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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One Water One Health is harnessing wastewater treatment plants across America to pinpoint harmful chemicals and help restore community health.
The Hood Incubator leverages the legal cannabis industry to advance racial equity and build economic power for Black communities.
South Dakota Voices for Peace fights bigotry and hate against Muslims, immigrants, and refugees in rural places.
The REAP program provides reentry support for system-impacted LGBTQ+ people, rebuilding their power and centering their capabilities on the path forward.
The First 72+ helps stop recidivism through hand-in-hand housing, small-business incubation, and other services grounded in healing and hope.
VIISTA seeks to revolutionize immigration law by creating a nationwide pipeline of legal advocates to advance immigrant justice.
An apprenticeship program for preservation tradespeople helps fill urgently needed jobs while building equity in the heritage movement.
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.
Through the nation’s first farm labor trust, immigrant farmworkers are reaping the benefits of worker-ownership while strengthening America’s food economy.
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.
Seeking to restore imperiled coral reefs, Coral Vita is leveraging for-profit tools to build a network of high-tech coral farms.
Ben Christensen and Marisa Repka
Cambium Carbon upcycles fallen urban trees, growing green jobs while building equitable cities and mitigating climate change at scale.
Seeking to reimagine the legal profession, Esq. Apprentice creates a no-cost pipeline for low-income youth of color to become fully licensed attorneys.
Get Media L.I.T. combats media misrepresentation of minority groups through literacy learning tools that disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.
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.
Jolt is pioneering a Latino youth-led movement across Texas to fight for stronger immigrant protections and rewrite the immigration narrative.
Rising Tides brings expertise on climate adaptation and cultural heritage directly to vulnerable communities to save America’s histories, traditions, and cultures.
Ho‘oulu Pacific’s win-win model of “distributed agriculture” provides income for household farmers and healthy, affordable food for Hawaiians.
Homeownership and construction skills-building come together as a platform that centers Black women, reclaims historic homes, and sparks neighborhood-scale change.
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.
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.
Every Campus A Refuge leverages the sizable resources of colleges and universities to provide a stronger, more dignified landing for refugees.
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.”
The Black-led Freedom Community Center holistically integrates restorative justice with personal healing and broad-based advocacy to transform communities.
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.
Driven by a reparations ethic, Nuns & Nones collaborates with Catholic sisters to invest their land and assets in regenerative land stewardship.
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.
Daniel Bögre Udell and Kristen Tcherneshoff
Wikitongues safeguards threatened heritage languages by giving people resources to document, teach, and promote culture-sustaining mother tongues.
Through powerful first-person stories, Our Climate Voices humanizes the climate disaster and spurs concrete action to combat climate harm.
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.
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.
Through a unique blend of peer mentoring, community farming, and “dirt therapy,” Growing Veterans uses sustainable agriculture as a catalyst for ending veteran isolation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
