The 2024 Honorees
Every year at our Community Gala, our community comes together to recognize and celebrate the work of thousands of New Yorkers committed to grassroots organizing for a better New York. Among the 100+ grantees we celebrate, we highlight a handful of the grantees with the Frederick Douglass Award. These awards recognize and amplify the work of just a few of our grantees that we see as representing the depth and impact of the work of so many of the grassroots powerhouses we support with grants.
Here’s your introduction to the 2024 Frederick Douglass Award honorees.
Prepare to be inspired and amazed…
AfroResistance
AfroResistance, an international organization led by Black women based in New York City, is celebrating its 20th anniversary in May 2024. Originally founded in Georgia as the Latin American and Caribbean Community Center, their inception in 2004 was driven by a deep-seated commitment to liberation—a commitment sparked by the ongoing challenges to freedom in Haiti.
For two decades, they have been a beacon of education and organizing for human rights, democracy, and racial justice across the Americas. Their focus is on uplifting the Black Diaspora from all countries in the Americas—North, Central, South America, and the Caribbean Islands—through the development of services and activities that empower the Black community and enhance awareness of migration's roots and the migrant experience. Notably, their Rooted in Resistance podcast offers profound discussions on these subjects.
Their efforts in healing justice, leadership development, and political education are deeply informed by the experiences and wisdom of Black women and girls. AfroResistance operates across the languages of the Americas and has established a Language Justice League. This league is a collective of interpreters and translators dedicated to assisting like-minded organizations in creating multilingual spaces where every voice is acknowledged and represented. Currently, AfroResistance is compiling a Regional Directory of Organizations and Movements led by Afro-descendants in the Americas, aiming to fortify connections among activists and organizations within this community.
AfroResistance champions movement support through advocacy, international solidarity, and capacity building, helping liberation movements and organizations enact strategic, meaningful change. This work is conducted with a commitment to gender and racial justice, ensuring that external practices reflect their core values.
AfroResistance became a North Star Fund grantee in 2022 with a grant from our Let Us Breathe Fund. We're honoring their work to build a vibrant multilingual movement by and for Black women of the Diaspora.
Teamsters for a Democratic Union
Grassroots organizing builds power for communities wherever those communities are. They can be communities united by geography or cultural identity, but grassroots organizing also happens in one of the largest unions in the world. New York Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) is a worker organizing project using community organizing principles to build grassroots power in the labor movement.
The New York TDU builds leadership skills and conducts worker-to-worker outreach campaigns focused on workplaces including warehouses, package delivery services and drivers of all kinds. Over one thousand New York workers participated in NY TDU organizing trainings and strategy sessions in 2023—then turned that education into action. Thousands more receive regular updates and action alerts about campaigns they can participate in or lead.
NY TDU members helped mobilize 350,000 workers nationwide in a grassroots campaign at UPS that ended forced six-day work weeks imposed since 2020. TDU’s End Part-Time Poverty at UPS campaign raised starting pay for part-time workers from $15 to $23 an hour and won more full-time jobs for formerly part-time workers.
Beyond their own members, NY TDU fights for all working people. TDU members have been on the frontlines of the Fight for 15, Starbucks picket lines and the strike for Black lives. Today, TDU members are helping Amazon workers organize for justice on the job and for a union of their own.
Unions have been under fire for decades, but 2023 saw a wave of union victories and a growing trend of unions connecting with movements for racial, gender and economic justice. NY-TDU is confirmation that building grassroots leadership can change culture anywhere.
NY Teamsters for a Democratic Union has been a grantee since 1981. We’re honoring their determined efforts to increase grassroots power among workers in hundreds of New York workplaces using a foundation of listening and leadership development.
Yonkers Sanctuary Movement
Immigrant communities are in the headlines as partisan politics makes them a political football. But what does the real work of responding to immigration in New York look like? It looks a lot like Yonkers Sanctuary Movement (YSM)—a mix of policy work, community building and mutual aid.
YSM builds the leadership of immigrant New Yorkers and New York families affected by the immigrant detention system, and organizes around issues that shape their lives. YSM advocated for Yonkers to become a sanctuary city, supported the Immigrant Protection Act in Westchester County, and pushed for ICE Out of Courts in New York State. They’ve organized around federal policy, including DACA (to prevent deportation of people who came to the U.S. as children) and DALE (to protect undocumented workers reporting labor abuse). YSM supported the Green Light Driver’s License campaign and the Fund for Excluded Workers—with several members joining the Westchester County hunger strike—and then helped people access these programs.
They’ve fundraised to free people from ICE detention, worked for community members facing unfair evictions to return to their apartments, and exposed a legal scammer who falsely promised families green cards. Combine that with ESL support, mutual aid throughout the pandemic, youth organizing and cultural events. This community unites to do work that matters.
Now, YSM is fighting for the Unemployment Bridge Program to create a permanent alternative for folks who don't qualify for unemployment insurance. They’re providing immigration-related support for members and bringing attention to the needs of the Yonkers undocumented community. A small but determined group of organizers, they’re building community in a time of stark anti-immigration conflict.
Yonkers Sanctuary Movement has been a grantee since 2017, and was among the first grants we awarded in the Hudson Valley. We’re honoring them for their persistence and determination to build community in today’s anti-immigrant climate.
