Posted on Monday, July, 13th, 2020 in Annual Grants, Opportunity Fund Grants.
$75,000 / 2020 – 2021
Denver, CO
Padres & Jóvenes Unidos (PJU) is a multi-‐issue organization led by people of color who work for educational equity, racial justice, immigrant rights, and advocating for equal access to achieve a better quality of life. Their freedom to Learn framework is based on the belief that education is a right, not a privilege, and that all students, regardless of race, income, or immigration status, deserve equal access to high-‐quality public schools that prepare them for success in life. They train their leaders in participatory action research methodologies to identify grassroots solutions for effectively limiting the scope and number of police on Denver school grounds, to increase the number of counselors and mental health professionals for youth, and to reinvest funding from policing toward ending the school to prison pipeline. In 2019, PJU won a new law that formally ends exclusionary discipline (e.g. expulsions, out-‐of-‐school suspensions, other force outs) in Early Childhood Education programs (public and charter) statewide.