Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJA) is a network of over 60 organizations committed to left-of-center social causes, ranging from environmental activism, to antiracism awareness, feminism, and support for Palestinians. ¹ The Alliance’s sister organizations are the Climate Justice Alliance, an environmentalist nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, and Grassroots Global Justice, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. ^{2 3 4} These organizations act as the tax-exempt, fundraising arms of the Alliance. ⁵

Since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas after the latter’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks, GGJA has become a radical network of pro-Palestinian advocates. It organized a protest on Capitol Hill in December 2023 which resulted in over 50 arrests and was reportedly involved in the 2024 college campus anti-Israel protests. ⁵

Background

The idea for Grassroots Global Justice Alliance was formed in the aftermath of the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) demonstrations in Seattle, Washington. ⁶ During the WTO protest, activists alleged that the Seattle Police Department responded with excessive force when it released tear gas onto the mostly peaceful protesters. ⁷ In response, GGJA’s founders said that the struggle over trade and economics required an international community of lower-income voices to advocate left-of-center economic, racial, and environmental initiatives. ⁶ The Alliance officially launched in 2005 in San Antonio, Texas. ⁶

Although the Alliance began primarily as an environmentalist group, it has since expanded into a network of broader left-wing groups advocating left-of-center initiatives. ⁸ It works extensively with About Face, an anti-war group of United States war veterans who decry U.S. militarism abroad and at home. ⁹ About Face has helped GGJA in its DemilitaRISE campaign to defund United States law enforcement agencies and replace them with restorative justice programs. ¹⁰

In 2013, Climate Justice Alliance was founded and has since aligned with GGJA as a sister organization. Together they have helped build several grassroots organizations, including It Takes Roots, a global environmentalist advocacy group that represents GGJA at the United Nations Conference of Parties. ⁴ Other aligned groups include the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Just Transition Alliance, and Jobs With Justice, which seek GGJA’s greater goal of a world economy that prioritizes people of color and sexual-identity minorities above other world peoples. ¹¹

GGJA has transitioned into an increasingly identity-activist organization, involving itself more with international movements against racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonization. ¹² This shift towards greater radicalism can be seen in GGJA’s disruption of Congressional proceedings in the Capitol Rotunda as the United States Senate was debating a bill that would have further funded Israel in its war against Hamas. ⁵ More than 50 GGJA affiliated movement leaders were arrested at the protest. ¹³

Major Initiatives

Grassroots Global Justice Alliance has five major initiatives: demilitarization, ¹⁰ feminist organizing schools, ¹² global well-being, ¹⁴ grassroots feminism, ¹⁵ and movement building. ¹⁶

Demilitarization

DemilitaRISE is GGJA’s effort to oppose US military intervention abroad and the militarization of law enforcement at home. ¹⁰ GGJA’s goal through this initiative is to defund law enforcement agencies like the police, prisons, and the Pentagon and reallocate funding to left-of-center groups fighting for left-wing policy. ¹⁰ Through DemilitaRISE, GGJA combines with About FACE, an anti-war group of U.S. veterans and the Female Abolitionism movement to deconstruct U.S. militarism “toward building a Feminist, Anti-racist, Regenerative Economy (FAREconomy).” ¹⁰

GGJA’s demilitarization program supports the Stop Cop City campaign to persuade Georgia law enforcement to drop charges against Defend the Atlanta Forest protesters who have been charged with domestic terrorism after occupying the wooded area where the new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center will be built. ^{10 17}

In its anti-war activism against the Israel-Hamas war, GGJA organized a Capitol Rotunda protest in late 2023 that led to the arrest of 50 people. ¹³ They protested a Senate bill that would have allocated $14.3 billion toward Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas. ¹³

Feminist Organizing Schools

Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is developing a network of international feminist schools to fight back against systemic forces it believes keep women and people of color oppressed, including “patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy and climate change.” ¹² The goal of the Feminist Organizing Schools is to create nation and international communities of women engaged in the fight against “neofascism inside the US,” and to realize a feminist economy that promotes and advances women and underrepresented groups. ¹⁸ These schools take the form of educational retreats. ¹²

Global Well-Being

The GGJA Global Well-Being (GWB) program is the most active environmentalist initiative within GGJA, as it seeks to strengthen and support the Climate Justice Alliance and movement and realize the Justice Transition: a left-of-center plan to create a future of clean air and water for communities most impacted by climate change. ¹⁴

The GWB program advocates for a Green New Deal that prioritizes and protects people of color and other under-represented groups. ¹⁹ Through this initiative, GGJA sends a delegation to the annual United Nations Conference of Parties where the GWB program works alongside its sister organization Climate Justice Alliance to promote left-wing climate activism. ⁴

Grassroots Feminism

The Grassroots Feminism initiative is a branch of the Feminist Organizing Schools that more specifically targets the alleged impacts of “patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism” on women, transgender and non-binary persons, and people of color. ¹⁵ This program seeks a feminist economy led by women, people of color, and other left-of-center identity groups that GGJA argues are marginalized. ¹⁵ Its central belief is that “the liberation of womxn [sic] is bound to the liberation of all oppressed peoples.” ¹⁵

