Co-Founder
Todd Belcore - 2012

History

SOCIAL CHANGE  was founded in 2012 by Todd Belcore, and a childhood friend Emile Cambry Jr. – two idealistic young men with firsthand experience with poverty, racism, and systemic inequality. We wanted to “do something” about the inequality that surrounded us but became frustrated and tired of hearing people and organizations with no lived experience or deep ties and relationships within our communities tell our stories – while dictating how to do it and without taking into account the endemic and systemic systems and barriers intrinsically intertwined with its root causes.

Fed up, we decided to leverage our own life experiences to create a vehicle to address fundamental inequities and empower underserved communities – which simultaneously would be led by those same communities – including ourselves. At that moment, SOCIAL CHANGE was born.

What do we do?

We’re not just doing one thing — we’re solving problems on multiple levels at once. If someone comes to us hungry, we feed them, but we also build a farm so they’ll never have to depend on a food line again. If someone needs their record cleared, we help them in court, but we also go to the statehouse and change the law so thousands of others benefit too. And with ChangeFest, we take those stories and push them out to the world so they inspire more change

Mission

Social Change provides direct services that address urgent community needs and engages in storytelling, capacity building, organizing and mobilizing to address systemic barriers to self-sufficiency. Over the years, we have established a range of programs and initiatives to support these goals, from health clinics and legal assistance to free farmers markets and civic engagement efforts.

We are active in several states across the United States, which include Illinois (headquarters), California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin.