Bread & Roses Community Fund

For more than four decades, Cheri Honkala has transformed survival into a movement for human rights, collective action, and social justice.

As co-founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, Cheri’s vision casts poverty not as a personal or policy failure but a human rights issue.

"There’s multi-million budgets, there’s nonprofits all over the place, and there’s nothing for people,” she says. “Every night in this city, homeless people have to do the homeless shuffle.”

Through organizing, bold public actions, and political education, Cheri’s lifelong dedication to the belief that everyone has a chance to live with dignity and hope has built power and sustained movements.

Cheri says: “We're educated, we're organized, and our goal is to recruit, multiply, and create another kind of world, because it's possible."

Click the link to sponsor, buy a ticket, make a gift, or learn more about the 2026 Tribute to Change: Resist, Rise Up, and Reimagine taking place on June 11 at Vie. Your support of Cheri's tenacity and leadership allows Bread & Roses to fund grassroots organizations working toward social justice all year long: https://breadrosesfund.org/2026tribute/

David Acosta is a community organizer and poet who has spent five decades connecting LGBTQIA+ rights, HIV/AIDS advocacy, and Latine and broader immigrant social justice movements.

In 1989, David founded GALAEI to confront the pain, hurt, and fear resulting from the loss of LGBTQIA+ Latine lives to the HIV/AIDS crisis, and later helped found Prevention Point Philadelphia, pioneering harm reduction and health services in the community.

“I had a lot of doors closed, but I was persistent, and eventually those doors either opened, or I kicked them open,” David says. “People realized this is important work, it's in our communities, it's happening, we're being affected, we're being impacted, we need to do something.”

“You do the work because you want to change both your own conditions, because in changing our own conditions, we change the conditions of other people,” David reflects.

As the current artistic director of Casa de Duende, David is dedicating himself to platforming, uplifting, and guiding artists to spark change. “We know that art does have the power to heal,” he says.

Sponsor the 2026 Tribute to Change and honor David’s courage and creativity demanding community self-determination and promoting healing. Sponsoring and buying a ticket allow Bread & Roses to fund grassroots organizations working toward social justice all year long.

Click the link to sponsor, buy a ticket, make a gift to Tribute to Change, and learn more: https://breadrosesfund.org/2026tribute/

Cierra Freeman has spent years building power across communities—from saving the Cecil B. Moore Library through leadership in the Brewerytown Sharswood Neighborhood Coalition, to developing a guaranteed income program through her leadership at the Womanist Working Collective.

As she says: "The scope of work must be revolutionary for the trying times that we're in."

Celebrate Cierra Freeman as a sponsor of the 2026 Tribute to Change: Resist, Rise Up, and Reimagine on June 11! Sponsoring helps Bread & Roses move money into the hands of community organizing groups all year round. The deadline to be listed as a sponsor in the printed program book is Monday, May 25.

Click the link to sponsor and learn more: https://breadrosesfund.org/2026tribute/