2023 Wellspring Fund Grantees

The Wellspring Fund supports multi-year projects and campaigns within BIPOC-led organizations actively working towards strengthening the ecosystem of social justice movements in Minnesota.

At Headwaters, we believe that a community’s collective power is a source of abundance and of transformative change. In the natural world, wellsprings are sources of abundance that start deep in the earth, slowly breaking through rocks and creating new pathways toward growth. The Wellspring Fund is dedicated to nourishing organizations that have deep roots and long horizons.  

The 2023 Wellspring Fund, stewarded by a group of 7 community grantmakers, moved over $1.4 million to ecosystem-strengthening organizing throughout Minnesota. With this funding, Headwaters will provide 4 organizations with four-year, project-based grants of $360,000 to support a multi-year strategic campaign or project. 

Headwaters is proud to celebrate the 2023 Wellspring Fund grantees and grantmakers:

  • Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha  
  • Dream of Wild Health   
  • Greater Minnesota Worker Center  
  • InquilinXs UnidXs Por Justicia  

Each of these organizations is using innovative and effective approaches to build community power and advocate for social change in Minnesota. Through their work, they are strengthening the ecosystem of social justice movements in Minnesota. 

Click on the boxes below to learn more about each winner. 

CTUL

Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha

CTUL is a worker-led collective where low-wage workers organize, educate, and empower each other to fight for a voice in their workplaces and in their communities. Using tactics like coalition building, leadership development, direct action, popular education, member-led advocacy, and community organizing, CTUL has been a leader in the movement to win racial and economic justice in Minnesota for over 15 years.

GMWC

Greater Minnesota Worker Center

Founded in 2013, Greater Minnesota Worker Center (GHWC) is a worker-led organizing hub based in St Cloud. They focus on building leadership within Stearns County workers at the Pilgrim’s Pride meatpacking plant, where immigrant workers have been exploited for years. For more than 10 years, GMWC has laid the groundwork for powerful, multi-racial worker organizing that raises wages, improves working conditions, and builds long-term systemic change.

DWH

Dream of Wild Health

Dream of Wild Health (DWH) is restoring health and well-being in the Native community by recovering knowledge of and access to healthy indigenous foods, medicines, and lifeways.Through youth leadership development, growing and selling Indigenous foods, and community organizing around reclaiming cultural traditions and policy and systems change, DWH is building food sovereignty for Native people.

IX

InquilinXs UnidXs Por Justicia

Since 2014, Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia/United Renters for Justice (IX) has been organizing low-income, BIPOC, and immigrant renters to create long-term housing solutions and build tenant leadership. Through the leadership of an of an organized base of renters, IX has made significant impacts on the lives of renters in Minneapolis, recovering rents, evicting exploitative landlords, and building political momentum for rent stabilization policies.

The 2023 Wellspring Fund grantees were selected by a group of community grantmakers. The committee brought care and dedication to the decision-making process, leaning into trust in each other and their shared values.

Please join us in celebrating the 2024 Wellspring Fund grantmakers: 

  • B.G.   
  • Takara Henegar  
  • Marco Hernandez 
  • Nausheena Hussain 
  • Thorne LaPointe 
  • Aimee Vue 
  • Alfred Walking Bull