Movement Building

The Movement Building program within Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is the system and network of left-wing agitation groups that GGJA helps establish and fund. ¹⁶ This is the central initiative through which GGJA expands and manages its national and global network of left-of-center institutions. ¹⁶

Opposition to Nuclear Energy

The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance was a cosigner on an April 2021 letter to President Joe Biden that asked the administration to promote weather dependent wind and solar power systems and “end the fossil fuel era.” The letter also advised the president to “Phase out nuclear energy as an inherently dirty, dangerous and costly energy source.”  ²⁰

Nuclear power plants produce no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, and from 1990 until 2021 accounted for 20 percent of American electricity production—the largest source of zero carbon electricity in the United States. ²¹ An October 2018 proposal from The Nature Conservancy noted that zero-carbon nuclear plants produced 7.8 percent of total world energy output and recommended reducing carbon emissions by increasing nuclear capacity to 33 percent of total world energy output. ²² A 2020 analysis from Our World in Data reported that nuclear energy “results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas,” making it “just as safe” as wind and solar power production. ²³ The U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that “nuclear energy produces more electricity on less land than any other clean-air source” and that it would require “more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines.” ²⁴

Allies

Grassroots Global Justice Alliance helped create It Takes Roots and The Rising Majority. ²⁵ It Takes Roots is the combined effort of the Climate Justice Alliance, Grassroots Global Justice, the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Just Transition Alliance, and Jobs With Justice. ^{16 4} It Takes Roots advocates at the United Nations for greater environmental regulations and protections on behalf of GGJA. ²⁷ This organization is the most prominent international channel through which GGJA operates. ¹⁶

The Rising Majority was founded in 2017 through cooperation between the Movement for Black Lives and GGJA affiliates. ²⁸ The Rising Majority states its commitment to “building a powerful, anti-racist left for radical democracy,” by dismantling alleged systems of oppression. ²⁹ It is a central organization in the coordination of all aspects of GGJA’s work, bringing together the “youth, abolition, immigrant rights, climate change, feminist, anti-war/anti-imperialist, and economic justice forces” to form a cohesive, unified voice for left-of-center social and political change. ³⁰

Climate Justice Alliance is a major ally of GGJA’s environmental work, particularly in advocating the Just Transition plan which will move global economies away from ordinary means of production and natural resource consumption towards a left-of-center, social justice-oriented environment and economy. ³¹

In 2021, GGJA also signed a radical open letter that urged white philanthropists to stop funding institutions that are not led by people of color. ³² The letter said that a new way of philanthropy “must include a significant transfer of resources into the control of institutions where people of color, who are primarily accountable to their communities, have the ultimate decision-making power over where dollars go.” ³² Otherwise, the letter argued that white donors were only perpetuating white supremacy. ³²

Leadership

The executive director of Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is Cindy Wiesner. ³³ She helped found the Climate Justice Alliance and has been heavily involved in GGJA’s Movement Building initiative, connecting the World March of Women, Social Movement Assemblies, International Council of the World Social Forum, U.S. Social Forum, the Peoples Climate Movement, the People’s Bailout, The Frontline, It Takes Roots, the Rising Majority, and Green New Deal Network to GGJA’s broader agitation network. ³³

Financials

In 2022, Grassroots Global Justice reported $5,014,834 in revenue, $3,829,505 in expenses, and $9,017,264 in total assets. ³⁴ GGJA also now has an Action Fund through the Groundswell Fund, which provides left-of-center causes another source of income. ³³

In 2022, Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), a sister organization of GGJA, reported $9,580,362 in revenue, $9,256,399 in expenses, and $19,228,472 in total assets. ² CJA’s parent organization, Movement Strategy Center, receives funding from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Tides Foundation. ⁵ CJA also received $50 million from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Inflation Reduction Act “to fund ‘environmental justice’ projects by ‘community-based nonprofit organizations.’” ⁵

Although GGJA was listed as a small left-wing activist group in 2021, its funding greatly increased in 2018. ³⁵ This was shortly after its creation of the Rising Majority organization that combined forces with various racial activist groups, such as Movement for Black Lives in 2017. ²⁸

GGJA has received several donations and grants from prominent charitable foundations and organizations. In 2015, the NoVo Foundation donated $75,000 to GGJA. ³⁶ In 2019, the Overbrook Foundation donated $50,000 to GGJA. ³⁷ Also in 2019, the Elias Foundation donated $3,000 to GGJA. ³⁸ In 2019, the Libra Foundation donated $250,000 to GGJA in two separate gifts to P.O. boxes in Miami, Florida. ³⁹ Libra also approved $250,000 to be paid in the future to GGJA at the same P.O. box addresses. ³⁹ In 2020, Grassroots International Inc. granted $462,929 to GGJA. ⁴⁰ In 2020, the Common Counsel Foundation gave GGJA $25,000 toward the It Takes Roots group. ⁴¹ In 2021, Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs donated $7,000 to GGJA. ⁴² In 2022, the Bafrayung Fund donated $50,000 to GGJA. ⁴³ In 2023, the Csp Charitable Foundation donated $5,000 to GGJA. ⁴⁴

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