Rhode Island Archives - Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice

For the past nearly fifteen years, PrYSM has provided Southeast Asian youth with the tools they need to design and run campaigns aimed at shifting oppressive systems through concrete policy change.

For the past nearly fifteen years, PrYSM has provided Southeast Asian youth with the tools they need to design and run campaigns aimed at shifting oppressive systems through concrete policy change. PrYSM’s works towards addressing the school to prison to deportation pipeline that affects the community not just in Providence, but nationwide. Youth at PrYSM strive to become leaders, organizers, and critical thinkers, by offering educational workshops, leadership opportunities, mentorship, and oversight of youth-led community organizing projects. Though campaign goals have shifted over the years to reflect the changing needs of their base, they continue to fight the criminalization of Southeast Asian community and honor their refugee roots. Queer and Trans (QT) Thursdays, a new PrYSM program that builds on their history of having queer and trans programming at the heart of the organization, takes place weekly. QT Thursdays are a social and political organizing space open to people of color under 25 years old who identify as trans, queer and/ or gender-queer. The program has expanded PrYSM’s community and brought new skills and energy into the organization. PrYSM aims to achieve its goals through a focus on love, family, roots and movement building. This organization is supported through the Funding Queerly Giving Circle, which is housed at Astraea.

Grants Made to our U.S. Anti-Criminalization Grantee Partners

We are excited to announce a new set of grants made to 10 innovative organizations across the country through our U.S. Fund, under the thematic focus of Anti-Criminalization and Freedom from Violence.

Streetwise and Safe's Teeshirt on Police Accountability
“Know Your Rights” t-shirt developed by Streetwise and Safe youth.
We awarded $220,000 to 10 groups working on campaigns and policies that increase safety and end multiple forms of violence within LGBTQI communities across a range of issues. These include efforts around interpersonal and hate violence, domestic, family, and intimate-partner violence, as well as institutional violence. Many of the organizations funded under this thematic focus tackle institutional violence, such as policies that criminalize gender expression, sex work, and many other aspects of LGBTQI peoples lives, dignity, and livelihoods. We are deeply encouraged to see the diverse interventions this set of grantee partners is making in anti-criminalization efforts locally and nationally in the areas of immigration, prison abolition, sex work organizing, and homelessness. By bringing together these groups into a cohort, we expect to see fruitful collaborations among them in policy advocacy efforts specifically related to police accountability at the city and state level.