Graphic Design and Layout - Los Angeles Area Foundation Case for Support

COMMUNITY,

POW E R

A N D H O PE

THE CASE FOR SUPPORTI NG LI BERTY H I LL

T H E CA SE FOR SU PPORTING LIBERT Y HIL L

The Case for Supporting Liberty Hill Border agents snatch parents while their children watch. Hundreds of thousands sleep on streets nationwide, tens of thousands in Los Angeles County alone. Wildfires and megastorms mark changes of season thrown out of balance by dangerous concentrations of atmospheric carbon.

From the White House, white nationalist sentiment fuels a movement governed by violence.

What can be done?

An initial surge of passionate resistance, from the unprecedented street mobilizations of the Women’s March to a wild bloom of self-organized civic action, sits at a crossroads in the wake of an historic midterm election, with elected leaders slow to pick up the mantle handed to them.

How does a movement keep hope alive?

For 40 years, the donor activists behind the Liberty Hill Foundation have nurtured organizers, activists, troublemakers and even legislators. Our work connects many of the great battles of the late 20th century to the present moment.

There are long, dark nights in the march towards freedom. As foes of justice gather strength, Liberty Hill has kept a fire burning, ready to light the way for the movements that will greet the dawn.

To support Liberty Hill—through light and dark times alike—gives fuel to that fire. ggg

The pioneers of the American Civil Rights Movement knew that struggle took generations.

They knew that their anger at injustice needed a foundation built on love. They built it in their

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support for one another, and they called it “the beloved community.”

Over decades, Liberty Hill has created and sustained its own beloved community of donor activists, organizers, and other social justice leaders who want to challenge the status quo and support leaders from the communities on the front lines of injustice.

The Liberty Hill community has seeded and sustained the movements that fought for rent control, for LGBTQ rights, for students standing up to schools that branded them as criminals. It nurtured the environmental justice movement in its early days, building the bridges between mainstream environmentalists and communities of color that allowed them to confront a common adversary.

Its work goes beyond a series of grants made to organizations operating in a common field. Its grantees and its donor activists are joined in a common passion for justice. They work together in one movement, and together they have built an enduring home for progressive change in Los Angeles County, its influence felt from Sacramento to Washington, D.C. ggg

The work of Liberty Hill continues every day. It manifests in tangible victories that span the years: plans for nuclear plants, trashed; equal protections for LGBTQ workers, won; wage theft from immigrant workers, punished with the full force of the law. An end to racially discriminatory school suspensions. A challenge to noxious oil drilling in communities of color.

But those victories live inside a vision common to the donor activists who fuel Liberty Hill’s work. It has the strength to carry the work of justice down through the years and out of the darkest nights.

It holds that the only way towards justice is by building power in marginalized communities that have suffered from its unjust exercise. When those who hold wealth and power today recognize their responsibility to change who holds it tomorrow, they can spark a transformation that will bring forward a more just and equitable future.

T H E CA SE FOR SU PPORTING LIBERT Y HIL L

A Home for Progressive LA

For four decades, Liberty Hill has set a common table for donor activists and organizers with a passion to repair an unjust world. The result is an unrivaled home for progressive LA. To join Liberty Hill today is to pick up a torch that has passed through the hands of the giants of California’s great social movements: the fights for racial justice and LGBTQ equality, the uprising of immigrant California in the face of vicious attacks, and the transformative organizing that brought together disparate movements to stop corporate might from crushing environmental protections and worker power. And it is to carry that torch forward in community with fellow donor activists, supporting organizers on the front lines doing profound, life-changing work.

leaders of small grassroots organizations fighting for justice and provide early and sustained support to accomplish the impossible.

Liberty Hill was founded by a small group of friends whose vision and values drew them to a model of giving that challenged the status quo. Over the years, its core of supporters has grown moderately.

The opportunity today to give strategically in the service of transformational social change is unrivaled—if new donors answer the call.

PROGRESSIVE

DONORS

Since our founding, our home has opened its doors beyond donors and organizers to include government leaders and foundations. No other institution in LA brings together such a diverse community to understand the unique challenges facing bold

Liberty Hill’s annual donors understand the importance of sustained attention to and support for grass-roots organizing. They represent the heart of social change giving.

Other organizations may ask new supporters to fund a specific task or test the waters with an individual program. Liberty Hill invites its supporters to take their seat at history’s table as changemaking donor-activists.

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T H E CA SE FOR SU PPORTING LIBERT Y HIL L

What We Do

grants leadership training From its earliest days, Liberty Hill’s donor activists have identified grass-roots organizations that move beyond service to building community power for lasting change—and have supported them by giving grants. The sustained, year-over-year relationships that our donor activists form with grantees helps them grow their membership and develop—and execute—long-term strategies for change.

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But grantmaking alone is not enough. Since the early years of this century, Liberty Hill has offered leadership training in order to outfit the next generation with skills and connection to one another.

Especially notable is the Wally Marks Leadership Institute, helping grass-roots leaders create solutions to intractable problems through commissions, policy campaigns, and social movements. Today, Liberty Hill-trained leaders sit on city councils and county commissions and have won policy victories that have improved the lives of millions of Angelenos.

