Purpose
In the past, we have neglected as an organization to take a continued stance on police brutality and the institutionalized anti-Blackness in the United States. As a program committed to Justice and dedicated to educating ourselves and our students on the historic and present marginalization of groups in the U.S., we understand our silence as an act of oppression and a failure in our purpose.
In our commitment to supporting anti-racist organizations, we have put together the following list of nonprofits to engage with and donate to. We commit to creating programming in the coming months and years that centers missions like those of these organizations.
Black Affinity Spaces
Universities, like all American institutions, did not consider the different expectations and lived experiences of diverse groups in their formation—in fact, they were often designed to intentionally exclude Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color (BISOC). As such, collegiate environments are often skewed to the needs of white students. Below we've shared a brief description and contact information for several off-campus organizations that offer Black affinity spaces.
In addition to these off-campus organizations, we want to highlight the spaces and
programming offered by the U's Black Cultural Center, Black Student Union, Black Faculty & Staff Association, and many others.
Their Mission
Melanin Squad is a safe space for women of color to foster deep connections with one another through quarterly curated events.
What You Can Do
Join, facilitate partnerships to support their work (contact org before doing so), donate
Their Mission
Outdoor Afro is at the forefront of helping more people, particularly Black people, equitably reconnect with the natural world through Outdoor Recreation. We activate networks in nearly 30 states, led by trained volunteer leaders who facilitate activities such as hiking, biking, camping, environmental education, conservation stewardship, and more.
What You Can Do
Join/attend local meet-ups, donate
Their Mission
Color Outside helps women of color harness the power of the outdoors to create the JOY-filled, balanced lives they crave through coaching, workshops, & one-of-a-kind retreats.
What You Can Do
Join (online engagement and community events), facilitate local business partnerships to support their work (contact org before doing so), donate
Their Mission
Curly Me is a resource for families with children of color, specifically black girls 5-14 years old. We hold quarterly events to help educate, empower and encourage them to be there best selves.
What You Can Do
Join/attend events, provide publicity, donate
Their Mission
Our purpose is to teach how-to do African American genealogy and how-to write yours & your family's story.
What You Can Do
Participate in a virtual event, connect with genealogy services, provide publicity, attend/support Black History Conference at Fort Douglas in Sep. 2021, donate
Their Mission
Our motto is “Keeping Hope Alive” and we work with youth and families to help keep dreams alive and imagine a world where they contribute and participate in its positive growth and prosperity. We do so by opening doors of opportunity to celebrate arts and culture, support and celebrate academic foundations, and promote health and wellness.
What You Can Do
Participate in programs and events, donate
Their Mission
We are a collective of Black medical and mental health clinicians servicing the needs of the Black community and committed to creating healing spaces for all.
What You Can Do
Participate in virtual or in-person events centered on mental health for the Black community in Utah, spread the word in campus spaces and beyond, donate
Their Mission
To serve as a collective voice in support of a better Utah. The Utah Black Roundtable is a community collaborative established to work on issues and solutions impacting the lives and well-being of Blacks/African Americans in Utah. Through advocacy, and in collaboration with others, we work to enhance the quality of life while eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in several key areas.
What You Can Do
Join, attend events, provide publicity, donate
Their Mission
The UndocuBlack Network (UBN) is a multigenerational network of currently and formerly undocumented Black people that fosters community, facilitates access to resources, and contributes to transforming the realities of our people, so we are thriving and living our fullest lives.
What You Can Do
Join, access resources, provide publicity, donate
Offer Direct Support: Volunteer & Donate
The following organizations are local to Salt Lake City, center anti-racism in their
work, and have known direct volunteer opportunities that you can get involved with.
Please get in touch with these organizations if you have questions about how you can
best support them and their work.
Their Mission
#BlackLivesMatter was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes. By combating and countering acts of violence, creating space for Black imagination and innovation, and centering Black joy, we are winning immediate improvements in our lives.
What You Can Do
Attend sponsored protests, donate
Their Mission
PANDOS peacefully advocates for basic human and environmental rights, primarily Native and Indigenous rights. By organizing support and education, we encourage dialogue and the protection of our shared home. We are a diverse group of both native and non-native people who are passionate about working together to ensure this mission.
