About SJPLA
We are Social Justice Partners Los Angeles. We envision a region where every Angeleno feels a deep sense of connectedness, belonging, and purpose, sees clearly the history and systems of injustice, and works in concert to redistribute wealth and power in service of justice and liberation.
Community is at the heart of everything we do, and we work together to move resources to powerful justice work, provide training and peer learning, and create healing spaces.
Social Justice
Social justice is both the process and the outcome we seek in a liberated Los Angeles.
We:
challenge systems that maintain unjust power structures.
build pathways for connectedness and equitable opportunities.
create the space we need to explore our individual and collective potential.
We took inspiration for this definition from UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare, Awake to Woke to Work, and Kellogg Foundation.
Mission & Values
We invest in, expand, and connect communities advancing racial & social justice.
We value human connections and our interconnectedness.
We invest in addressing root causes of racial, economic, and social injustice in Los Angeles.
We root our learning and actions in the wisdom of people most impacted by systemic injustice.
We acknowledge, shift, and share power.
We live our mission and values from the inside out and infuse them in our policies and practices including our bylaws.
Our Vision
A Los Angeles where everyone feels a deep sense of connectedness, belonging, and purpose, acknowledges the history and systems of injustice, and works together to redistribute wealth and power.
We must acknowledge a long history of injustice to move towards a liberated future
Our nation was founded on the genocide of Indigenous people and the kidnapping and enslavement of African people. Our country is built on stolen land and labor.
This is why we root our learning and action in the wisdom of those most impacted by injustice.
Race was invented to justify and enable this accumulation of wealth and power by people who are constructed as white.
This is why we invest in racial justice, and educate white people about anti-racism.
Rather than addressing these founding injustices, white people with class privilege have built massive sectors and institutions, including philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, focused on the symptoms of these injustices rather than the root cause of systemic racism and intersectional injustice.
This is why we invest in systems change.
The nonprofit and philanthropic sectors obscure our role in creating and perpetuating these root cause problems, and instead create the illusion of “generosity” while enabling ourselves to continue to amass wealth and power, never disrupting the inequitable systems we’ve created.
This is why we redistribute wealth & power, and move from charity toward justice.
The broader culture is one of individualism and productivity, keeping our attention away from these injustices and keeping us at a distance from one another.
This is why we value human connections and interconnectedness.