WCF Home  >  Grants  >  FY 2004-2005 Grants

CSWAB’s mission includes empowering, unifying and strengthening communities affected by environmental pollution in order to restore the integrity of damaged natural systems. CSWAB empowers communities of color by ensuring they are informed, involved and engaged in response to the proposed open burning of contaminated buildings at Badger Army Ammunition Plant and supports communities by providing organizing tools to strengthen local campaigns.

Community Union’s multi-racial Board and membership work collectively to identify issues and take action to challenge systemic racial and economic injustices affecting communities of the poor, of color and of the powerless in Milwaukee. CU works to address racism by promoting and empowering grassroots efforts designed to challenge racist economic and social policies in Milwaukee. The grant provides funds for general operating expenses.

ILI is committed to reducing racial tensions at Lakeland Union High School (Minocqua) by promoting cultural understanding through inter-cultural experiences at the grade school level. The grant will provide support for additional salaries to continue this highly successful program.

As a grassroots resource and organizing center, the Madison Infoshop works for radical and progressive social change in Wisconsin. Funding will go for general operating expenses of purchases for the lending library, subscriptions for materials, a computer printer, and outreach. 

NPCWF seeks to develop and sustain a grassroots constituency that uses the political process to guarantee every woman the right to make personal decisions regarding the full range of reproductive choices, including preventing unintended pregnancy, bearing healthy children and choosing legal abortion. Funding will help with outreach to traditionally under represented groups: young women, women of color and rural women and build relationships, identify and develop leaders, expand and train activists and improve outreach and communication with targeted communities.

Repairers of the Breach is composed of formerly homeless, at-risk homeless and dedicated Board, staff and volunteers, whose collective purpose is to advocate, address, educate, empower and organize, working for sustainable change with and for the homeless. Funding will be used for General Operating Expenses to help defray 2004 operating costs for the Tony Lee Sanctuary Center in Milwaukee. These costs include water for showers, telephone and voicemail, electricity, and heating and cooling costs. 

This group focuses public attention on the criminal justice system and mobilizes public action to reduce the number of incarcerated persons; enact an appropriate balance between incarceration and community based programs that is humane cost effective and better preserves public safety; and to remove the disproportionate impact of the criminal justice system on people of color, people in poverty, people of limited education and people with mental illness. The grant goes for general operating expenses. 
Granted $

The Madison-based WRNC provides programs, services and access to resources that promote personal growth and community well being, in response to neighborhood needs. To build the capacity of the Teen Build UP (TBU) to engage youth of color and low income youth across Dane county in direct action campaigns on juvenile justice and other youth issues.

By placing apprentice organizers with small groups dedicated to working for social change in Madison and Milwaukee, WI-AOP helps build organizations able to respond to issues in poor communities. This grant will help recruit, select, place, train and support up to six apprentices.

WRC works to create, support, and sustain rural learning communities that engage young people as partners with adults to make their rural communities good places in which to learn, work and live. The funded project will pilot a rural capacity-building project initiative in 3 rural communities facing economic and educational challenges common across rural WI. The initiative will work with each community for 3 years to facilitate a democratically conceived locally owned process resulting in a shared vision and plan for future sustainability.

The Freewheel Community Workshop is a collectively-operated warehouse that aims to share skills, workspace and salvaged materials at low cost or free for use by community activists, low income people and youth. The group is hosting a 2 day public skill-share with biofuels activist Maria Alovert from Berkeley, CA. Covered will be safety, quality control and small-scale biodiesel processor construction. Ms Alovert is a recognized innovator in the field and her knowledge will help galvanize a cooperative biofuels effort in Dane County. The workshop will also be used to build a new processor.

Funding will go to help cover the costs of sending a group of volunteers of ICWJ to the national Interfaith Committee for Worker justice pre-conference on workers’ centers in Chicago, IL in May, 2005. Funds will go for lodging and travel expenses.

Funding will go for a panel discussion on the history of the IWW in Wisconsin on Saturday May 14th. The panel is part of a series of events planned for April and May as local commemorations of the IWW Centenary. The panel is important as it helps keep alive an understanding of the connections between the past and the present, and labor and the anti-war movement.

