“In the rural South, more than one in four children and nearly as many women live in poverty. When race and ethnicity are taken into consideration, the poverty rate is more than double for African-Americans and Latinos compared to their white counterparts. For women and children living in the rural South, poverty is the result of unequal social, political and economic conditions – failing school systems, high levels of unemployment, poor public infrastructure and housing, and the lack of access to quality healthcare – that have persisted over many decades.”
So begins the executive summary of the impressive, starkly honest new report from the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative (SRBWI): Unequal Lives: The State of Black Women and Families in the Rural South. The report, and indeed all of SRBWI’s work, is an important call for the social sector to recognize and act on poverty and health disparities interwoven with racial and gender inequity in the rural South.
SRBWI is a model for regional social justice efforts. Comprised of Black women leaders from Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, staff and supporters work to develop the assets and skills of Black women in rural areas. They see the women and families most affected by regressive public policy and entrenched systemic injustice as those most able to find and execute solutions to the problems they face. In this way, SRBWI empowers those they seek to help instead of patronizing them.
SRBWI is also a model of the profound potential convening power of institutional philanthropy. In 2000, the Ford Foundation gathered a small group of women from the Deep South and asked a vital question: What will improve the quality of life for rural Southern women? Ford’s convening power, coupled with its vital financial support, launched the collective just a few years later. This latest report is funded by Ford, along with the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the Foundation for a Just Society and the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation.
Foundations can help by addressing five specific findings of the report:
- Philanthropic funding in the rural South, especially to benefit people of color and women and girls, has not kept pace with the staggering need. In 2012 just 5.4 percent of grant dollars in the South were for work on women and girls, and less than 1 percent was for Black women and girls. Just $2.3 million of the $4.8 billion invested by foundations in the South went to six of the nine rural counties identified by SRBWI as those most in need in the region. In 2012, no philanthropic support went to the Alabama counties surveyed (the other counties surveyed were in Mississippi and Georgia).
- Economic sea changes in the South have disproportionately affected Black women, and economic policies have failed to close the gap. In the rural counties surveyed by SRBWI, Black women had an unemployment rate four times higher than white women in the same counties. Black women heads of households in these counties were twice as likely to be poor as their white counterparts.
- Black women in the rural South face challenges when it comes to getting an education that their white counterparts do not. In the counties surveyed, Black women were as much as three times less likely to complete high school than white women.
- Tragic health disparities persist among Black women and families in the rural South. Southern Black women are three times more likely than white women to die during childbirth, and the infant mortality rate in the predominantly Black counties surveyed is as much as five times the national rate.
- Federal welfare reform in the 1990s inflicted painful cuts to the amount of public support flowing to poor women and families. The number of poor children has largely not changed. In the words of the report, “What this means is that poor families are simply going without basic necessities.”
SRBWI’s report is a critically important contribution to social sector work among Black women and families in the South both because it prioritizes their lived experiences and unique perspectives, and because it offers concrete public policy solutions. Much like NCRP’s Grantmaking for Community Impact project, it amplifies the voices of underserved communities in a call for greater investment in just public policy initiatives. Foundations can use this report to inform their priorities in the South, and anywhere intense, racialized inequities persist in this country.
The report urges action on a few important subjects:
- Job training for sustainable industries in the South ought to seek long-term change in economic conditions, not just short-term job placement.
- Black women and families in the rural South would benefit greatly from targeted investments in the transportation infrastructure and quality affordable childcare support critical for finding and keeping a job.
- Access to healthy, accessibly food options are sorely needed to reduce food insecurity and obesity-related health issues among poor Southern women.
- Comprehensive sex and health education – missing in some rural Southern communities and prohibited by law in others – could reduce health disparities among Black women and families linked to early motherhood, STIs and infant mortality.
- Schools in the rural South need strong investments in teachers, supplies and educational infrastructure in order to better prepare Black women and girls to be economically self-sufficient.
The report also explicitly – and urgently – calls for more philanthropic investments to benefit Black women and girls in the rural South. In fact, the report is specific about how and where these investments could be most beneficial. Rarely are foundations given such a crystal clear portrait of hard-to-measure, deep-rooted inequity and a detailed road map to impact.
The SRBWI’s Unequal Lives report ought to be required reading for funders who work in the South, and it is NCRP’s hope their recommendations lead to action, soon.
Ryan Schlegel is research and policy associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). Follow @NCRP on Twitter.
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