Note: This post is not a one-stop-shop for people looking for easy advocacy on-the-go. It's not a checklist, syllabus, or an all-in-one link repository. This is a starting point, intended for those looking to more effectively spend their time, energy, and resources to benefit Black people through direct financial assistance and personal (re-) education on issues directly affecting Black communities. This is a beginning—and as you visit, bookmark, subscribe, and donate to the sites and accounts below, keep your eyes and ears open to the suggestions they make, too.

Support Black-Owned Businesses

The Mercatus Business Directory
An interactive map and list with links to Black-owned businesses in the Portland Metro area, organized by sector and community.

I Love Black Food
A user-updated directory of Black-owned restaurants, food carts, and eateries, created for "Support Black-Owned Restaurants Week." Check this list next time you're looking to order-in for dinner.

Black PDX
A combination business-listing and community calendar specifically for Black Portlanders.

Places to Send Your Charitable Donations

Black Lives Matter PDX
Help fund this organization's efforts to lead, coordinate, and direct people to local protest actions and efforts, while increasing awareness of racial injustice and holding city and state officials accountable.

The Black Resilience Fund
An emergency fund focused on helping Black families and individuals pay rent, bills, get groceries, reduce debt, and more; co-created by social justice advocates and community activists Salomé Chimuku and Cameron Whitten.

Don't Shoot PDX
This community advocacy group specializes in education workshops and outreach programs focused on changing police policy and ending systemic discrimination.

Campaign Zero
A national organization dedicated to police reform at all levels and introducing/enacting policy changes and legislation aimed at holding police accountable for their violent actions. Last year, they gave a presentation before Portland City Council about how to negotiate a stronger police contract.

The Equal Justice Initiative
This organization led by lawyer/author Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy) is dedicated to ending mass incarceration and economic and racial injustice, and protecting America's most vulnerable.

The Portland NAACP
Includes a calendar of meetings and gatherings, volunteer opportunities, and African American healthcare provider listings.

Black United Fund of Oregon
Created in 1983 by community leaders in North and Northeast Portland to combat inequality in Portland by channeling charitable funds to low-income areas in the city.

Urban League of Portland
One of the city's oldest civil rights and social services organizations, aiming to empower Black communities through housing, workforce development, community health, and social reform.

Organizations Dedicated to Liberating Political Prisoners

PDX Protest Bail Fund
A GoFundMe created by the General Defense Committee Local 1 in Portland.

The Northwest Community Bail Fund
A nonprofit dedicated to bail reform in Washington state, and helping release people in King and Snohomish County's court systems.

The Bail Project
A national nonprofit dedicated to helping bail out those in need and pursuing/promoting their "community release with support" models.

National Bail Out
A Black-led, Black-centered collective aimed at ending pre-trial detention and mass incarceration, with a particular focus on bailing out Black mothers and reuniting them with their families.

Split Your Donation Across 50+ Bail Funds
Make a sizable contribution and spread it across 50 bail fund projects (including the Minnesota Freedom Fund, the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, and Restoring Justice in Houston) to help free low-income protesters (and bystanders) caught up in unfair police arrests at protest actions.

Online Presences and Personalities to Follow

Antiracism Center
American University's research and policy center, led by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

Check Your Privilege
Myisha T. Hill leads followers through an investigation of privilege, and the way privileged actions affect PoC mental health, with educators and guides offering advice to participants to increase their effectiveness in promoting anti-racist works and deeds.

No White Saviors
A Uganda-based advocacy campaign led by African women, focused on education and action in a more equitable and anti-racist direction, with an emphasis on ensuring white people understand that they can help without needing to center themselves in a hero narrative.

Showing Up for Racial Justice
An organization focused on undermining white supremacy by "moving white folks into accountable action as part of a multi-racial movement through community organizing, mobilizing, and education."

The Conscious Kid
A Black-and-Brown owned educational non-profit endeavor providing resources for parents and educators, as well as rent relief for families.

Things to Read

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

How to Be an Antiracist by Dr. Ibram X Kendl

They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Bleeding Albina: A History of Community Disinvestment, 1940-2000 by Karen J. Gibson

Things to Listen To

Code Switch
NPR's multi-racial, multi-generational journalistic podcast focused on race, ethnicity, and culture in the 21st century.

1619
The podcast component of the New York Times series about the ways slavery built and transformed America.

About Race
The now-ended Panoply podcast starring Anna Holmes, Baratunde Thurston, Raquel Cepeda, and Tanner Colby, "about the ways we can't talk, don't talk, would rather not talk, but intermittently, fitfully, embarrassingly talk about culture, identity, politics, power, and privilege."

Seeing White
A 14-part podcast documentary series from Scene on Radio that seeks to answer the question of where "whiteness" even comes from, and what it's for.

Pod Save the People
Activist and organizer DeRay McKesson's popular social justice and politics podcast on the Crooked Media network, with co-hosts Brittany Packnett Cunningham, Sam Sinyangwe, and Dr. Clint Smith.

