Impact Fund Grants Support Indigenous Rights, Students’ Civil Rights, and Environmental Justice
Sanjana Manjeshwar, Grant Program Associate
During the Impact Fund’s winter and spring grantmaking cycles, we granted a total of $315,000 to support impact litigation brought by communities challenging systemic injustice across a wide range of issue areas. Our new grantees are doing incredible work across North America to advance Indigenous land rights, protect transgender students, challenge segregation in public schools, advocate for climate action, and more. We are so excited to be able to support these important cases.
These grants also represent an exciting milestone: the Impact Fund has now granted more than $10 million since our founding in 1992. We are grateful to the many organizations, communities, attorneys, and supporters who helped make this historic moment possible. Below, we share the inspiring stories behind some of the cases we have funded in recent months.
Protecting Indigenous Communities’ Land and Water
Two of our recent grantees are bringing cases on behalf of Indigenous people challenging decades of resource extraction and environmental degradation in their traditional territories.
One grant funds a case seeking to recognize Indigenous land and marine rights in Haida Gwaii, Canada (pictured).
The Council of the Haida Nation, represented by the White Raven Law Corporation, is bringing a case seeking Aboriginal rights and title claims over the islands of Haida Gwaii off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. The case seeks justice for the wrongful colonization of the islands and their surrounding waters, which resulted in significant deforestation, depletion of fish populations, and harm to Haida culture and traditions. In 2023, the province of British Columbia conceded that the Haida Nation has rights over the lands of Haida Gwaii with the passage of the Haida Nation Recognition Act. However, the federal government of Canada has not yet recognized these rights, and the lawsuit aims to compel it to do so. The Haida Nation is additionally seeking damages to compensate for the ecological and cultural harm caused by centuries of colonization.
According to the lawyers bringing the case, this litigation is part of a broader strategy to facilitate Haida self-determination and to protect the land, air, and water of Haida Gwaii for generations to come. If successful, the case would be the first in Canada to recognize Indigenous rights to marine territories, which could lay the groundwork for similar litigation in other Indigenous nations across the country.
A sugar plantation in Central Maui has drained hundreds of millions of gallons of water from streams in a Native Hawaiian farming community.
Another grantee, the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, is bringing a case challenging the excessive diversion of water from dozens of streams that run through the rural Native Hawaiian farming community Nā Moku ʻAupuni ʻo Koʻolau Hui. For over 25 years, real estate and agricultural corporations have drained water from streams in the Ke‘anae-Wailuanui region to irrigate a commercial sugar plantation dozens of miles away in Central Maui.
In 2015, the community sued to stop the diversions due to a lack of adequate environmental review. While the case was ongoing, the corporations continued to drain the streams daily. After many years of litigation, the courts agreed that the Hawai‘i Board of Land and Natural Resources should not have authorized the diversions. However, by this point, the community had already suffered for years because hundreds of millions of gallons of water were unlawfully taken from them. The community is now seeking restitution for the losses that they experienced. By pursuing significant damages, the case also aims to discourage further illegal water permitting and diversion in the region. The issues behind the lawsuit are explored in the short film Ola I Ka Wai: East Maui, accessible here.
Challenging Discrimination and Segregation in Schools
Two recent grantees are bringing class actions seeking to protect civil rights and equal access in schools.
Public interest law firm Wardenski P.C. is suing the state of South Carolina over the state’s 2024 budget appropriation law, which restricts funding for K-12 schools that permit transgender students to use gender-appropriate school restrooms. Following the law’s passage, public schools across the state began prohibiting transgender students from using gender-appropriate restrooms. The named plaintiff in this case is a 13-year-old transgender boy who was punished and suspended for using the boys’ restroom. He experienced anti-trans harassment from classmates and eventually withdrew from his school to attend an online education program.
Transgender children in South Carolina now face heightened discrimination, bullying, fear, and stigma at school.
There are thousands of transgender children living in South Carolina, and according to the case, they now face heightened discrimination, bullying, fear, and stigma at school. The case alleges that denying transgender students access to gender-appropriate restrooms violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and Title IX, and the goal of the litigation is to obtain an injunction preventing the state law from being enforced.
We also supported a civil rights class action brought by Minnesota law firm Shulman Buske Reams PLLC challenging racial and economic segregation in K-12 public schools in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. Although the Minnesota state constitution guarantees the right to an adequate and equitable education, public schools and charter schools in the area remain deeply segregated on the basis of both race and socioeconomic status.
K-12 public schools remain deeply segregated in the Minnesota Twin Cities area (pictured).
Children of color and children receiving free or reduced lunch make up the majority of students in the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Students at these schools are at a severe educational disadvantage compared to students in the surrounding suburban schools, which are overwhelmingly white and affluent. The students from Minneapolis and Saint Paul perform substantially lower on reading and math tests, and their schools lack resources such as textbooks, computers, science equipment, and sports and art programs.
The case alleges that the Minneapolis and Saint Paul school districts knowingly approved the drawing of school boundaries that increased segregation by race and income. The case seeks to establish that school segregation is unconstitutional and to require the creation of a region-wide desegregation plan.
Seeking Environmental Justice and Climate Action
Finally, two recent grantees are bringing environmental cases aiming to address the harmful impacts of factory farming and fossil fuel production.
We made a grant to the Center for Food Safety for a case challenging the recently-issued permit for a proposed large-scale chicken factory farm in Linn County, Oregon. Major poultry corporation Foster Farms is planning to open a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) with the capacity to produce more than 3.4 million broiler chickens each year.
The North Santiam River in Oregon would be contaminated by a proposed large-scale chicken factory farm just a few hundred yards away.
The proposed facility would be located just a few hundred yards away from the North Santiam River, which serves as a critical water source for residents of the South Willamette Valley. According to the case, the resulting pollution could contaminate the river with toxic levels of ammonia, chicken waste, and feather and skin fragments. The nearby low-income farming community strongly opposes the facility.
This case aims to establish that the planned CAFO would violate the Clean Water Act and Oregon state law and should not have been issued a permit. In addition, the litigation is one part of broader organizing and advocacy efforts by local community farmers and ranchers to oppose industrial animal agriculture. If successful, the case could set positive legal precedent that would help rural communities across the country address the harmful impacts of factory farming.
Climate change has contributed to natural disasters such as this massive forest fire in British Columbia, Canada.
Our Children's Trust is bringing a climate justice case on behalf of 15 youth advocates challenging the Canadian government’s support and promotion of fossil fuel production as unconstitutional under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The case alleges that despite Canada’s knowledge of the harmful climate impacts of fossil fuels, it continues to actively promote fossil fuel production and has missed every climate pollution reduction target it has set for itself. Canada is one of the fastest-warming countries in the world, and the 11.1 million Canadian youth under the age of 25 will spend the coming decades experiencing wildfires, heat waves, violent storms, and other extreme weather events.
The goal of the case is to seek recognition of Canadian children’s fundamental climate rights and to compel Canada to develop a national science-based climate recovery plan. The youth plaintiffs come from several different provinces across Canada, including a number of Indigenous communities in the Arctic. The litigation aims to center and amplify the plaintiffs’ personal stories about the impacts of climate change on their daily lives.
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Our new grantees’ cases demonstrate the important potential of impact litigation as a tool to confront powerful entities and achieve justice, especially during a time when standing up to cruelty and oppression is more important than ever. We look forward to following the progress of these cases in the coming years.
Each quarter, we make grants to support impact litigation in pursuit of economic, environmental, racial, and social justice. To learn more about our grant criteria and upcoming grant application deadlines, check out the “Apply” page of our website or contact us here.