On the extended Tax Day, July 15, 2020, we made a second round of grants totaling $12,000 to groups that directly address the issues of racism and police violence as well as providing relief for those most vulnerable to the impacts of the Coronavirus epidemic.
We held a virtual granting ceremony to honor the recipients which were selected:
- Black Organizing Project
- HOMIES Empowerment Project FREEdom Store
- Oakland Communities United for Equity & Justice – Food & Hygiene Distribution
- Feed the People/The Village – Hotels Not Graves Fund
- Anti-Police Terror Project
- Moms 4 Housing
- Jerralynn Brown Blueford, mother of Alan Blueford, killed by OPD
- Maria Moore, sister of Kayla Moore, killed by BPD
- Barbara Doss, mother of Dujuan Armstrong, killed at Santa Rita Jail
- Encampment for Citizenship
Additionally, on April 15th of this year, we redirected a total of $21,850 in small grants to eleven local social justice organizations that are providing human services that the government is not adequately supplying.
For more info on our April 15th, 2020 grantees, please go HERE.
As war tax resisters, we are united in our opposition to war and militarism, both at home and abroad. We use the redirection of our tax dollars as both a statement of our conscientious objection to state violence, and as a concrete way to “put our money where our mouths are.” The People’s Life Fund is an escrow fund, founded by Bay Area resisters in 1971, to redirect refused war taxes and other contributions toward life sustaining purposes. On April 15th of this year, we redirected a total of $21,850 in small grants to eleven local social justice organizations that are providing human services that the government is not adequately supplying. On this extended Tax Day, July 15, 2020, we are making a second round of grants to groups that directly address the issues of racism and police violence as well as providing relief for those most vulnerable to the impacts of the Coronavirus epidemic.
Today, as Americans find ourselves facing a triple pandemic—the COVID virus, rampant institutional racism and the economic crisis—the underlying damages caused by state violence is laid bare. We have allowed the lion’s share of public resources to be devoted toward systems of violence—the military, the prison industrial complex, immigration enforcement and the police. As a direct result, our life affirming systems of public health, education, environmental protection, infrastructure and our social safety net have been critically underfunded. The role of racism is integral to each of these systems of state violence at the local, regional and international levels.
Black, Brown, and Indigenous organizers in our communities are leading—and have been leading for generations—fierce campaigns to end state violence, dismantle white supremacy, and eliminate all forms of oppression. As war tax resisters, we see poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, economic exploitation, environmental destruction and militarization of law enforcement as integrally linked with the militarism which we abhor. Our July 15th act of war tax redirection is focused specifically on groups, led by people of color, who are actively working in the spirit of the Movement for Black Lives’ call to divest in state violence in order to invest in true community safety.
