These Chicago Activists Are Making Soccer More Inclusive For POC and LGBTQ+ Athletes

To encourage more Black people to explore outdoors, individuals and organizations in Colorado are working to address underlying barriers such as access to transportation and gear, as well as fear and concerns of safety. Despite the groups still encountering "frustrating" incidents with other outdoor recreationalists, the movement has spread to other states and steadily attracted a growing community of members.

Nonprofits increased voter engagement in communities that face barriers to voting. Deaf Equity posted videos on social media in ASL to educate voters on how to register to vote and track mail-in ballots. The Native American Community Development Institute is engaging with voters in rural Minnesota, religious leaders at mosques, churches, and temples are encouraging members to vote, and volunteers at food shelves are handing out voter registration forms. Several groups have received funding to conduct voter outreach with Black and Muslim communities as well as neighborhoods where people have lower incomes.

In Dayton, Ohio, a Ku Klux Klan rally was met with over 500 counterprotesters. While the city is one of the United States’ most segregated, community members including church groups, New Black Panthers, Antifa members, and students came together in a show of solidarity against the racist group.

To better serve all communities and increase safety for families, the Philadelphia Department of Parks and Recreation is offering free swim lessons at community pools. Building off of the success of University of Pennsylvania's We Can Swim summer program which offers lessons to "Philadelphia children who might not otherwise have the opportunity to learn," the idea has already been deemed a success given the enrollment numbers.

A highly popular German sports club named Borussia Dortmund is taking advantage of its fanbase and following to promote anti-extremist messages, praise diversity, and celebrate inclusion. They do so in a variety of ways, including elevating and supporting independent fan initiatives like ballspiel.vereint!, requiring fan clubs and members to sign statues that reject far-right ideology, hosting educational field trips to former concentration camps for youth, and donating over a million dollars to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.

St. Louis-based We Stories provides parents with a course curriculum and reading list for the children with the goal of sparking conversations about race, oppression, and cultural awareness. The target audience of the organization is white families, who—through neighborhood demographics or socioeconomic status—may not have to directly engage with these issues unless they choose to do so.

Millions of Americans, particularly the working class, LGBQT, minorities, and immigrants, feel left behind by the system, and in light of the revival of violence from white supremacists and the tumultuous debate on gun control, many feel that the only solution is to take the defense of their rights and needs into their own hands. The Redneck Revolt is an anti-racist, pro-gun organization that works to represent the working class - across race, sexual identity, and creed - and to protect their communities and interests from white supremacists and economic disparity alike.

A progressive funding model has been a boon to schools in Berlin’s poorer neighborhoods, which receive a baseline of staff and resources. But schools in poorer neighborhoods face a myriad of struggles that additional resources haven’t been able to quell, due to the deep socioeconomic disparities between the home neighborhoods of wealthy and poor students. However, one elementary school seems to have succeeded in desegregating students by offering a choice of academic tracks.

In Uganda, religious leaders and anti-gay individuals have been very vocal against the LGBTI community and have disowned many LGBTI religious leaders. This has led some of these leaders to publicly come out and advocate for others and speak of their own experiences, showing the possibility of being LGBTI and religious.

When anti-drag protesters appeared at a library storytelling event in Calgary, counter-protesters from the Fairy Garden Project showed up with pink angel wings to protect performers and attendees entering the event. The strategy follows a long tradition of counter-protest in LGBTQ2S+ communities.