What You Can Do
Volunteer to help organize events and dialogues, donate to help deliver test kits to the Navajo Nation
Their Mission
To improve the lives of harmed and justice-involved women and girls by empowering them through gender responsive case-management and mentorship; and with social advocacy to the systems that serve them. Mentoring and case management are available for women who are victims of abuse, homeless, victims of trafficking, struggling with substance abuse or mental illness, and women who are on parole or probation.
What You Can Do
Volunteer (opportunities inside and outside Department of Corrections), donate
Their Mission
The Dignity in Schools Campaign (DSC) challenges the systemic problem of pushout in our nation’s schools and works to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. As a national coalition, the DSC builds power amongst parents, youth, organizers, advocates and educators to transform their own communities, support alternatives to a culture of zero-tolerance, punishment, criminalization and the dismantling of public schools, and fight racism and all forms of oppression.
What You Can Do
Learn more about their work and how you can be involved, donate
Their Mission
To empower Latinx to recognize and achieve their own potential and be a positive force for change in the larger community.
What You Can Do
Volunteer (coordinate and recruit fundraising teams, leverage community support, plan activities), donate
Their Mission
Salt Lake Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), doing business as NeighborWorks® Salt Lake (NWSL), builds on the strengths of neighborhoods, creating opportunities through housing, resident leadership, and youth and economic development. We work in partnership with residents, government, and businesses to build and sustain neighborhoods of choice.
What You Can Do
Become familiar with this community resource, donate
Their Mission
There are three ways that Black Futures Lab is a different kind of project for change: our mission to engage the Black community year-round; our commitment to use our political strength to stop corporate influences from creeping into public policies; and our plan to combine technology and traditional organizing methods to reach Black people anywhere and everywhere we are.
What You Can Do
Take action (sign petitions, join their volunteer action network, register to vote), donate
Their Mission
To uplift and advocate for our communities by creating media content that is for us, by us. Just Media Utah is a growing collective of organizers committed to fight oppression by broadening our understanding of the different expressions of exploitation and engaging in struggles that build popular, sustainable power.
What You Can Do
Learn more about their work and how you can be involved, provide publicity, donate
Their Mission
We are fighting for a world without prisons, policing, surveillance and punishment. Today, the Dream Defenders is organizing Black and Brown youth to build power in our communities to advance a new vision we have for the state. Our agenda is called the Freedom Papers. Through it, we are advancing our vision of safety and security – away from prisons, deportation, and war – and towards healthcare, housing, jobs and movement for all.
What You Can Do
Download their Defunding the Police Toolkit, support their mission, donate
Their Mission
People are coming together to confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism.
What You Can Do
Take action (join a state campaign, attend events, submit COVID-19- and poverty-related memorials, call representatives, watch livestreams), provide publicity, donate
Their Mission
The purpose and aims of our organization shall be to improve the political, educational, social, and economic status of minority groups. In turn, to eliminate racial prejudice, to keep the public aware of the adverse effects of racial discrimination, and to take lawful action to secure its elimination.
What You Can Do
Attend events, learn more about their work and how you can be involved, donate
Their Mission
This Migrant Mutual Aid Network was created to answer the needs of the Utah Undocumented Community in wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Being located in Utah, our community members do not have many non-profits or infrastructure set up to care for Undocu-Migrants and their needs; many of us are left out of private and state-sponsored relief.
What You Can Do
DONATE to the fund!
Virtual & Remote Engagement
The following are opportunities to engage with anti-racist organizations virtually
or remotely. Please get in touch with these organizations if you have questions about
how you can best support them and their work.
Their Mission
We believe it is key for Black people to be agents in creating systematic shifts in this country, and we believe that Black people engaging in direct action is a key tactic in creating this change.
What You Can Do
Connect with services/resources, raise awareness, donate
Their Mission
We mobilize our members to end practices and systems that unfairly hold Black people back, and champion solutions that move us all forward.
What You Can Do
Become a Black trainee, raise awareness, donate
Their Mission
We work to connect people across the country while supporting and collaborating with local and national racial justice organizing efforts. SURJ provides a space to build relationships, skills and political analysis to act for change.
