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Echoing Justice is an action research project of the Echo Justice Communications Collaborative—a multi-year initiative to incubate, innovate, and implement movement building communications strategies that strengthen racial justice alliances and their impact.

What we found through our State of the Field project demonstrates the value of funding multi-issue, multi-constituency community organizing, as well as the merits of general operating support and multi-year funding. Below are observations from our Building Bridges, Building Power: Developments in Institution-Based Community Organizing report about the structure and approach of institution-based community organizing, how it has expanded over the past decade, the current funding of the field, and some recommendations for philanthropy.

This paper seeks to identify ways to better connect two disparate realities that can be found side by side in America today: the growing needs of struggling communities and the vast but detached institutional wealth to which they are home. While communities across the United States continue to suffer in the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, huge pools of investment capital are often to be found sitting right next door.

For more than two decades, Illinois grantmakers expressed a desire for open and ongoing dialogue between a succession of attorney generals and their staffs through a structured advisory council. The purpose of such a council would be to help educate state officials about the roles, missions, needs and successes of Illinois’ philanthropic sector.