What We Do
Civic Engagement
IE United Education Fund is the center of civic engagement power building in the Inland Empire. The nine organizations that make up the coalition are each powerful power builders and movement organizers, building a base and leading local organizing on their respective issue(s) of focus.
IE United Education Fund bolsters that activity by uniting the work around a shared, intersectional, cross-issue platform that tells a story of transformative change in our inland communities. Because our mission is to prioritize civic engagement activity, we coordinate local field activity and train partners how to best manage their data to ensure we’re maximizing the resources coming in, and we have the capacity to manage systems change programs–like census, redistricting, and regional narrative building–that partners may not be able to do on their own given their issue specific programs.
Values Based Budgeting
We can join together to demand courage from our leaders in holding these bad actors accountable and making them pay their fair share. We can have good jobs with actual benefits, a safe environment where we can breathe easy, accessible housing that’s affordable and high quality, and secure neighborhoods where everyone has what they need.
Justice Leadership Academy
The Inland Empire is home to over 4.7 million people, nearly 75% are communities of color and a million are immigrants. Our region spans race, ethnicity, language, age, religion, gender, or ability and we grow more diverse every year!
Still, we continue to see the same faces making the same choices in our elected leadership, leaving our communities fighting for scraps and struggling to get by. We have too much need, too much opportunity, too much talent to allow our community to settle for policies that did not work for most of us to begin with. It is time for a new generation of leadership, grounded in our values and in our community, to change the face of our councils and commissions!
IE United Education Fund, California Environmental Voters Education Fund, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund of the Pacific Southwest will be welcoming our third cohort in 2025. We are eager to identify, train, and support community members and leaders, specifically progressive women, black, indigenous, LGBTQ, and/or people of color, to run for office and/or manage winning electoral campaigns. Over the course of 6 months, we will train a small cohort of leaders on everything they need to know to run, manage, and win grassroots, values based campaigns – for free!
Narrative Change
The Inland Empire is the fastest growing region in the state of California. With over 4.7 million residents, we have both an opportunity and a mandate to ensure that our systems and policies grow with us as a region so that all of us can live full, thriving lives.
In order to transform this region so that it better serves us all, we must be mindful of how we talk about ourselves and how we talk about our dreams. From the High Desert to the Twin Cities, Ontario to Moreno Valley to Coachella, we all deserve to have our basic needs met and we all desire to live in communities we are proud to call home.
Right now though, too many of us are struggling to keep our heads above water. Some people try to tell us that it’s because too many immigrants are taking all the jobs or our black and brown neighbors don’t work hard enough. But we know better.
We will not be distracted and we will not blame our neighbors when we are all struggling with the same issues. People feel stuck in place because big corporations in our region just want to profit off of us for the sake of their own pockets.
IE United Education Fund launched the IE Communications Hub in 2023 in partnership with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice in order to support grassroots organizations across the region in telling our story.