The Open Society Foundations has announced the 16 recipients of its Justice Rising Awards. 

The inaugural awards are part of a wider investment in racial justice that OSF announced in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the worldwide racial reckoning that followed. Those investments, totaling $220 million, were made in support of emerging organizations and leaders in Black communities across the country. Justice Rising awardees were selected by a group of Open Society-U.S. staff who have long worked to advance racial justice in the United States. In making their decisions, the group sought to reflect the diversity of issues, approaches, geographies, life experiences, and movement philosophies represented by Black movement leaders across the U.S. and its territories. 

This year’s cohort includes M Adams, co-executive director of Freedom, Inc., which engages low-to-no-income communities of color in Dane County, Wisconsin, by coupling direct services with leadership development and community organizing; Gloriann Sacha Antonetty-Lebrón, an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, communication strategist, and professor and founder of Revista étnica, a multimedia platform and magazine in Puerto Rico that represents the Caribbean archipelago’s vast and diverse Afro-Latinx population; Colette Pichon Battle, founder and executive director of the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy; and LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, who is leading several international efforts to provide training, support, and funding for women-led institutions based in Belize, Guyana, Senegal, and Tanzania.

“We remain at a critical moment in the fight for racial justice in the United States, and these 16 award recipients represent important parts of the ongoing struggle to combat inequality and injustice,” said Adam Culbreath, acting division director at Open Society-U.S. 

For more information on the Justice Rising award recipients, see the Open Society Foundations website.

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