Barred Business aims to uplift and empower marginalized justice-impacted individuals, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and transgender people of color——along with their families and communities. Their vision is a world where these individuals can live, work, and thrive without discrimination. To achieve this vision, Barred Business advocates for policy changes, institutional transformations, and electoral strategies to empower these communities and ensure their well-being and safety. They believe in redirecting resources from punitive systems to community-based services, addressing racial and economic disparities that have long persisted.

Both Sides of the Wall is a grassroots organization dedicated to reforming the criminal justice system. Their focus includes advocating for prison reform, restorative justice, participatory defense, re-entry support, effective programming, and parole.

Founded by spouses and family members of incarcerated individuals in the Alabama Department of Corrections, Both Sides of the Wall works to ensure fair sentencing and rehabilitation through evidence-based programs. They stand in solidarity with all incarcerated individuals and their families, leveraging protests and rallies to raise awareness about inhumane treatment and poor living conditions in prisons.

California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) is a grassroots abolitionist organization that challenges institutional violence perpetrated on women, transgender people, and communities of color by the prison-industrial complex. CCWP believes that the fight for racial and gender justice is essential to dismantling the prison-industrial complex. This movement is driven by the leadership of those most impacted——including people inside and outside of prison, families, and communities.

CCWP envisions a world where the prison system——designed for punishment, control, and the incarceration of primarily people of color and the poor——is abolished. Their goal is a society that prioritizes education over incarceration, directs investment towards employment rather than prisons, rejects sexual violence, and upholds human rights for all individuals.

The Chicago Torture Justice Center (CTJC) is dedicated to confronting traumas resulting from police violence and institutionalized racism by providing access to healing and wellness services, trauma-informed resources, and community connections.

CTJC actively contributes to and aligns with a movement aimed at eradicating all manifestations of police violence.

Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM) aims to honor and to seek justice for the survivors of Chicago police torture, their family members and the African American communities affected by the torture. CTJM began in 2010 when a group of attorneys, artists, educators, and social justice activists, put out a call for speculative memorials to recall and honor the two-decades long struggle for justice waged by torture survivors and their families, attorneys, community organizers, and people from every neighborhood and walk of life in Chicago. This effort culminated in a major exhibition of 75 proposals and a year-long series of associated teach-ins, roundtables, and other public events in 2011-2013. In 2013, a Reparations Ordinance was drafted to provide redress to approximately 120 African American men and women subjected to racially-motivated torture, including electric shock, mock executions, suffocation and beatings by now former Police Commander Jon Burge and his subordinates from 1972 through 1991. CTJM led the effort to introduce the ordinance into Chicago’s City Council. The knowledge of the ordinance gained momentum amongst various Chicago communities and transitioned into the Reparations Now campaign also known as the #RahmRepNow movement. CTJM, along with local and national organizations joined together with the mission of garnering city-wide support of the reparations ordinance. The movement was centered on spreading information about John Burge, the torture survivors with specific focus on getting the major of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel to support the passing of the ordinance. On May 6, 2015, after decades of grassroots struggle, the Chicago City Council passed the reparations package for the Burge torture survivors and their family members.

CTJM reached a pivotal milestone in 2025-2026 with the official authorization of the construction of a permanent, public memorial honoring survivors of police torture in Chicago. CTJM has successfully lobbied for the transfer of city-owned land at 5520-38 S. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive for just $1 per lot and recently secured a proposal for $280,000 in Open Space Impact Fee funding to support the $4.7 million project. Their current work focuses on a planned groundbreaking for the memorial titled "Breath, Form & Freedom," which will feature a 1,600-square-foot winding hallway inscribed with the names of survivors. Beyond the physical structure, CTJM continues to advocate for the memorial to serve as a living site for “reparative justice,” incorporating public education, workforce development, and healing spaces that ensure this history of state violence is never forgotten.

The Death Penalty Oral History Project is a project led by Social Change Fellow Renaldo Hudson, in partnership with nonprofit Soapbox Productions and Organizing, and oral historian Liz Futrell to develop a people’s history of how the death penalty was abolished in the state of Illinois.

More specifically, this project focuses on the history as told by people who were on death row and their political allies. Together, they narrate how they organized to transform Illinois from a state that regularly executed people to a state that commuted and then abolished the death penalty.

The project is producing a micro-documentary that will combine the oral history interviews and cinéma vérité following a group of death penalty survivors as they share life outside of a prison cell.

System Impact Media is an Oakland-based film production company led by people impacted by the prison system.

System Impact focuses on making films that impact the prison system in transformative ways, telling stories that are rarely told and that open people's minds about the lives individuals lead and the transformations they experience and create in prison and beyond.

In addition to producing independent films, System Impact Media provides various platforms, including festivals, where people who are currently or formerly incarcerated can present their work and get their films screened to wider audiences.

Women Transcending focuses on the impact of the mass incarceration system on women and girls, emphasizing women's crucial roles in driving change within these systems.

Led by formerly incarcerated and directly-impacted women, Women Transcending strives to illuminate the factors leading women into the criminal justice system and raise awareness of the repercussions of punitive measures on individuals, families, and communities.

Empowering women to lead and effect change, Women Transcending also seeks to reshape the current narrative on incarceration through public programming and initiatives including the Women Transcending Collective Leadership Institute, Oral History Research Project, and The Right/Write to Heal.

Empowerment Avenue uses art, writing, journalism, and film to empower people in prison.

More specifically, they support talented writers and artists in prisons across the country, providing resources to get their creative work outside prison walls, be fairly compensated, and contribute their creativity to the movements of abolition, de-carceration, and liberation of incarcerated people. Moreover, they support capacity building for publications, galleries, museums and other organizations committed to this work, to help them meaningfully center currently-incarcerated people in creative spaces while fairly compensating them.

Conceived over 60 years ago as one of the nation’s first nonprofit theaters, The Public has long operated on the principles that theater is an essential cultural force and that art and culture belong to everyone.