2021 Innovation Prize Awardees
North Carolina (Operating nationwide)
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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Daniel Bögre Udell &Kristen Tcherneshoff
New York (Operating globally)
Wikitongues safeguards threatened heritage languages by giving people resources to document, teach, and promote culture-sustaining mother tongues.
District of Columbia (Operating nationwide)
Cambium Carbon upcycles fallen urban trees, growing green jobs while building equitable cities and mitigating climate change at scale.
Esperanza Dillard &Talila "TL" Lewis
Nationwide
HEARD’s trauma-informed reentry program provides healing, empathy, and justice for deaf/disabled people who have been harmed by the carceral system.
Maryland
Homeownership and construction skills-building come together as a platform that centers Black women, reclaims historic homes, and sparks neighborhood-scale change.
Ohio
Co-op Dayton builds community- and worker-owned cooperatives that center Black workers, expand democratic participation, and renew long-neglected neighborhoods.
Ariel Koren &Fernanda de Oliveira Silva
California (Operating globally)
Respond provides trauma-informed, life-critical translation and interpretation services to asylum seekers and anyone needing language support in contexts of crisis.
Wisconsin (Operating nationwide)
Driven by a reparations ethic, Nuns & Nones collaborates with Catholic sisters to invest their land and assets in regenerative land stewardship.
Missouri
The Black-led Freedom Community Center holistically integrates restorative justice with personal healing and broad-based advocacy to transform communities.
Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program
California
A promising California model builds a pipeline of needed wildland firefighters by forging career pathways for individuals formerly incarcerated in “Fire Camps.”
2019 Innovation Prize Awardees
Our Climate Voices
Minnesota
Through powerful first-person stories, Our Climate Voices humanizes the climate disaster and spurs concrete action to combat climate harm.
Viridiana Carrizales &Vanessa Luna
Texas and New York
ImmSchools seeks to transform America’s schools into safe and welcoming places for undocumented students and their families.
Arizona
One Water One Health is harnessing wastewater treatment plants across America to pinpoint harmful chemicals and help restore community health.
California
The Hood Incubator leverages the legal cannabis industry to advance racial equity and build economic power for Black communities.
South Dakota
South Dakota Voices for Peace fights bigotry and hate against Muslims, immigrants, and refugees in rural places.
Black and Pink’s REAP Reentry Program
Nebraska
The REAP program provides reentry support for system-impacted LGBTQ+ people, rebuilding their power and centering their capabilities on the path forward.
Louisiana
The First 72+ helps stop recidivism through hand-in-hand housing, small-business incubation, and other services grounded in healing and hope.
Pennsylvania
VIISTA seeks to revolutionize immigration law by creating a nationwide pipeline of legal advocates to advance immigrant justice.
The Campaign for Historic Trades
Maryland
An apprenticeship program for preservation tradespeople helps fill urgently needed jobs while building equity in the heritage movement.
Ohio
True Pigments transforms acid mine drainage into high-quality pigments, restoring polluted streams and growing green jobs in rural Appalachia.
2017 Innovation Prize Awardees
Western North Carolina
Connecting cultural heritage, youth retention, and economic revival, The Industrial Commons helps small to mid-size manufacturers convert to worker-ownership.
Washington, D.C. and San Diego, CA
Seeking to restore imperiled coral reefs, Coral Vita is leveraging for-profit tools to build a network of high-tech coral farms.
Washington, D.C.
Rising Tides brings expertise on climate adaptation and cultural heritage directly to vulnerable communities to save America’s histories, traditions, and cultures.
California
Seeking to reimagine the legal profession, Esq. Apprentice creates a no-cost pipeline for low-income youth of color to become fully licensed attorneys.
Neighborhood Opportunity and Accountability Board (NOAB)
California
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.
Swapna Reddy &Elizabeth Willis
Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP)
New York
ASAP offers a model for “lawyering in a crisis” by crowdsourcing short-term volunteers to provide rapid legal services to asylum-seeking families.
California
Through the nation’s first farm labor trust, immigrant farmworkers are reaping the benefits of worker-ownership while strengthening America’s food economy.
Texas
Jolt is pioneering a Latino youth-led movement across Texas to fight for stronger immigrant protections and rewrite the immigration narrative.
Ho‘oulu Pacific
Hawaii
Ho‘oulu Pacific’s win-win model of “distributed agriculture” provides income for household farmers and healthy, affordable food for Hawaiians.
Washington, D.C.
Get Media L.I.T. combats media misrepresentation of minority groups through literacy learning tools that disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.
2015 Innovation Prize Awardees
New York
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.
ScholarCHIPS for Children of Incarcerated Parents
Washington, D.C.
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.
Washington State
Through a unique blend of peer mentoring, community farming, and “dirt therapy,” Growing Veterans uses sustainable agriculture as a catalyst for ending veteran isolation.
California
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.
West Virginia
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.
California
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.
New York and North Carolina
To advance worker well-being, Coworker.org harnesses online tools to advocate for freelancers, independent contractors, and others in today’s gig-based workforce.
Elizabeth Monoian &Robert Ferry
Washington State
A series of large-scale public art installations seeks to transform unloved clean-energy infrastructure into wildly inspiring cultural and economic assets.
New York
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.
Maryland
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.