What You Can Do
Donate, start a local chapter
Education: Anti-Blackness, Anti-Racism, & Police Brutality
A core component of the Bennion Center's Alternative Breaks program is providing our students with a robust educational curriculum that is critical of our own biases and thoughtful in our approach to social and environmental justice. We believe it's important, when discussing complex problems and injustices, to be able to have informed dialogue rooted in shared understanding and openness to learning.
Below we've provided brief introductions to some of the topics that—though not at all new problems in our communities—have recently been discussed more and more in popular discourse and media. These short introductions are followed by lists of additional educational materials related to each topic. Many of these resources were compiled by Break Away and shared with and reviewed by members of our program.
Anti-Blackness
Anti-Blackness is "a two-part formation that both strips Blackness of value (dehumanizes), and systematically marginalizes Black people. This form of anti-Blackness is overt racism... Beneath this anti-Black racism is the covert structural and systemic racism which predetermines the socioeconomic status of Blacks in this country and is held in place by anti-Black policies, institutions, and ideologies."
- Council for Democratizing Education
» INTERACT | 1619 Project (Interactive, New York Times)
» READ | 1619 Project PDF (Pulitzer)
» READ | We Must Keep Their Names Alive (Aspen Institute)
» READ | The Case for Capitalizing the B in Black (The Atlantic)
» LISTEN (TRANSCRIPT) | The health effects of racism (Fighting the Machine, 35 min)
» LISTEN | Is This The Blueprint for Black Liberation? (Black History Year, 35 min)
Anti-Racism
"Being antiracist is fighting against racism. Racism takes several forms and works most often in tandem with at least one other form to reinforce racist ideas, behavior, and policy.
"No one is born racist or antiracist; these result from the choices we make. Being antiracist results from a conscious decision to make frequent, consistent, equitable choices daily. These choices require ongoing self-awareness and self-reflection as we move through life. In the absence of making antiracist choices, we (un)consciously uphold aspects of white supremacy, white-dominant culture, and unequal institutions and society. Being racist or antiracist is not about who you are; it is about what you do."
- National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian
» READ | Letters for Black Lives (multiple languages)
» READ| Accomplices Not Allies: Abolishing the Ally Industrial Complex (Indigenous Action)
» LISTEN | Code Switch (multiple episodes, NPR)
» LISTEN | Momentum: A Race Forward (multiple episodes, Color Lines)
» WATCH | A Conversation on Race & Privilege (Angela Davis & Jane Elliot, 1 hr 42 min)
» WATCH | Justice by Design (Antionette Carroll, TED, 13 min)
» WATCH | Tools for How to be an Anti-Racist (Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, 4 min; buy the full book)
Police Brutality & Abolitionism
Police brutality is the unwarranted or excessive and often illegal use of force against civilians by law enforcement officers. In the United States, Black people are affected by and lose their lives to police brutality at highly disproportionate rates compared to their white peers. This excessive use of force by police officers against BIPOC individuals has led to the centering of reforming U.S. law enforcement through Defunding the Police and abolitionism in movements for racial justice.
DEFUND THE POLICE: a movement calling for a decrease in the funding that is given to policing and instead that money be reallocated to holistic investments and services that protect and serve our communities efficiently, such as: affordable housing, job training, education, heath care, mental health services, substance use and addiction services, childcare, parks and recreation, community centers, and libraries.
ABOLITIONISM: movements working for the undoing of institutions and systems that are harmful (such as prisons and police). Whereas reformers simply call for incremental changes to these systems, abolitionists recognize that these changes are often only cosmetic and do not actually address the injustices that these systems continue to inflict on marginalized groups.
"Reforming the prison entails changing its existing practices to make the system a better one. Abolishing the prison entails dismantling it wholesale. Reformers object to how the prison is administered. Abolitionists object to the prison’s very existence."
- Ruby C. Tapia
» READ | Defund the Police and Invest in Our Communities (Ben & Jerry’s)
» READ | Prison Abolition FAQ (K. Agbebiyi)
» READ | Slavery and the Origins of the American Police State (Medium)
» LISTEN | Throughline, American Police (NPR, 1 hr)
» LISTEN | Thinking about how to abolish prisons w/ Mariame Kaba (NBC News, 1 hr)
» WATCH | What Protesters Mean by ‘Defund the Police’ (Washington Post, 5 min)
» WATCH | What Does It Mean to Defund or Abolish the Police? (Trevor Noah, 20 min)