About Us
Our Mission
To open spaces and provide support for people with targeted identities to engage in social uplift within our own communities.
Our Vision
We envision a collective liberation in which we as targeted peoples--grounded in our knowledge, ancestral wisdom, and survivance, and sustained by our relationship with the Earth--build a world for all to thrive.
Our Guiding Principles
Terms Defined:
*Targeted: This is a word we use in place of other ways that people talk about our communities: marginalized, oppressed, and underserved are some of the other words you might here. We use "targeted" because it puts the onus back on people and systems to rectify, and underscores that these systems and institutions were built on purpose, and function exactly as intended.
*Intersectionality means that we have multiple identities that contribute to our personhood and community outcomes.
*Decolonization means that we center Indigenous sovereignty and achieve "cultural, psychological, and economic freedom," remembering and upholding who we were to each other prior to colonization.
Our Values
Speaking authentically
Valuing curiosity
Deep Research
Data sovereignty
Recentering liberation work to be accessible and intergenerational
Relationship
Collaboration
Tenderness with people
Honoring boundaries
Owning our own "stuff" - Our trauma, our strengths, and the work we still have in us to do
Our Equity Statement
We honor our Indigenous siblings who made their stand on the hallowed ground at Wounded Knee. We honor our stolen African siblings, who found ways to keep their children fed while teaching them to look the world in the eye. We honor our Latinx siblings who marched in the Plaza de Mayo for the disappeared, willing the world to see. We honor our Asian siblings, who wield leaf blowers against the smoke in our eyes. We honor the brick-throwers, the crawlers up the capitol steps, and the reclaimers of the languages we knew before we grew thorns on our tongues. We honor your stories, your songs, and your survivance. We commit to working toward creating a world that is grounded in the wisdom you’ve imparted to us. We honor your joy, your strength, your resilience, and your vision, and move forward knowing that your gifts live within us all. Your resistance has provided us with a roadmap to liberation. We are still here. And we rise.
To open spaces and provide support for people with targeted identities to engage in social uplift within our own communities.
Our Vision
We envision a collective liberation in which we as targeted peoples--grounded in our knowledge, ancestral wisdom, and survivance, and sustained by our relationship with the Earth--build a world for all to thrive.
Our Guiding Principles
- We believe in communal decision making and that leadership should come from within the community. Deciding what this looks like is a messy process, but it necessarily includes building relationships across communities, with the recognition that no community is a monolith.
- We believe folks from targeted* communities are capable and typically take on the emotional, mental, and physical labor of resisting white supremacy and other oppressions and deserve credit for the work they do.
- We believe intersectionality* is a thing, because it is.
- We believe our coping/survival skills, which include the ability to experience joy, are the gifts we bring to our communities to the world and that our vision can extend beyond just our ability to cope.
- We believe we can do better and we deserve better. We believe that liberation and healing are possible.
- We believe empowerment isn’t a thing, because it's not and is connected to saviorism. Power comes from each person and within the community. When we realize our power, reclaiming it becomes essential.
- We believe this world is unable to survive without us. Your capitalist systems can’t survive without us. The U.S. like so many other white supremacist spaces was built on stolen land with stolen labor and so we demand the status quo be recentered around reciprocity, abundance, relationship, and interconnectedness.
- We strive to decolonize* and re-indigenize our mentality, education, government, families, communities, and ways of knowing and being in the world.
- We recognize that ideas, models, and ways of existing the ways that we support decolonization and indigenization are the gifts of a long legacy of ancestral resistance, led by queer womxn of color who do the work without the credit.
- We also recognize that the words “decolonize” and “indigenize” get thrown around a lot. These are journeys that we’re on, that don’t get fully realized until we pay reparations and give #landback.
- Messiness is okay. Embrace the mess. We often work with people that want us to give them the answers. There’s no cookie cutter or prescribed way to liberate ourselves.
Terms Defined:
*Targeted: This is a word we use in place of other ways that people talk about our communities: marginalized, oppressed, and underserved are some of the other words you might here. We use "targeted" because it puts the onus back on people and systems to rectify, and underscores that these systems and institutions were built on purpose, and function exactly as intended.
