Project Partners

Our projects are social ventures that practice and exemplify Transformative Action. They employ pattern-breaking ideas to address pressing social problems.

CTA currently provides fiscal sponsorship to thirteen projects. Our Projects are an integral part of our center, qualifying for charitable donations and grants available only to tax-exempt organizations. They also benefit from our mentorship, business services, and the credibility and accountability that come with decades of successful, progressive social change work.

If your organization in New York State needs fiscal sponsorship, click here to find out how to apply for non-profit status under our 501(c)3 umbrella. You can also click on each project below to learn more about how our projects promote social change.

Durland Alternatives Library

The Durland Alternatives Library is located on the Cornell campus and is free and open to everyone. The collection is comprised of books, periodicals and audio-visual materials focusing on cutting edge work in ecology, community, renewable energy, alternative health, organic agriculture and gardening, world cultures, global issues, domestic politics and policies, spirituality and a variety of materials on sustainable living.

Buffalo Street Bookmarks

Buffalo Street Bookmarks is one of CTA's newest Project Partners and is a literary arts center housed at the community-owned bookstore Buffalo Street Books.

Committee on U.S.-Latin American Relations (CUSLAR)

The Committee on U.S.-Latin American Relations (CUSLAR) works for peace, justice, and greater mutual understanding in U.S.-Latin American relations through education, solidarity and support of human rights. CUSLAR supports the right of the people of Latin America and the Caribbean to self-determination, and supports their efforts to free themselves from a legacy of colonialism, exploitation, and oppression.

Dorothy Cotton Institute

The Dorothy Cotton Institute envisions the full realization of a just and peaceful Beloved Community in which all people understand, respect, protect and exercise full human rights. We believe that with a global community of human rights leadership, and a well informed, inspired and motivated population, in the United States and elsewhere, the goal of human rights for all can be achieved.

Ecovillage at Ithaca Center for Sustainability Education

EcoVillage at Ithaca (EVI) is part of a growing global movement for a saner, more sustainable human culture. It is developing an alternative model for suburban living, which provides a satisfying, healthy, socially rich lifestyle, while minimizing ecological impacts. EVI-CSE offers a variety of hands-on, experiential learning programs including those of the Groundswell Center for Local Food & Farming.

Emerging Educational Futures

Emerging Educational Futures facilitates multi-level collaborations in communities across New York to develop equitable and sustainable models of schooling for a new economy.

Food Systems Journal

The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development (JAFSCD), also known as the "Food Systems Journal," is the world's only peer-reviewed, applied research journal on food system-based community development. They are one of our newer Project Partners.

From Here: Making Our Future

From Here: Making Our Future is one of our newest Project Partners. Located in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, From Here is working toward alternative economic practices that support cooperation, ecological sustainability, and mutualism.

Human Rights Educators USA

The mission of Human Rights Educators USA is to promote human dignity, justice, and peace by cultivating an expansive, vibrant base of support for Human Rights Education (HRE) in the United States.

Ithaca City of Asylum

Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA) is dedicated to providing sanctuary to writers whose works are suppressed, whose lives are threatened, whose cultures are vanishing, or whose languages are endangered.

Local Investing Resource Center

The mission of the Local Investing Resource Center is to expand investment by local investors into small businesses and nonprofits in communities across the country. We will do this by creating a non-profit website and advocacy center that will educate and support local businesses, local investors, and local investing networks nationwide.

An Open Window

An Open Window is a project in which Treacy Ziegler, the director, goes into maximum-security prisons to teach art to incarcerated individuals. The project also donates professional artwork to prisons with the goal of involving non-artists into the process of art. It is the vision of this project for the prison community to have the fullest and most complex experience of art.

Sustainability Center

The Sustainability Center, one of the first of its kind in the country, provides a place where residents, students and visitors to Tompkins County can learn about our community's collective efforts to protect the environment through proactive initiatives led by individuals, businesses, government, non-profits, the campuses, and other sectors.

Third Root Education Exchange

The Third Root Education Exchange (TREE) recently joined CTA as a new Project Partner. Located in Brooklyn, New York, TREE specifically aims to reach individuals in the community who have been excluded from quality and culturally-relevant kinds of healthcare through community health forums, educational workshops, specialized yoga classes, and direct outreach.

Veterans' Sanctuary

The Veterans’ Sanctuary works to create a peer-based, residential program to support Iraq and Afghanistan veterans as they transition from combat to civilian life. The organization provides a new path toward addressing veterans’ issues with tools for transformation, holistic wellness programs, expressive arts, farming, green job training, and community living.

Vitamin L

The purpose of the Vitamin L project is to spread love and goodwill, and to encourage positive character development through music, by inspiring young people with messages that are meaningful in their daily lives.

Wood's Earth Living Classroom

Wood’s Earth Living Classroom fosters community relationships tocultivate an underdeveloped yet crucial component of the Ithaca areafood system—sourcing healthy, local food for our public schools. Webelieve that youth and community can actively build a moresustainable, cohesive food system by building partnerships to improveschool food.

Past Projects

The Center for Transformative Action started in 1971 as the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy (CRESP). Over the past forty years we have been home to a number of projects. Some of them have become independent non-profit organizations, some of them moved to new fiscal sponsors, some of them ended, and some of them are still with us. This page is a timeline of past projects.