Values & Principles

Collectrify was started by environmental, housing, and climate justice leaders who came together in 2019 with other community-based housing, energy, and consumer protection advocates and members of philanthropy, because low-income communities and communities of color were being left out of conversations about building decarbonization. 

 

Initial conversations among Carmelita Miller, Michelle Martinez, Cecil Corbin-Mark, isaac sevier, and Jen Somers began to coalesce around how to build a national community space that could support our mutual learning; protect collective ideas, strategies, and the knowledge economy coming from the environmental and climate justice community; and grow community capacity to lead on the topic of building electrification. We began to form the first version of the Governance Assembly with Jacqui Patterson, Logan Burke, Melissa Gavin, and Jackson Koeppel, and invited trusted members of philanthropy - Jessica Boehland, Laura Wisland, and Darryl Young - to collaborate on the development of Collectrify. The philanthropic and community practitioners who started Collectrify collaboratively developed Principles of Transformative Partnership and a Governance Structure to meet that intent, along with a Knowledge Economy Grievance and Restoration Process to protect the knowledge economy of environmental justice communities.

 

​These conversations led to the creation of a pooled participatory grant-making fund and a learning space for frontline, grassroots, and base building organizations and leaders in communities of color and limited-wealth communities.  

 

Collectrify Principles of Transformative Partnership

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• Grassroots groups own their ideas and intellectual property.

• All participants strive for equal partnership, whether funder or practitioner.

• Funders will enter with open minds and without expectation that they can set Collectrify’s agenda.

• Collectrify prioritizes groups that work to correct historic disinvestment and seeks to support groups on the frontline of disparity.

• The existing and emerging priorities of frontline community members as represented by grassroots applicants determine Collectrify’s grantmaking priorities.

• Collectrify will continuously evaluate itself against presented needs.

• Collectrify will honor and uphold the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing, which include the core principle of building just relationships among ourselves.