Alchemy Award

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Alchemy Award 🌸

The Bambi Fund’s Annual Alchemy Award is an end-of-year discretionary mini-grant awarded to a frontline changemaker who uses their magic to create loving community.

Our Grantees

2025 Grantee

  • This year, we are honored to present the Bambi Fund’s annual Alchemy Award mini-grant to Walter Cobb - a true force for justice, community care, and transformative action. From overcoming his own re-entry process after incarceration to now serving the community with deep purpose, Walter embodies what it means to turn lived experience into liberation for others.
    As volunteer Director of Outreach & Education at The Tadini House, facilitator with the National Participatory Defense Movement, and an activist and community revolutionary rooted in downtown Phoenix, Walter shows up every day to uplift others and break cycles of harm. We’re especially grateful for our partnership with Walter on the Turkey Bowl in 2025, where together we resourced South Phoenix families and showed up with care and celebration over Thanksgiving.
    Currently pursuing his paralegal studies at Phoenix College and seeking an internship in the legal field, Walter’s commitment to justice, community empowerment, and radical care inspires us all.

2024 Grantee

  • We are thrilled to announce tireless advocate and volunteer PJ Boone Edgerton Longoni, founder of The Tadini House, as the recipient of our 2nd Annual Alchemy Award. PJ’s dedication to community, in the face of any and all obstacles, and fearless compassion to do whatever she can to support those in most need, inspires and encourages us everyday.
    The Tadini House aspires to be a community of people that believe in beauty, blessings and human flourishing for all people but focus on returning citizens to heal the effects of injustice. The Tadini house is a nonprofit organization, that was founded in 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona by a mother with sons who served prison time.
    Determined to make a difference for men like her sons, PJ began first by mentoring former prisoners from her home by offering guidance and developing opportunities for personal growth and development. She also pointed her participants toward services and at the same time monitored their success in reaching their personal goals. Her dream is to build a beautiful spiritual living space for a community of 33 men and 66 “exemplars.”
    Now with the guidance of Silicon Valley De Bug, and with the vision of building community, The Metro-Phoenix Participatory Defense hub is at The Tadini House and it is where families like PJ’s encourage and guide Arizonan families whose loved one is facing a criminal case to navigate the criminal system in an effort to save time, and thereby save lives, families and communities.

2023 Grantee

  • We are excited to announce our first annual Alchemy Award recipient - artist, birthworker, and trans reproductive justice activist Wilbliss Kim. Wilbliss is a queer & trans Korean adoptee deeply inspired to support bodily autonomy from gender journey, abortion, birth, postpartum, adoption, and grief & loss. Wilbliss continuously demonstrates their commitment and conviction to justice for all, centering trans, queer and intersex people of color in everything they do, through their unending compassion, vulnerability, and action.
    Wilbliss works tirelessly to resource and provide spiritual and mental health counseling to people in our communities most in need. They coordinate regular resource distribution events to provide essential healthcare and childcare items to families and individuals, fill free community fridges, provide emergency grants and other rapid response to folks in crisis, and so much more. We are honored to feature Willbliss as our inaugural alchemist!