Who We Are
The Social Impact Center is a nonprofit organization that serves as a hub for organizers and is a bridge between government, grassroots organizations, and people in underserved communities.
Our mission is to build, strengthen, and empower the next generation of leaders focusing on the most impacted populations. We do this through education, storytelling, community building, and creating safe spaces for dialogue.
Mission
We are building power in criminalized BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities through stigma-free organizing and mutual aid. Our model is rooted in storytelling, education, cultural expression, intergenerational healing, and intersectional coalition building.
Vision
Centering our individual narratives and collective histories, we are building a Los Angeles rooted in compassion, care, healing, and intergenerational power for criminalized BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities.
Values
Our values are guided by empathy and compassion. We believe that acts of inclusion and collaboration centered on intentionality Build, strengthen, and empower our community. This allows the community to feel seen, heard, accepted, safe, and ready to step into bravery.
The Problem
Systemic criminalization - rooted in white supremacy, gendered violence, and racial capitalism - has produced and continually produces violence including but not limited to police brutality, mass incarceration and economic sanctions. It especially separates BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities in Los Angeles from their power, health, value, opportunities, connection to each other, the land and nature.
BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) represent 72% of California’s state prison population with a recidivism rate of 50% over the last 10 years. 1 out of 3 people in LA County Jails suffer from mental illness and LA County spends 32 times more money on putting people in jail than keeping them out. For far too long our resources have been invested in systems of harm.
We’re here to change that.
Our Theory of Change
When harm has occurred, it is our collective responsibility to prioritize healing. Healing begins with ourselves. From that place, we can be present, encourage healing for others, and step into our leadership role.
We create change by providing educational programming centered on harm reduction, equity, and transformative justice. We educate our community to address individual acts of harm by relying on community members instead of the police, the law, or the government.
Using innovative technological tools, we streamline, humanize and build power from the delivery of expungement services by partnering lived experience experts and other trauma-informed volunteers with justice-involved community members to develop leadership across communities.
Our theory of change transforms harm into healing.