The 2023-2024 Grant Cycle is Open for Applications! Micro-grants are available through the Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant as well as the Anarchist Horizons Grant. Please visit the Institute for Anarchist Studies website to learn more and submit applications. Applications close March 31st, 2024.
The Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant was created in memory of Jen Angel, the social justice activist, baker, writer, and co-founder of Agency who died on February 9, 2023 as a result of an apparent robbery-assault in Oakland, California.
Agency created the Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant program to help fuel the types of projects that Jen created throughout her life–projects that reflect the spirit of grassroots and do-it-yourself action she worked so hard to sustain. The core tenets of anarchism that underscored Jen’s life and work—autonomy, mutual aid, voluntary association, direct action—are all amplified by the independent media projects funded by this grant program.
Alongside Agency, the grant program in Angel’s honor is co-hosted by the Institute for Anarchist Studies. Applications for the Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant are accepted through the institute’s long-running grant program, which has supported hundreds of anarchist writing projects for over the past quarter-century.
Read Remembering Jen Angel to learn more about Jen’s legacy, and the press release announcing the inaugural Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant recipients here.
Donate to Agency to support the the Jen Angel Anarchist Media Grant fund.
2023 Grantees
Elements of Mutual Aid Docuseries
Project Description
“The Elements of Mutual Aid” is an independent, four-part docuseries (currently mid-production) that explores the origins, structures, healing ways, and logistics of anti-authoritarian mutual aid across North America. Each chapter is based on one the four elements – fire, earth, water, and air – and introduces a unique cast of grassroots activists that each tackle oppression in their communities.
Bios
Payton (he/they) and Leah (they/them) are anarchist filmmakers who have both spent the last decade organizing on the ground in their communities. Payton’s from Michigan and has focused on anti-fascist organizing, agit-prop production, and popular education. Leah’s from Texas has organized disaster response and recovery, worked in solidarity with Oaxacan indigenous anarchists and migrants, and documented lessons learned along the way. Both are first-time filmmakers who are excited to co-produce media that helps explain how anti-authoritarian values can be put to practice.
Website: theelementsofmutualaid.com
Occupy Sandy Documentary
Project Description
“Occupy Sandy: A Decade’s Retrospective on Mutual Aid” documents Occupy Sandy, an anarchistic mutual aid disaster relief effort that delivered millions of dollars in relief to more than a dozen neighborhoods and mobilized at least 60,000 volunteers in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Combining collective oral history practice and documentary film, the project explores how Occupy Sandy’s work embodies a prefigurative anarchist project. Occupy Sandy: A Decade’s Retrospective on Mutual Aid hopes to provide communities with education and inspiration for non-hierarchical post-disaster mutual aid organizing.
Bio
Micaela Suminski is a service worker, union organizer, and documentary filmmaker from the Philadelphia area, now living in Brooklyn, NY. Centering on forms of collective resistance, Suminski’s documentary projects have explored topics including gig economy food delivery workers, university student strikes, tenant organizing, post-disaster mutual aid, and personal loss.
Undoing Rigid Radicalism Podcast
Project Description
Based on the book Joyful Militancy by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, Pamela Carmona and Alf Bojórquez present the podcast “Undoing Rigid Radicalism.” This podcast in Spanish explores how concepts like paranoia, purity, guilt, and punishment affect social movements in Latin America and how we can build a joyful militancy.”
Bios
Alf Bojorquéz: (she/her): Musician and writer. She has embarked on extensive tours of experimental music, hardcore punk, and improvisation, playing percussion and conducting workshops on fiction, art, and critical theory in Mexico and the United States. Her first novel, “Pepitas de calabaza,” was published by Fondo Blanco, and her second book, “No existe dique capaz de contener al océano furioso,” a personal essay on political philosophy, will soon be released by Heredad Publishing.
Pamela Carmona: (she/her): Sound, self-management, and social justice. Promotes self-management through sociocracy at Sociocracy For All. Radio and Podcast host and producer.
Lesbians and Gays Against Intervention Podcast
Project Description
The history of the San Francisco Bay Area-based collective known as Lesbians and Gays Against Intervention is the subject of a new seven-part podcast series utilizing archival testimonies, sound images, and interviews with remaining members of the group that has fought for justice since the 1970s. The collective has focused organizing efforts on issues including the continuing housing crisis in the Bay Area. Based on a writing project supported by IAS in 2016.
Bio
Toshio Meronek produces Sad Francisco, a podcast about neoliberal nightmares. Their book ‘Miss Major Speaks’ was published in 2023 by Verso.