Resources and Opportunities
The Race and Resistance Studies department is committed to supporting students through accessible resources and meaningful opportunities. This page features scholarships, student organizations, and services that foster learning, connection, and success.
Scholarships
Race and Resistance Studies, San Francisco State University, and our donors work together to make education affordable for our students by offering scholarship opportunities in order to aid the experience in pursuing a degree. Learn more about current funding opportunities below.
RRS prepares students to understand the race-related processes underlying many social problems and the multiple forms of struggle aimed at social justice. Our program explores these processes through an interdisciplinary, comparative and relational approach — examining how people of color and indigenous people both face and resist social inequalities. In doing so, we attend to intersectionality (e.g., how race, class, gender, sexuality and/or nationality intersect) as well as the complexities of identity and community formation.
A core part of our mission is to prepare students to use their learning to build on existing service and organizing work among disenfranchised communities of color in the U.S. and abroad. In short, we seek to build a praxis that unites both theory/study and practice/organizing in a life committed to social justice.
One of our former students, Hassani Bell, who passed in 2021, exemplifies much of what we do in RRS. Hassani came to San Francisco State in 2015 after having been a student in San Leandro High’s Social Justice Academy. In his first semester in RRS, he began talking about the big impact he wanted to make as an organizer. In only his second semester, in the midst of looming budget cuts to the College of Ethnic Studies, Hassani joined three other dedicated RRS students and went on a hunger strike, demanding among other things, full funding for the college. Drawing on what he learned in his RRS classes, the following year, Hassani spent the summer working as an organizer in New York City, trying to build interest in union participation among retail workers. He was the personification of everything we care about in RRS: excellent critical thinking skills, a dedication to social change, great integrity, and a generous heart. In honor of Hassani, we are excited to present this scholarship opportunity.
Application is due March 02, 2026.
The Queer Ethnic Studies Scholarship aims to provide financial support for our undergraduate students in the Queer and Trans Ethnic Studies program. Students who are actively engaged in community work with a focus on empowering and advancing queer and trans people of color and strive for an equitable LGBTQ community will be the ones considered for the scholarship.
Application is due March 02, 2026.
The Edward Said Scholarship was established by San Francisco State Alumnus Allam El Qadah in honor of Professor Edward Wadie Said, a Palestinian-American literary theorist, public intellectual, political activist, and musician, who helped found the critical-theory field of post-colonialism and was a champion of justice for and in Palestine.
The scholarship is open to undergraduate and graduate students of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies who demonstrate an outstanding academic record and community service that exemplifies what Professor Edward Said stood for. Learn more about the Edward Said Scholarship.
Application is due March 02, 2026.
Community Partners
| Arab Resource & Organizing Center | The Arab Resource and Organizing Center is a grassroots organization working to empower and organize the community towards justice and self-determination for all. AROC members build community power by participating in leadership development, political education, and campaigns. Also coordinates the Arab Youth Organization (AYO). |
| Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) | APEN is an environmental justice organization seeking to strengthen the capacities of Asian and Pacific Islander American communities to develop proactive solutions to environmental problems through grassroots organizing, leadership development, and advocacy. |
| Black Organizing Project (BOP) | BOP is a Black member-led community organization working for racial, social, and economic justice through grassroots organizing and community-building in Oakland. |
| Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth | A dynamic, multi-ethnic, youth-led organization that builds the leadership and power of high school age low-income young people and people of color in San Francisco. Youth Organizers recruit, educate and mobilize Y-MAC members to wage policy campaigns that win concrete improvements. |
| Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) | A community-based membership organization that organizes and empowers the low-income Chinese immigrant community in San Francisco with campaigns and programs on housing, health, a workers’ center, English empowerment classes, and a women’s group. |
| Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) | CBE is a grassroots non-profit environmental health and justice organization. CBE works for environmental health and justice by providing organizing and leadership development skills, and legal, scientific and technical assistance to low-income communities of color facing threats to their health and well-being from toxic pollution. |
| Critical Resistance | Critical Resistance was formed in 1997 when activists challenging the idea that imprisonment and policing are a solution for social, political, and economic problems came together to organize a conference that examined and challenged what we have come to call the prison industrial complex (PIC). |
| Filipino Community Center | Builds civic participation and grassroots leadership to strengthen our commitment and responsibility to each other, our community, and the larger society. |
| Frontline Catalysts | Committed to helping frontline youth of color discover their power by grounding them in the historical context of climate justice and the role of collective and distributive power to create profound change. |
| Local 2, UNITE HERE! | Represents about 12,000 workers in the hospitality industries of San Francisco and San Mateo. Our members work in many job sites – including hotels, restaurants, food services. |
| Movement Generation: Justice and Ecology Project | Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture. |
| Oakland Kids First | Oakland Kids First (OKF) trains hundreds of high-school leaders each year who work to advance safe and caring school cultures, academic success, and educational equity campaigns that center the needs of under-served Oakland students. |
| People Organized to Demand Environmental Rights (PODER) | PODER is a grassroots, environmental justice organization based in San Francisco’s Mission District. PODER’s mission is to organize with Mission residents to work on local solutions to issues facing low income communities and communities of color. |
| Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples | SPI provides in-person and virtual spaces for Native Nations and Indigenous People to think and strategically plan about how best to protect their sacred sites as well as advance the environmental justice priorities of tribal communities. |
| SF Rising | Builds political powers with communities of color that prioritize racial, economic and environmental justice. We build power through deepening multiracial solidarity, educating and mobilizing voters, working closely with policymakers, organizing, and developing leaders of color.” |
| Sogorea Te’ Land Trust | An urban Indigenous women-led land trust based in the San Francisco Bay Area that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people. |
| Trabajadordes Unidos/Workers United | Formerly known as Young Workers United. |