J.M.K. Innovation Prize Awardees

Viridiana Carrizales and Vanessa Luna

ImmSchools seeks to transform America’s schools into safe and welcoming places for undocumented students and their families.

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Rolf Halden

One Water One Health is harnessing wastewater treatment plants across America to pinpoint harmful chemicals and help restore community health.

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Ebele Ifedigbo

The Hood Incubator leverages the legal cannabis industry to advance racial equity and build economic power for Black communities.

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Taneeza Islam

South Dakota Voices for Peace fights bigotry and hate against Muslims, immigrants, and refugees in rural places.

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Dominique Morgan

The REAP program provides reentry support for system-impacted LGBTQ+ people, rebuilding their power and centering their capabilities on the path forward.

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Kelly Orians and Ben Smith

The First 72+ helps stop recidivism through hand-in-hand housing, small-business incubation, and other services grounded in healing and hope.

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Michele Pistone

VIISTA seeks to revolutionize immigration law by creating a nationwide pipeline of legal advocates to advance immigrant justice.

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Nicholas A. Redding

An apprenticeship program for preservation tradespeople helps fill urgently needed jobs while building equity in the heritage movement.

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Michelle Shively and Paul Patton

True Pigments transforms acid mine drainage into high-quality pigments, restoring polluted streams and growing green jobs in rural Appalachia.

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Carmen Rojas

Through the nation’s first farm labor trust, immigrant farmworkers are reaping the benefits of worker-ownership while strengthening America’s food economy.

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David Muhammad

A neighborhood-led model for youth justice seeks to re-route resources spent on locking youth up, and instead invest in young people and their communities.

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Gator Halpern and Sam Teicher

Seeking to restore imperiled coral reefs, Coral Vita is leveraging for-profit tools to build a network of high-tech coral farms.

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Ben Christensen and Marisa Repka

Cambium Carbon upcycles fallen urban trees, growing green jobs while building equitable cities and mitigating climate change at scale.

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Rachel Johnson-Farias

Seeking to reimagine the legal profession, Esq. Apprentice creates a no-cost pipeline for low-income youth of color to become fully licensed attorneys.

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Tony Weaver Jr.

Get Media L.I.T. combats media misrepresentation of minority groups through literacy learning tools that disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.

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Sara Chester and Molly Hemstreet

Connecting cultural heritage, youth retention, and economic revival, The Industrial Commons helps small to mid-size manufacturers convert to worker-ownership.

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Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez

Jolt is pioneering a Latino youth-led movement across Texas to fight for stronger immigrant protections and rewrite the immigration narrative.

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Victoria Herrmann

Rising Tides brings expertise on climate adaptation and cultural heritage directly to vulnerable communities to save America’s histories, traditions, and cultures.

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David Walfish

Ho‘oulu Pacific’s win-win model of “distributed agriculture” provides income for household farmers and healthy, affordable food for Hawaiians.

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Shelley Halstead

Homeownership and construction skills-building come together as a platform that centers Black women, reclaims historic homes, and sparks neighborhood-scale change.

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Lela Klein and amaha sellassie

Co-op Dayton builds community- and worker-owned cooperatives that center Black workers, expand democratic participation, and renew long-neglected neighborhoods.

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Swapna Reddy and Elizabeth Willis

ASAP offers a model for “lawyering in a crisis” by crowdsourcing short-term volunteers to provide rapid legal services to asylum-seeking families.

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Diya Abdo

Every Campus A Refuge leverages the sizable resources of colleges and universities to provide a stronger, more dignified landing for refugees.

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Sara Sindija and Brandon Smith

A promising California model builds a pipeline of needed wildland firefighters by forging career pathways for individuals formerly incarcerated in “Fire Camps.”

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Mike Milton

The Black-led Freedom Community Center holistically integrates restorative justice with personal healing and broad-based advocacy to transform communities.

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Esperanza Dillard and Talila “TL” Lewis

HEARD’s trauma-informed reentry program provides healing, empathy, and justice for deaf/disabled people who have been harmed by the carceral system.

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Brittany Koteles

Driven by a reparations ethic, Nuns & Nones collaborates with Catholic sisters to invest their land and assets in regenerative land stewardship.

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Ariel Koren and Fernanda de Oliveira Silva

Respond provides trauma-informed, life-critical translation and interpretation services to asylum seekers and anyone needing language support in contexts of crisis.

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Daniel Bögre Udell and Kristen Tcherneshoff

Wikitongues safeguards threatened heritage languages by giving people resources to document, teach, and promote culture-sustaining mother tongues.

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Aletta Brady

Through powerful first-person stories, Our Climate Voices humanizes the climate disaster and spurs concrete action to combat climate harm.

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Ruth J. Abram

A model for activating human capital in rural places, this “living museum of contemporary rural life” has helped inventive rural residents ignite a fresh sense of cultural and economic opportunity.

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Yasmine Arrington

To break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration, ScholarCHIPS supports college students in the Washington, D.C. area who are among the millions of children in America with incarcerated parents.

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Christopher Brown

Through a unique blend of peer mentoring, community farming, and “dirt therapy,” Growing Veterans uses sustainable agriculture as a catalyst for ending veteran isolation.

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Gina Clayton

This peer-support program’s “healing to advocacy” agenda empowers women with incarcerated loved ones to push for social and policy reform, while boosting their economic resilience.

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Brandon Dennison

Tackling the economic, cultural, and environmental distress of West Virginia’s collapsing coal economy, Reclaim Appalachia creates new economic opportunities rooted in a vibrant spirit of place.

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Elizabeth Monoian and Robert Ferry

A series of large-scale public art installations seeks to transform unloved clean-energy infrastructure into wildly inspiring cultural and economic assets.

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Michelle Miller and Jess Kutch

To advance worker well-being, Coworker.org harnesses online tools to advocate for freelancers, independent contractors, and others in today’s gig-based workforce.

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Alan Lovewell

Bringing local fish into schools proves a powerful way to cultivate the next generation of ocean stewards, while promoting sustainable seafood and supporting a community’s fishing industry.

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Jon Schull

A global network of tech-enabled partners uses advanced production tools to deliver life-changing prosthetic hands and arms to those who need them most.

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Elizabeth Vartkessian

Using state-of-the-art investigative tools, legal defense teams can highlight an offender’s life history, reducing severe sentences and reshaping a retributive criminal justice system.

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