Things to Watch

The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975
Director/writer Göran Olsson admits his film isn’t comprehensive, but his outsider’s perspective lends a piquant slant unavailable to American filmmakers. He devotes almost as much time to ordinary black citizens dealing with injustice, drugs, and poverty as he does to leaders like Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and Eldridge Cleaver, making us realize that Black people’s grievances resonate as urgently today as they did 40 years ago. DAVE SEGAL

Selma
Director Ava DuVernay's willingness to engage with this particularly American history of violence sets Selma apart—portraying a movement on film is an impossible task, but if DuVernay has succeeded, it's in the way Selma forces a kind of reckoning for its viewer. MEGAN BURBANK

I Am Not Your Negro
In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project—a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left behind only 30 completed pages of this manuscript. Filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished.

Fruitvale Station
Oscar Grant was the unarmed 22-year-old black man who was shot to death by a transit cop in an Oakland train station—Fruitvale Station—on January 1, 2009. At trial, the officer convinced the jury that he mistook his gun for a Taser. Convicted of involuntary manslaughter, he served 11 months and was home before the year was out. In a way, Grant himself is on trial in Fruitvale Station, humanized compassionately yet unflinchingly on the big screen. But ultimately, you need only ask yourself: Why does this man have to prove he doesn't deserve to be killed? In our culture, who has to prove themselves and who doesn't? JEN GRAVES

Why Aren't There More Black People in Oregon? A Hidden History
A filmed 2014 presentation at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art by PSU adjunct professor and writer Walidah Imarisha, covering aspects of Oregon history not taught in local schools, a history steeped in Black exclusion and discrimination, answering the question "Why Aren't There More Black People in Oregon?"

If Beale Street Could Talk
Moonlight director Barry Jenkins' masterful adaptation of James Baldwin's novel perfectly captures how macro issues—particularly the rigged systems that work against Black people in America—affect one family like shuddering, foundation-shaking aftershocks. ROBERT HAM

Queen & Slim
Queen & Slim may be the best—and is almost certainly the Blackest—film of 2019, and is perhaps most poignant for its gorgeous, complex, and multifaceted portrayal of the Black experience, where sparks of joy and love exist alongside pain, struggle, and oppression; a new American romance/drama written in the Black American language, told via a fully Black lens, and including a diverse array of characters who show that Black people are not a monolith. JENNI MOORE

Arresting Power
Making good use of rare (and expensive) archival footage from the Oregon Historical Society, the local documentary Arresting Power is at its strongest when telling the origin story of Portland’s police accountability movement—providing potent evidence that the marches and demands for change that erupted post-Ferguson are part of a decades-long tradition started by our city’s African American community. Many of those leaders also appear on camera, sharing their wisdom alongside testimonials from community members like Shirley Isadore, whose daughter Kendra James was killed by Portland police in 2003. It’s a good primer for anyone who cares about accountability. DENIS C. THERIAULT

When They See Us
Ava DuVernay's award-winning Netflix miniseries about the injustices visited upon Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana Jr., Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam, and their eventual exoneration. DuVernay's media company and arts collective ARRAY has released a learning guide for families and educators to use when watching the miniseries with children.

Blindspotting
In rapidly gentrifying Oakland, Collin (Daveed Diggs) is trying to survive his last three days of probation when the slightest infraction will send him back to jail. However, his best friend Miles (Rafael Casal) is white, wild, and reckless. Collin should avoid Miles, but he doesn’t. While trying to get home before curfew late one night, he witnesses a rogue cop pursue and shoot a fleeing black man. CARL SPENCE

Priced Out
Cornelius Swart’s Priced Out assembles a wealth of information about the history of gentrification in the Black neighborhoods of North and Northeast Portland. This film is a follow-up to NorthEast Passage, a documentary Swart, a longtime reporter, co-produced in 2002; that film's central figure, Nikki Williams, spoke in favor of gentrification. Priced Out juxtaposes Williams’ current perspective with the recent developments that have turned several Portland neighborhoods into playgrounds for white newcomers. It’s as fascinating to watch as it is devastating to comprehend. SUZETTE SMITH

The Murder of Fred Hampton
In the late '60s, Fred Hampton became one of the most powerful voices in the Black activist movement, rising to the ranks of deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party and helping found the Rainbow Coalition, a multicultural group that united a disparate batch of Chicago community groups all fighting on behalf of civil rights and racial equality. So powerful that he was deemed a radical and was killed in a raid of his apartment by the Chicago police and the FBI. Director Howard Alk's 1971 documentary, offered up for streaming via Portland's Church of Film, is a damning expose into Hampton's death and an unforgettable portrait of his short but deeply impactful life. ROBERT HAM

Again, this is just a starting point, directing people towards more meaningful ways to help others and get educated. Did we miss an organization or resource you think could be a good introduction to their moves towards an anti-racist future? Email us and let us know. Looking to join a protest action and show solidarity? Check out our Resistance calendar. And if you're organizing a rally, march, or meeting and you want people to know, send our calendar team the info.