Episcopal City Mission Awards $200k in Grants to Community Organizers

Episcopal City Mission (ECM), a faith-based ministry which promotes social and economic justice working through congregations, community-based organizations and people within the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, presented their Burgess Urban Fund grants to 17 grassroots community organizers in January.

For more than 30 years, the Burgess Urban Fund (BUF) has supported grassroots community organizing in response to social injustice in Massachusetts and has awarded over $6 million in grants.

This year’s grants ranged from $8,000 to $20,000.

“We feel quite strongly that by partnering with the wider community, we will have greater impact to improve the lives of the urban poor and the oppressed. This year’s grantees, truly emulate the Burgess Urban Fund’s mission and have the power and capacity to reach into so many neighborhoods," said ECM Executive Director Dr. Ruy O. Costa.

Burgess Urban Fund grantees must: engage members of the community to identify shared concerns and create goals for social change; develop new leaders, especially among those affected by social inequality; undertake projects with concrete goals for the core constituency; articulate both the immediate and root causes of the problem through social change, and collaborate with other organizations, regional and statewide.

This year’s Burgess Urban Fund grantees are:

Boston Tenant Coalition, Boston

• Boston Workers Alliance, Boston
• Bread and Roses Housing, Lawrence
• Brockton Interfaith Community, Brockton
• Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, New Bedford
• Coalition Against Poverty, New Bedford
• Essex County Community Association, Lynn
• Ex-Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement, Worcester
• Massachusetts Alliance of HUD Tenants, Jamaica Plain
• Massachusetts Senior Action Council, Boston
• Merrimack Valley Project, Lawrence
• Metropolitan Interfaith Congregations Acting for
  Hope, Framingham
• One Lowell, Lowell
• Student Immigrant Movement, Boston
• Union of Minority Neighborhoods, Jamaica Plain
• United Interfaith Action, Fall River
• The Worker Center for Economic Justice, Lynn