beatriz beckford is an organizer and artist who has spent more than twenty years helping communities hit hardest by policing, poverty and disinvestment win the resources and the policies they need to be self determining and thriv

She is a resource mobilizer and fundraiser who knows both sides of the table. At People's Advocacy Institute in Jackson, Mississippi, she helped build a development program that grew from a single $100,000 grant into a $3.6 million budget. As a program officer, she ran rapid response grantmaking at Groundswell Fund, getting money quickly to organizers facing sudden fights, and at Brooklyn Community Foundation she designed participatory grantmaking that put funding decisions in the hands of grassroots, BIPOC-led groups. She can tell an organization's story so a funder sees exactly where the money goes, and she keeps those relationships going long after the first check. She holds the a Fundraising and Non Profit Management post graduate certificate from NYU and holds a CFRE credential.

She also designs campaigns. She helped co-write the Vision for Black Lives, the Movement for Black Lives' policy platform, and co-architected the Community Safety Agenda, which brought more than 70 organizations behind one set of policy priorities and demands. At MomsRising she led a national team fighting the school-to-prison pipeline. Her particular gift is the slow part of coalition work: getting groups with different priorities to agree on what to ask for, then keeping them together long enough to win it.

Underneath all of it, she is a teacher. Eight years in public school classrooms in Chicago, New Haven and New York taught her how people actually learn, and she brings that to every room she facilitates. Her art practice is where much of her popular education begins; she was artist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago's Homan Square and has built programs with Parsons - The New School, NYU Law, among others.

She co-founded the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. She sits on the boards of Impact Justice and Sweet Freedom Farm and on the advisory board of The Action Lab NYC, and she previously served on the board of Rooted In Community. She has trained with Rockwood Leadership and the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, though she'll tell you her best teachers were kinship circles and the communities she has organized alongside.