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Tzedek Social Justice Fund

Growing Leaders to Build Change

Celebrating Tzedek Grantees: The Center for Participatory Change

Posted on July 14, 2021

Available in Español

There’s so many things we appreciate about the Center for Participatory Change. Here are just a few. 

An Inspiring Vision and Mission

CPC’s vision is collective liberation, la liberación del pueblo. CPC creates spaces for learning, healing and relationship building. Racial equity, language justice, and popular education are at the heart of each of their strategies.

  • To ignite collective power, CPC builds skills and structural analysis to lead and sustain movements for collective liberation.
  • To transform systems of oppression, CPC supports and leads collective action.
  • To heal in community, CPC creates intersectional spaces for healing.

A Pivotal Convener in Asheville

CPC has a 20-year legacy of impact in the WNC region. In 2000, CPC supported grassroots groups in African American, Latinx, Appalachian, Cherokee, Hmong, and multi-racial communities working towards racial and economic justice. Support included community organizing, leadership development, training, technical assistance, networking, coalition building, and micro-grants. CPC’s current work builds from this foundation.

Nourishing and Transformative Programming 

In the current political climate, people most impacted by structural inequities are being attacked, imprisoned, deported, and worse. CPC leads with a powerful vision: we are stronger together. By creating spaces for training, analysis building, and healing—grounded in racial equity, popular education, and language justice—CPC creates space for people to build trust, form meaningful relationships, and collaborate across identity.

Here are the words of a recent Serpent’s Tongue participant, “Understanding that I knew two colonized languages was a big wow for me. To acknowledge such reality with other compañeros also having this realization is life changing. Together we have the opportunity to share stories and grow our analysis of being LatinX in the United States.” 

Adaptable and Responsive to the Moment

In response to COVID, CPC pivoted fast, offering multi-lingual training about how to use interpretation on Zoom, trauma and resilience training for interpreters, an advanced popular education workshop, and online summer camps. CPC staff supported the Coping with Corona collective programming, facilitated two Culebritas, Spanish classes for children of Latinx/Hispanic parents to help kids reclaim Spanish, and convened virtual and in-person Black Love healing spaces for Black communities supported by Black therapists and peer-support specialists. Se Ve Se Escucha released a 3rd season of the podcast featuring conversations with language justice workers in the South.

Throughout, CPC focused on creating an internal culture to support staff wellbeing as people navigated the stress of the pandemic, tended children once childcare closed, and managed online schooling. 

To learn how to support the deep change work led by the Center for Participatory Change, check out this video by JMPRO TV.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS7Itz629nI
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Tzedek (pronounced “tz” as in ritz, TZEH-dek) is the Hebrew word meaning justice, which is at the heart of our mission.

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