NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR PEER SUPPORT

We made grants to organizations and paid consultants to organize peer support groups for dozens of environmental activists; mutual aid groups for 500 people; and peer-based educational forums and public events reaching 5,000 people. These efforts provide training in grassroots activism and education in pertinent issues to which this activism is directed. Such efforts are provided for those most directly impacted by the issues of concern and empower them to attain trust, knowledge and competence as they experience those issues of concern and devise their own methods of coping and remedying associated problems. As the affected community empowers itself in these way, it affords strength, durability and resilience at a community level. Mutual aid groups thus cultivate community care as basic social practice that serves to remedy areas of chronic disenfranchisement. Such peer-based activism and education can then employ an "each one teach one" practice that shares knowledge, skills and competency around other related issues and with other similarly challenged disenfranchised communities, replicating its benefits.

In 2023, we maintained a BIPOC Green New Deal internship program and paid 48 interns $500 apiece. As with the program area 4a above, these interns are educated and trained in peer based support that they can then share with BIPOC communities around issues of concern as to their race and class-based disenfranchisement and its remedies, and as to environment justice including the existential threats posed by climate chaos.