Funding will go for the cost of printing the first hundred copies of their new publication: Terrorism, the Iraq War, and Our Classrooms: A Collection of Teaching articles and resources from Rethinking Schools.

Funding to send Dianne Riley to Midwest Academy for Organizer training in March 2005. Dianne works with the Incarceration Coalition of the TFMEP. 

The grant will go for anti-racist training for the new apprentices, their mentors and WI-AOP Board members.

The grant will go for bringing women from a sewing coop in Managua to Madison in early October as part of a national tour.

Besides being Wisconsin’s oldest incorporated shelter serving domestic abuse victims and child witnesses of domestic abuse, Women and Children’s Horizons is the only agency in Kenosha County providing services to child witnesses of domestic abuse. Using this grant, Women and Children’s Horizons will be able to purchase a new TTY phone for the emergency shelter. The phone will be used as the hotline for clients and potential clients with disabilities. The phone will be used by all clients needing to use it as well and also by the hotline staff to communicate easier with persons in the community with auditory disabilities. 

Funding will go for an International Women’s Day event on March 6th at the Pres House in Madison. the event will feature Ms Marguerite Laurent a playwright and activist attorney from Haiti. WCF has been an active participant in the International Women’s day event at Pres House for several years.

Last year’s grant played a crucial role in moving this project forward by supporting the Red Cliff Land Recovery’s initiative entitled “Empowering Our Community Through Land-based Education.” The Red Cliff Band is the second poorest Chippewa Tribe in Wisconsin. The Tribe’s land was signed away to the federal government in the 1850’s, the primary reason for the poverty now engulfing the reservation (49% unemployment during winter months). The current grant will be used to transition the project into a land trust. 

MTN is a Native American and non-Native alliance committed to defending American Indian treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, environmental protection and cultural respect. WCF will be funding the Nationhood Gathering on a northern WI reservation in June 2005. This is an historic opportunity to build grassroots unity among tribes in the western Great Lakes region, to educate and empower youth, and to mobilize Native people (and non-Native supporters) around treaty rights and tribal sovereignty as the means to bring about environmental justice and cultural survival. 

We Indians Parent Committee was organized 30 years ago to empower parents within the Milwaukee Public School District to be knowledgeable advocates for the Native American community regarding special education issues for their children. The grant will help to recruit Native American parents of special education students to participate in special education training, inform parents of special education students of resources in the district and the community, and develop recruiting and public relations materials to better inform parents of their rights and responsibilities. 

 NARAL Pro-Choice WI Foundation is the state’s only organization dedicated exclusively to political advocacy for reproductive freedom. Funds received from the SKMF will assist in outreach efforts to traditionally under-represented groups such as young women, women of color, and rural women.

 GLSEN-SCW works with students and educators in Wisconsin to create an environment in which every child learns to respect and accept all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity or expression. The grant will help support their High School Gay-Straight Alliance Outreach and K-12 Professional Education programs.

 CSWAB is an environmental organization founded to address issues of pollution in and around Badger Army Ammunition Plant near Baraboo, WI. The group received funds to mobilize grassroots opposition to a proposed exemption to federal law that would allow the U.S. military to open-burn PCBs and other toxins found in hundreds of buildings at the Plant.

Rosalie Manor started as a home for single pregnant women and has grown into a social service agency providing services to single mothers, fathers and youth. 

Habitat for Humanity International is a nonprofit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry. HFHI seeks to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the world, and to make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action. Habitat invites people of all backgrounds, races and religions to build houses together in partnership with families in need.

WAOP recruits, selects, places, trains and supports apprentices in community organizing with groups working for social justice in Madison and Milwaukee.

Working to inform, support and advocate for students and families of color in the public schools.

A statewide network of over 150 groups working for peace and justice throughout Wisconsin.

Scholarship for the University of Minnesota

A project of Peace Action that seeks to educate and inform about working for peace in local neighborhoods, the nation and the world.

A group working to support children of political activists who are under attack in their communities. Named for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a couple persecuted and executed for their political beliefs by the US government in 1953.

Grants to 31 Latino workers in the Madison area.

2004-2005 Donor Advised Grants Total: 

Grand Total

$ 214,606

1202 Williamson St, Suite D
Madison WI  53703
Tel: (608) 251-6834
FAX: (608) 251-6846

e-mail:  info@wcfund.org

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