Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT)
Led by Native American women, ACAT’s Alaska Environmental Reproductive Justice Project (AERJP) works through public education, grassroots organizing and advocacy to change public policy regarding environmental contaminants that are linked to involuntary infertility, premature births and infant health — the major reproductive justice concerns of the Indigenous people of the state. ACAT has blocked pesticide use by Alaska railroads, stopped the timber industry from spraying herbicides on areas farmed by the Haida Nation and organized tribal participation in the Stockholm Convention, a global treaty which banned 12 persistent organic pollutants. After convening a diversity of social justice organizations to build a common analysis in 2007, in 2008, ACAT will organize the state’s first Reproductive Justice Forum at which key reproductive issues will be discussed and campaign strategies formulated.

California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (CLRJ)
CLRJ is a Latina-led statewide policy and advocacy organization working to advance California Latinas’ reproductive health and rights within a social justice and human rights framework. CLRJ accomplishes this through targeted, culturally-based policy advocacy, coalition-building, community education and strategic communications strategies. CLRJ’s outreach to the Latino community in the fight to defeat Proposition 85, was critical to the margin of victory in this campaign. CLRJ is also a leading force for comprehensive sexuality education in California schools and a key resource for training and support for Latinas organizing in the central, more rural areas of the state.

Choice USA (CUSA)
Choice USA is a national, youth-led, pro-choice organization working to mobilize and sustain the involvement and leadership of young people in the reproductive rights movement. Dedicated to “the right of each person to decide if and when they will have sex, become pregnant and have a child,” Choice USA works through 40 college and high school campus affiliates in 18 states to support student-led campaigns for accurate reproductive information and safe, accessible reproductive health services. Choice USA has a base of 625 young organizers and leaders who represent another 10,000 young people across the country. It engages its affiliates through trainings and on-site technical assistance, and links campus-based campaigns to a national policy agenda. This agenda is focused on addressing the rise of Crisis Pregnancy Centers and the targeting of students for egg donation.

Different Avenues (DA)
DA is a Washington D.C.-based service and organizing collective that promotes harm reduction and supports formal and informal sex workers to organize for their rights. Its direct services encompass violence prevention services and support groups offered at its drop in center, and outreach conducted at indoor sex work venues such as exotic dance clubs and trick houses and online. Its organizing work supports sex workers to oppose and dismantle local laws that criminalize sex work and to participate in national and international coalitions working to transform more far reaching laws and regulations. DA’s constituency is 85 percent African American, and 10 percent Latino, and includes equal numbers of trans male and female persons. DA was instrumental in moving the D.C. government to add “gender-identity and expression” to the DC Human Rights Act, which serves as the local non-discrimination code.

Idaho Women’s Network Education Fund (IWN)
With 33 organizational members and 400 individual members, IWN is Idaho’s oldest and largest women-led human rights organization. Through grassroots organizing, advocacy, education, and policy work, IWN takes a multi-issue approach to social change that links the rights of women, low-income people, immigrants, and the LGBT community. IWN turned back efforts to create a “new crime”: a felony offense of being pregnant and ingesting a controlled substance; and helped ensure that federal Medicaid funds cover 90 percent of family planning services to eligible women and men. IWN is currently leading campaigns to support access to emergency contraception, comprehensive sex education and community-based drug abuse treatment for pregnant women. It will also work to pass a statewide Mercury Reduction Act (to reduce negative reproductive health outcomes of mercury exposure), to improve childcare safety regulations, and to oppose a constitutional ban on same sex marriage.

Khmer Girls In Action (KGA)
Led by young, low-income, Southeast Asian women, KGA uses leadership development, community organizing, and cultural expression to empower the Cambodian and Southeast Asian community of Long Beach, California, to challenge systems and institutions that are not accountable to immigrant/refugee needs. Long Beach is home to 60,000 Cambodians, the largest population outside of Cambodia. Last year, KGA mobilized its membership and their peers to provide a youth-of-color voice to the statewide campaign to defeat Proposition 85. In the coming year, its youth members (ages 14-21) will carry out participatory action research to inform campaign development. Of particular interest is the intersection between immigrant and reproductive rights, particularly how deportation policies and practices effect the community’s access to health care and undermine the ability to raise intact families.

Metro TeenAIDS (MTA)
MTA is a local community health organization created to support young people—primarily low-income (approximately 87 percent African American, 10 percent Latino, seven percent Asian and three percent White) youth in underserved communities—in the fight against HIV/AIDS and for comprehensive sexual education. In the Washington D.C. area, where youth HIV rates are rising more rapidly than any others, MTA is the only organization focusing on HIV/AIDS prevention and reproductive health advocacy among youth. MTA’s public policy efforts, focus on reforming an outdated sexual health curriculum and current HIV/AIDS policies within D.C. public schools. Youth engagement and leadership development are the hallmarks of MTA’s approach, and include peer education, direct service provision, coalition advocacy, and grassroots organizing. By mobilizing a broad base of youth of color, their parents, communities, and allies, MTA has won comprehensive sex ed for D.C. public schools and convinced the D.C. Board of Education to establish an Ad-Hoc Committee on HIV/AIDS.

