in the streets.
Rhythm Vision Production
Provide access to our clientele, encouraging them to find new gifts within themselves and within their communities. Finally, we commit to making our goals a reality. Once self worth and access are in place, commitment is inherent.
Roofless Women
Through their belief in personal and collective power, Roofless Women aims to lift and combine the voices of women who have touched homelessness. They maintain a firm commitment to non-traditional structures, especially peer support & leadership development which encourages personal growth and systemic change.
SABAI
SABAI is an organization in Lowell, MA that is directed and staffed by Cambodian/Asian women. The agency seeks to address issues related to the disparities in access health services and understanding health insurance among Southeast Asians.
A Slice of Rice
Asian and Asian-American queer youth. A Slice of Rice work to end the isolation and discrimination faced by our constituency.
Strong Women, Strong Girls
Program is to utilize the lessons learned from strong women throughout history to encourage young girls to become strong women themselves.
Survivors, Inc.
Our purpose is to provide information about rights to benefit and basic human needs so low-income/no income people can be heard, to educate people and develop analysis about social welfare issue, to develop leadership among low-income people, and to help mobilize a large welfare rights constituency in order to develop more humane social policy.
Tien Xanh-Voice
The organization works with high-risk girls because we as Vietnamese-American women face the same societal and cultural challenges that limit their economic choices. This grant supported the organization to provide proven-risk Vietnamese-American adolescent girls in Dorchester through the Examine Life (ELLE) project.
Viet-Aid
The Viet-AID Family Child Care Program promotes opportunities for Vietnamese women who experience multiple barriers to have a viable profession, living wage salary, professional and leadership development opportunities that move them out of economic oppression.
Up You Mighty Race Theater Company (UYMR)
UYMR started of a theatre troupe that would study and perform works by playwrights of African decent. UYMR utilizes the arts as a catalyst for social awareness and change. By producing works that represent a positive image of people of African decent, UYMR cultivates the development of emerging theatrical artist, serve as an educational outlet for youth in the theatrical arts, and provides access and exposure to the performance arts for member of the community. UYMR is dedicated to presenting professional quality performances that exhibit integrity, reflects great thought, and honors our ancestors.
W.A.N.T.E.D.
(We Are Nevertheless Talented, Educated and Determined)
Works on behalf of young women ages 13-19 from low-income communities in order to enhance their opportunities. W.A.N.T.E.D. provides young women the needed information and resources to access more of what they need to accomplish their newly outlined goals. We seek solutions to our conditions while working with their families and teachers.
Women Connecting Affecting Change (Women of Color AIDS Council)
To prevent women from acquiring AIDS and assist infected women to cope with the virus by providing them with education and opportunities to help them preserve their physical, emotional, and spiritual health and well being.
Women of Action
Women of Action is a multi-issue, direct action, grassroots organization of low-income women organizing for social and economic justice.
Women of Color Fundraising Institute
Help women of color, especially immigrant and marginalized constituents (now at a greater target) learn the necessary skills to sustain our movement.
Women of Courage
Provides essential services including emotional support to women suffering the effects of having been diagnosed with Systemic and/or Discoid Lupus Erythematosus. Also provide education, and information to lupus sufferers, their family members and friends as well as the general public.
Women’s Fightback Network
WFN organizes around the issues related to the impact of racism, poverty, war and budget cuts on women and children, including the LGBT communities, youth, immigrants and people living with HIV/AIDS. We also make the links between the US wars abroad and the impact of the war at home on women and children. We focus our efforts on building a united fightback movement that can address and solve these issues.
Women’s Institute for Leadership Development (W.I.L.D.)
Works to increase the number and diversity of women labor leaders and promote a new model of a democratic, inclusive and anti-racist labor movement. WILD believes that women, especially women of color, will play a key role in providing new leadership for the labor movement. www.communityworks.com/thml/mgd/WILD.html