Longtime Schott grantee partner the Journey for Justice Alliance (J4J), a coalition of organizations across more than 30 cities, has its roots in education justice, but in recent years has begun to articulate a vision that encompasses not just the classroom and schoolhouse, but the entire social community our children and parents live within.

J4J launched the Equity or Else Campaign in May 2021 with a national virtual rally that brought together leaders and organizers from different “quality of life” areas to share the impact of inequity and grassroots solutions to these problems.

The latest virtual town hall was held last week on April 7, streamed live to hundreds online. The event featured grassroots voices from communities across the country highlighting the racial inequities and injustice they’re facing, along with the organizing work they’re engaging in.

“The institutions we’re talking about, health care, food production and delivery systems, housing, education, the environment, youth investment, the rights of our seniors — the infection that runs through all of these institutions as they serve our communities is racism,” said Jitu Brown, J4J’s national director. J4J’s new Quality of Life Agenda seeks to unify what were separate struggles in different spheres of society into a cohesive and robust movement.

Through a series of listening tours and virtual and in-person events, J4J and its member organizations have been learning and building consensus around a common platform. “Our superpower is that we engage with the people directly on their vision for a better world with respect,” said Brown, “and then we move with the strategy to actually win.”

Unfortunately, often what stands in the way of building and moving multi-issue strategies is the funding that groups rely on. “What happens in the organizing world is that often our agenda is kind of guided by philanthropy,” Brown said. “And so what we get grants for is what we organize around. But we don’t live single-issue lives.”

This critique of philanthropy is nothing new, but it’s something the sector has so far moved too slowly to remedy. For our part, Schott just launched EndowNow, a multi-year effort to endow education justice organizations so they have the independence to listen to communities, develop bold new ideas, and act on them.