Category: Human Rights

Over the last two years, the pandemic exposed the intersections of multiple structures of inequality including race, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, and class, which have a multiplying, devastating effect when they cross paths for the same individual. Immigrant women of color, their families, and communities have experienced criminalization in this country in similar yet different ways. 

Q & A with Mariame Kaba, founder, and director of Project Nia and also co-founder and a principal at Interrupting Criminalization. Mariame Kaba is also a co-founder of Survived and Punished, a national formation that is working alongside and on behalf of criminalized survivors of violence.

The Human Rights program challenges the mass criminalization of Black, Brown, and people of color. We support ecosystems working to dismantle systems of incarceration, including immigrant detention, while also supporting them to build the vision of a world they want to see, not premised on punishment.

The Heising-Simons Foundation is pleased to join several other philanthropic funders to support the newly formed Community Violence Intervention Collaborative (CVIC). CVIC, formed by the Biden-Harris administration, will strengthen and grow community-led interventions in 15 jurisdictions to reduce violence and increase public safety for children, families, and communities in the United States. Violence is an epidemic …

I’d like to tell you a little story about a moment in time, years ago when I was a new teacher in Oakland, California, and I took my 5th/6thgrade class on a field trip to the old prison on Alcatraz Island. The children were wind-blown and exuberant from the ferry ride, and the island was stunning in the cold sunshine; we were tourists in this prison land from long ago.

Angie Junck, director of the Human Rights program at the Heising-Simons Foundation, has been named a 2021 Equity in Philanthropy Fellowship Fellow at Rockwood Leadership Institute.

Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR), the country’s only immigrant-focused philanthropy-supporting organization, has named Heising-Simons Foundation’s Human Rights Program Director Angie Junck as its new co-chair. Angie has been serving on GCIR’s board since January 2020.

The Heising-Simons Foundation recognizes that structural racism pervades our society and manifests through systems of punishment including mass incarceration. The result is the over criminalization of Black people and the under resourcing of Black people in economic, political, and social justice sectors. To address these issues, the Human Rights program invests in grassroots organizing led by Black people and other communities of color directly impacted by mass criminalization, while advancing reimagined approaches to safety, justice, and accountability.