This is NEJA’s general fund. With a staff of unpaid volunteers, NEJA provides the maximum use of your donation to the cause of equal justice. Donations are used for needs additional to or beyond the scope of the seven specialty funds, described below.

The Equal Justice Fund makes it possible for NEJA to publicize precedent-setting struggles for justice on a national scale and thereby enlist individuals and groups of clergy, attorneys, civil rights activists and others to voluntarily apply their skills and give of their resources to benefit those efforts. At the same time, by support­ing the Equal Justice Fund you can promulgate the winning methods of these grassroots efforts to your own constituencies, thereby increasing the impact of your championing the cause of equal justice.

This fund supports just struggles of migrant and seasonal farm workers for decent living and working conditions — such as affordable clean and safe housing, freedom from pesticide poisoning and living wages. NEJA has helped bring together the power of legal and medical professionals and other specialists with labor organizations of farm workers. Together they have taken on otherwise seemingly insurmountable odds against entrenched power structures to win long-needed victories.

NEJA grants and expertise assisted farm workers in obtaining potable drinking water when state-operated housing units had wood slivers, pieces of metal and fatty sludge in their tap water — officials not only failed to correct the problem but retaliated against workers who filed complaints. After mounting a community wide campaign, including forming an independent fact-finding committee of experts, they won action by the local government to hook up the farm worker residences with a potable water supply from the city water main. This same objective had been sought after and lost a decade prior because the workers had been too isolated; many were fired and blacklisted by other employers in the area for “causing trouble.”

NEJA supported litigation on behalf of farm workers subjected to illegal rent hikes by a state agency and helped them sustain an 8-year-long court battle and until they won $1.2 million in settlement funds.

In numerous instances, NEJA’s power as an independent organization has reversed chilling effects that had sty­mied those seeking legitimate and lifesaving change.

This fund was established because while it may not be technically illegal that over 47 million people in the US have no affordable health care, it is certainly a crime against the people. Recent proposals to force the unin­sured to sign a contract with an HMO for health insur­ance coverage, regardless of an individual’s ability to pay but for which one could be fined for failure to comply, is an obvious boon to the corporate medical industry. However, they provide no solution for working people and the underemployed or for health professionals who care about practicing the ethics of their profession.

The Health Access Fund supports efforts of doctors, nurses and other health professionals in joining with their patients, workers organizations and other community members dedicated to eliminating the barriers to affordable preventive health care.

NEJA sponsors volunteer disaster relief units that have distributed food, clothing, bottled water and other relief supplies, free of charge, with no questions asked, in areas of major disasters. NEJA aids advocacy groups teaching disaster victims and others how to advocate for aid to individuals and entire communities. NEJA supports committees of volunteers demanding that official relief agencies uphold the law of the land to diligently work for full economic recovery in federal disaster areas. NEJA aids those working to counter­act the inherent racialism and classism manifested in official relief programs’ delays and denials of aid to poor, minority and working class communities.

NEJA has aided those working to advance the means to give a voice to groups on the front lines of the fight for equal justice whose efforts may be silenced or their mission misrepresented by a partisan press dependent on corporate advertising and investments. NEJA has supported committees for alternative press resources and independent publications that teach community organizers how to produce newspapers, posters, and other media to publicize their work among their own memberships and also to the community members they seek to win over to their cause.

NEJA issues grants for community organizing campaigns related to some aspect of equal justice and to aid self-help efforts to sustain themselves while in the midst of a heated battle or a new expansion drive.

This fund was established to support the renovation and construction of office facilities that can increase the capacity of associations of low-income workers or others striving for economic and legal justice.  The fund also provides education as to the pitfalls of the possible alternatives to many "redevelopment" schemes that too often drive out poor and minority residents, leaving only a token few in renovated structures

The Prisoner Justice Fund supports prisoner correspondence projects and efforts of friends and relatives of prisoners, mostly low-income and minority, to help their loved ones on "the inside." The fund has aided efforts of legal and prisoners' rights organizations nationwide.