National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW)
NAPW is a national intermediary organization working for the civil rights, health and welfare of pregnant and parenting women. It is the only national organization whose mission is to build bridges between the pro-choice movement and the growing maternity/birth with dignity movement. Focusing primarily on low-income women, women of color, and drug-using women, NAPW uses legal advocacy, local and national engagement with organizations and individuals, strategic communications, and policy development to ensure that: women do not lose their constitutional and human rights as a result of pregnancy; addiction is addressed as a health issue, not a crime; pregnant and parenting women have access to a full range of reproductive health services and non-punitive drug treatment services; and families are not needlessly separated. In 2007, NAPW’s National Summit was one of the most diverse gatherings ever to address issues concerning reproductive health, rights, and justice, the summit drew over 300 maternal, birthing, and reproductive rights/justice activists along with social justice activists, legal and policy experts, and healthcare providers from 60 organizations and 37 states, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Canada. It succeeded in detoxifying the divisive abortion debate; and creating a larger, broader, more inclusive, and more easily activated RJ movement. NAPW will now work to forge working alliances among these partners, for policy change.

National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH)
NLIRH works to ensure the fundamental human right to reproductive health for Latinas, their families and their communities through public education, policy advocacy, and community mobilization. Latinas have had very limited access to the institutions and officials responsible for setting and implementing polices that directly affect them. For this reason, NLIRH is committed to serving as an advocacy engine or vehicle through which Latinas can voice their concerns and demands. A bottom-up, grass tops organization, NLIRH build the capacity of many local and state-based Latina-led reproductive justice organizations and helps link their work to a national strategy that amplifies their core priorities with Congress and in the national policy arena. NLIRH is currently involved in three campaigns: Basta! 30 Years is Enough: Repeal Hyde; Immigration Reform: A Matter of Reproductive Justice, and Contraceptive Equity. 

Native American Community Board (NACB)
Formed in 1985 by Native Americans living on or near the Yankton Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota, NACB addresses health issues pertinent to Native communities through cultural preservation, education, coalition building, and environmental and natural resource protection, while working toward a safe community for women and children at the local, national and international levels. NACB’s Indigenous Women’s Reproductive Justice Program has laid the groundwork for a strong campaign to change Indian Health Services (IHS) policies and practices. Its documentation of IHS abuses were recently highlighted in an Amnesty International study and its organizing has formed a coalition of more than 20 organizations, including the ACLU, National Abortion Federation, National Congress of American Indians, and the American Indian Law Alliance, that will expand in the coming year to include urban Native health and environmental organizations, along with tribes and organizations in the Midwest, Southwest and Eastern United States. In the coming year, this coalition will work to compel IHS to provide women with legal access to abortion, adopt standardized emergency room policies and protocols for survivors of sexual assault, and modify its approval process to allow hospital personnel to appear in court in a timely manner.

Rebecca Project for Human Rights (RPHR)
The Rebecca Project for Human Rights (RPHR) is a national legal and policy organization that advocates for the human and reproductive rights of women and families in recovery. RPHR challenges the aggressive sentencing of mothers who commit non-violent crimes while suffering from addiction, and advocates for treatment instead of prison time so that mothers may remain with their children and heal together as a family. Led by mothers in recovery in ten state chapters, RPHR strives to create opportunities for their agency and leadership on the local, state and national level to change child welfare, criminal justice, reproductive health and substance abuse policies. RPHR’s victories include ending the practice of shackling pregnant women during labor in all federal and state prisons nationwide; amending Arkansas’ Garret’s Law to halt the automatic placement of a mother on the child maltreatment registry if she or her infant tested positive for illegal drugs at the time of delivery; and passage of The Child and Family Improvement Services Act of 2006, which secured $145 million over five years in mandated child welfare funding for family treatment services for low-income substance abusing parents who come to the attention of child welfare services.

Western States Center (WSC)
WSC works to build a progressive movement for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice in the eight western states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and Alaska. WSC works on three levels: strengthening grassroots organizing and community-based leadership; building long-term, strategic alliances among community, environmental, labor, social justice and other public interest organizations; and developing the capacity of informed communities to participate in the public policy process and in elections. The Family, Community, and Sexuality Project (FCS) was launched to counter the Right’s systematic and concerted use of these “hot button” issues, as a tool to push a conservative policy agenda with negative consequences for women, people of color, low-income people, young people, and queer people. FSC is supporting three organizations to implement a year-long political education program with their constituencies to strengthen their ability to educate and mobilize their base around critical reproductive justice policy fights in the coming year.

Women’s Voices for the Earth (WVE)
WVE is a national, women-centered environmental health advocacy organization focused on twin goals of reducing or eliminating environmental pollutants affecting women’s lives and creating opportunities for all women to influence environmental decision-making in light of the impact of toxic chemicals on a woman’s reproductive system. Over the past decade, WVE’s organizing has lead to the closure or scaling back of emissions from incinerators and power plants in MT and ID. Most recently, WVE compelled all Albertson’s grocery stores in Montana to post mercury warning signs at all of its fish counters and worked with ally organizations to move OPI, the largest supplier of toxic polish, to reformulate its polish to remove harmful toxins. Other companies have since followed suit. WVE will continue work on campaigns for safe cosmetics, and household cleaning projects.