*Intersectionality means that we have multiple identities that contribute to our personhood and community outcomes.
*Decolonization means that we center Indigenous sovereignty and achieve "cultural, psychological, and economic freedom," remembering and upholding who we were to each other prior to colonization.
Our Values
Speaking authentically
Valuing curiosity
Deep Research
Data sovereignty
Recentering liberation work to be accessible and intergenerational
Relationship
Collaboration
Tenderness with people
Honoring boundaries
Owning our own "stuff" - Our trauma, our strengths, and the work we still have in us to do
Our Equity Statement
We honor our Indigenous siblings who made their stand on the hallowed ground at Wounded Knee. We honor our stolen African siblings, who found ways to keep their children fed while teaching them to look the world in the eye. We honor our Latinx siblings who marched in the Plaza de Mayo for the disappeared, willing the world to see. We honor our Asian siblings, who wield leaf blowers against the smoke in our eyes. We honor the brick-throwers, the crawlers up the capitol steps, and the reclaimers of the languages we knew before we grew thorns on our tongues. We honor your stories, your songs, and your survivance. We commit to working toward creating a world that is grounded in the wisdom you’ve imparted to us. We honor your joy, your strength, your resilience, and your vision, and move forward knowing that your gifts live within us all. Your resistance has provided us with a roadmap to liberation. We are still here. And we rise.
How we do what we do
● Organizational Learning: Working with organizations, coalitions, and community groups to advance liberatory practices within their work, which helps UPRISE to fund its free community programming.
○ Organizational and educational equity training
○ Consultation on equity plans, statements, and lenses
○ Policy and curriculum review
○ Assessment and data analysis
● Community Programming: UPRISE hosts several event series throughout the year.
○ Nothing About Us Without Us: Civic Engagement Series
○ Community Conversations: Building Capacity Across Identities
○ The Selah Series: Creation Stories, Healing Stories, and Resistance Stories
○ UPRISE Book Club
● Disability Justice: Supporting the advancement of liberation in Sick and Disabled Communities
○ Community Building: Monthly Coffee Hours
○ Community Education: Training, consultation, and quarterly Demystifying Disability Speaker Series
○ DEP3: Emergency Preparedness Programming and community support
● Feed Our People: A way to support community members with targeted identities who embody resistance in change spaces.
○ Care Kits: Mailed packages for folks who are doing the hard work of supporting our communities in reaching liberation.
○ Meals for Organizers: Paying to feed the people doing social change work.
○ Organizational and educational equity training
○ Consultation on equity plans, statements, and lenses
○ Policy and curriculum review
○ Assessment and data analysis
● Community Programming: UPRISE hosts several event series throughout the year.
○ Nothing About Us Without Us: Civic Engagement Series
○ Community Conversations: Building Capacity Across Identities
○ The Selah Series: Creation Stories, Healing Stories, and Resistance Stories
○ UPRISE Book Club
● Disability Justice: Supporting the advancement of liberation in Sick and Disabled Communities
○ Community Building: Monthly Coffee Hours
○ Community Education: Training, consultation, and quarterly Demystifying Disability Speaker Series
○ DEP3: Emergency Preparedness Programming and community support
● Feed Our People: A way to support community members with targeted identities who embody resistance in change spaces.
○ Care Kits: Mailed packages for folks who are doing the hard work of supporting our communities in reaching liberation.
○ Meals for Organizers: Paying to feed the people doing social change work.
Our Organizational Chart & A Visual Model
To learn more about the UPRISE team, visit Our Team.
Our 3 Year Strategic Plan
Our FY25-27 Strategic Plan has been a labor of love by our Staff, Board of Directors, Members, and community partners. View the document below to review our vision, and explore opportunities to join our collective work:
Below are our previous Strategic Plans:
| strategic_plan_fy2022-2024.pdf |
Annual Reports
Fiscal Year 2021:
| fy2021_annual_report.pdf |
Fiscal Year 2022:
| fy2022_annual_report.pdf |
Fiscal Year 2023
| fy2023_annual_report.pdf |
Fiscal Year 2024:
| fy24_annual_report.pdf |