2025 Rapid Response Fund

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2025 RRF by the numbers:

12
grantees
$46,500
in grants
Since 2020, HEAL’s Rapid Response Fund has mobilized mutual aid to address urgent community needs – providing resources for everything from PPE and rent support to food distribution and climate justice organizing. Together, our community has raised and redistributed over $168,500 to 22 member organizations on the front lines of change.

In 2025, we are continuing this commitment by resourcing base-building efforts and supporting organizations that are often underfunded, ensuring they have what they need to respond to the crises – and opportunities – of this moment.

Meet our 2025 Rapid Response Fund grantees below. 

Frontline Voices, Lasting Impact:

Our 2025 Grantees

These 2025 grantees are building community power and advancing food, land, and climate justice across the country.

Brandworkers

(Queens, NYC)
Brandworkers supports NYC and New Jersey food manufacturing workers in organizing their workplaces into strong, worker-led unions.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Workplace campaigns (e.g., bakery bargaining committee’s first contract negotiations)
  • Research & training (GIS mapping project and training models for workers)
  • Coalition & community engagement (expanding campaigns by bringing nearly 30 allied organizations, elected officials, and faith leaders into the work; hosting trainings and public events that sustain worker participation, building leadership, resisting retaliation)

Good Food Buffalo Coalition

(Buffalo, NY)

The Good Food Buffalo Coalition encourages and supports public institutions in Western New York to adopt and implement the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) through community engagement, advocacy, collaboration, and education.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Two advocacy trips to Albany to build legislative support for the Good Food NY Bill

HOPE Collaborative

(Oakland, CA)

HOPE Collaborative works toward a vibrant Oakland where historically marginalized communities can shape their neighborhoods, have equitable opportunities for healthy food and safe community spaces, and build community wealth.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Distribution of 500+ meals and hundreds of pounds of recovered produce, grains, meat, and dairy each month at three sites
  • Stipends for two community leaders
  • Capacity-building for a new meal distribution site 

Idaho Organization of Resource Councils (IORC) 

(Boise, ID)

IORC Builds grassroots power through community organizing, leadership development, and civic engagement to protect health, dignity, and justice for frontline communities including farmworkers.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Buying and distributing 10,000 Know Your Rights cards to farmworkers
  • Copies of emergency planning documents for families at risk of deportation
  • Know Your Rights classes
  • Launch of an ICE rapid response hotline with coalition members

Nihikeya

(Navajo Nation/ Pinon, AZ)

Nihikeya is a grassroots Diné organization restoring regenerative ecological, social, economic, and cultural systems guided by Diné teachings. Nihikeya builds long-term, locally-based economic systems that place value on protecting and preserving lands, waters, air, culture, and future generations.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • The Diné Agroecology Project, to pilot watershed and food systems restoration on Dzil Yijiin (Black Mesa)
  • Political education on social and environmental justice to protect sacred homelands and community health

Operation Spring Plant (OSP)

(Oxford, NC)

OSP supports Black and small family farmers through education, technical and financial assistance, and information sharing for sustainable, timely planting.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Hiring a part-time person to assist with marketing produce and IT work
  • Setting up farmers market participation in the city

Real Food Challenge (RFC)

(National)

RFC harnesses student organizing power to shift university spending away from corporate food contracts and toward regional, under-served producers.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • A 3-day training with 20 students from CA and the East Coast on Food and climate justice connections, base-building with students and allies, auditing university procurement practices, taking direct action when demands are ignored, and securing media coverage for campaigns
  • Partnerships with Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Miami Fair Food Project on supporting farmworkers’ rights, and a guest facilitator on Know Your Rights for protesting and de-escalating interactions with police

Reuben V. Anderson Center for Justice

(Tougaloo, MS)

The Reuben V. Anderson Center for Justice believes that community organizing and capacity building within grassroots communities of color in Mississippi are key to creating immediate, broadly shared economic opportunity and building a mass movement for long-term economic, social, and racial justice.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Summer planting of the Tougaloo Agri-Growth Initiative (TAGI) farm
  • The inaugural FRESH (Food Revival through Economic Empowerment, Systems Change, and Health Security) Training for Mississippi Delta farmers
  • A Food Policy Council planning meeting to implement community engagement strategies

Rock Steady Farm

(Millerton, NY

Rock Steady farm is a queer- and trans-led, multiracial worker cooperative and nonprofit growing culturally meaningful food, training queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC) farmers, and catalyzing structural and political food system change.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Continuation of advocacy and core Food Access and Farmer programs despite major funding cuts

Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI)

(Pittsboro, NC)
RAFI Challenges the root causes of unjust food systems while supporting racially, economically, and ecologically just farm communities.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Emergency relief payments to eight farmers impacted by Hurricanes Helene and Milton

Southside Food Co-op

(Chicago, IL)

Southside Food Co-op is a Black-led, consumer-owned cooperative grocery store bringing affordable, healthy foods and local products to underserved communities.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Revamping the co-op’s website and marketing tools to improve accessibility and expand community outreach

Sprout NOLA

(New Orleans & Greater Louisiana)
Sprout NOLA cultivates a food system shaped and determined by the people of New Orleans and greater Louisiana.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Covering budget gaps caused by canceled federal contracts
  • Supporting leadership through shifts in the federal political landscape

Virgin Islands Good Food Coalition

(St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands)
Virgin Islands Good Food Coalition cultivates a nourishing food system for innovation, economic development, and agricultural growth in the territory.
HEAL Rapid Response Funds supported:
  • Outreach contractor and farmer support during political, economic, and climate instability
  • Hosting Farmer Community Gatherings to foster connection, safety, and mutual aid during heightened uncertainty