Now Liberty Hill has begun to pull its donor activists themselves into action, through three critical social justice campaigns—all taking place in Los Angeles County, all already yielding measurable results, and all with the potential to shape national fights for justice:

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T H E CA SE FOR SU PPORTING LIBERT Y HIL L

diversion. Together, these victories will keep 11,500 kids who have committed minor offenses out of the system over the next four years. But there are 23,000 more who will end up in the system unnecessarily, so there is much more to do. The campaign’s ultimate goal is to invest the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on harmful criminal justice policies in a youth development system that can transform the lives of youth in lowincome communities of color.

The Agenda for a Just Future End youth incarceration as we know it.

Fight for a roof over every head.

Eliminate neighborhood oil drilling.

These three struggles constitute the Agenda for a Just Future. With the Agenda, Liberty Hill has recognized that the donor activists who have invested trust and time in building this home for progressive LA have also instilled a responsibility to lead.

The fight to end youth incarceration as we know it has a strong foundation in Liberty Hill’s recent victories. An early challenge to the school-to-prison pipeline came in the formation of the Brothers, Sons, Selves coalition and the historic School Climate Bill of Rights slashed school suspensions, increased graduations, and was recognized by the Obama White House. Continued work on this issue has resulted in transformative public budgets that investing more than $100 million of state and county funds into youth development, prevention, and

As California’s housing crisis pushes tens of thousands into homelessness, Liberty Hill and its grantees are leading the fight for a roof over every head. New organizing in Pasadena, Long Beach, Culver City, Inglewood and other cities is winning longdelayed rent control policies that can stabilize families—including the landmark Los Angeles County rent freeze that will protect more than 100,000 families from catastrophic rent increases. Combined with upcoming challenges to longtime California policies, this work has the potential to upend local and state politics long dominated by real estate interests.

Few priorities can be higher for the health of a region dotted by poisonous oil rigs than to eliminate neighborhood oil drilling and foster a clean energy revolution. Day in and day out, the STAND-LA coalition of neighborhood groups bears witness to the harm and hazards posed to families and communities from South LA to Wilmington.

And just as steadily, Los Angeles moves closer to an end to urban oil drilling with a proposed buffer zone between oil drilling and homes and schools. While big oil gathers its forces to respond, sustained organizing has pushed the worst offenders to clean up and close operation, and Liberty Hill’s emPOWER program has begun the outreach and investment that will help lowincome communities switch to clean energy.

Liberty Hill donor activists are active participants in each of these struggles, bringing social, political and financial capital to bear in service of grass-roots organizing.

The results are changing Los Angeles—and transforming a region where power has long been used against the many by the few.

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T H E CA SE FOR SU PPORTING LIBERT Y HIL L

Building People Power

Liberty Hill’s community has been a target of the unmasked cruelty of the Trump Administration—and a pillar of the resistance to it. Immigrant advocates organized community self-defense to ICE raids and demanded sanctuary policies. Grantees swarmed LAX to get in the way of the racist travel ban.

Elected officials who emerged from grantee organizations have challenged Trump locally and fought his policies in Congress, while donor activists provided key support to the court cases, civic actions and elections.

That strength to fight back comes from years of block by block organizing and neighborhood fights. California’s liberal turn is often attributed to demographic change—but they are fueled by deep community organizing that has created talent and nurtured political transformation. By advancing justice in our own communities— by transforming our housing market, cleaning polluted neighborhood, or freeing jailed children—we continue to create models that can inspire change in communities across the United States.

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The guiding principle of Liberty Hill’s work is that the people most affected are the ones to lead the charge for justice and change. These are brave and innovative leaders in historically marginalized communities. People of color, women, immigrants, low wage workers, LGBTQ people, and poor people.

At the heart of Liberty Hill’s work are donor activists walking alongside activists from marginalized communities, breaking down barriers, building a just community, and together accomplishing victories that once seemed impossible.

The work that donor activists do through investing in Liberty Hill recognizes that power and privilege have been distributed unfairly—and places that power and privilege in the hands of the people it has harmed.

T H E CA SE FOR SU PPORTING LIBERT Y HIL L

Join the Movement

For years, Liberty Hill Foundation has relied upon a small group of very loyal, generous donors, continually building a Los Angeles community of shared values. To achieve the ambitious goals of our Agenda for a Just Future, our home for progressive donors must expand.

Our goal is to double our base of donors over the next three years. This is audacious. And it is necessary.

Join us. If you are not already a donor-activist at Liberty Hill, please join us by giving as meaningful a gift as you can. If you are already part of our community, ask us how we can help you participate in building our community with a connection to your friends and family who share your passion for change.

Right now in Los Angeles, a child’s education has been derailed by an unjust eviction; another’s health is compromised by an oil company’s profits; a third is locked up alone and terrified.

With your help, each may soon find the strength and the community to stop those cycles of abuse for a rising generation—with the strategy and support that can only be found at Liberty Hill.

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Liberty Hill Foundation 6420 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 700 Los Angeles, CA 90048 323-556-7200 www.LibertyHill.org  /LibertyHill  @LibertyHill  @LibertyHillFoundation

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