As the South Grows

“…What infrastructure do I see now? A region with a shared history that connects people – the history of slavery, oppression and rebellion. There’s one thing people in Mississippi can know about people in Alabama without having to even talk to them, and that’s ‘You survived and we survived. We’re both still here because we both have survival methods.’

“And it’s not something that someone from another part of the country would see, I don’t think. Somewhere else they might see someone and say ‘Oh, you’re here.’ But when I see someone in the South it’s a different acknowledgement. It’s ‘We’re still here.’ It’s a collective ‘We.’”

INTRODUCTION

The cover of NCRP's As the South Grows: So Grows the Nation report.

Between 2011 and 2015, foundations nationwide invested 56 cents per person in the South for every dollar per person they invested nationally. And they provided 30 cents per person for structural change work in the South for every dollar per person nationally. It is hard for Southern leaders, especially those at the vanguard of social change work in their communities, to reconcile the reality of a region full of innovative and effective social change networks with the long-standing dearth of resources to support their work.The soil for growing exciting solutions to national problems is deep and fertile in the South; the seeds are present, and foundation staff haven’t turned on the water. It’s time to open the spigot.

Because the South is and has often been the proving ground for some of the nation’s most regressive public policies and rhetoric, choosing not to invest in Southern structural change work puts marginalized people across the country in harm’s way. Wages are too low to support working families in the Midwest because of anti-labor legislation exported from Southern states. Cities and states in the Southwest model their systemic harassment of immigrants on policies and practices pushed by a powerful minority of Southern elected officials. The road to a more equitable future nationally runs through the South.

Southern leadership understands the twists and turns that lie on the road ahead. These leaders understand how we, as a nation, can find our way to a better, more just future because they’ve won a better future for themselves and their families again and again against stacked odds. Today’s movements for justice and equity are putting down deep roots at the intersections of gender, race, class, sexual identity and immigration status across the South.

Southern organizers understand how to operate in an environment where money for their work can be scarce, but where reciprocal communal support has sustained their communities for centuries. They also understand how to move safely and strategically in a region where the threat of economic, social and even physical retribution is still real. They are equipped to teach and lead their allies across the country in a vision that can win against forces of division, obfuscation and oppression. Southern organizations and the networks they comprise have all of this. What they don’t have so much of is philanthropic support to turn vision and skill into larger-scale change.

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THE BOTTOM LINE

A NEW WAY TO DO GRANTMAKING IN THE SOUTH

HOW TO MOVE FORWARD

CONCLUSION

What do we mean by structural change grantmaking?

Throughout this report and others in the As the South Grows series, we used the phrase “structural change grantmaking” to describe the kind of philanthropy Southern communities need. There is no rigid definition of structural change grantmaking; context matters, and our understanding of structural change ought to deepen and adapt with time. Here is some of what that phrase means to NCRP and GSP.

When we say “structural change,” we mean transforming the unjust structures in our society that collectively hold us back: laws, norms and biases whose complex effects have built up over time. Structures and systems themselves are not inherently unjust; many of them are unjust because the power to make the rules has been entrenched in the hands of select groups of people. Structural biases and disadvantages don’t have to be conscious or intentional to be unjust.

Structural change grantmaking prioritizes equitable outcomes for marginalized communities as its end goal. It improves the quality of life and increases the power of marginalized communities such as people of color, immigrants, poor people, LGBTQ people and other groups at a disadvantage in our society. These groups of people experience poverty, violence, poor health and other challenges at disproportionate rates not because of bad luck but as the result of active choices people in power have made over time.

Often those active choices have been informed by racism, sexism, xenophobia and anti-LGBTQ bias. Putting marginalized communities at the center of a structural change grantmaking strategy is not only the just thing to do, it is the most effective thing to do. When barriers to prosperity, health and safety are removed for these groups of people, whole communities and, therefore, society are better off. This kind of grantmaking strategy requires funders to be thoughtful and intentional about making grants in all the places marginalized people live, including in rural areas as well as cities.

Structural change grantmaking increases marginalized communities’ power to allocate public resources, to exercise their constitutional rights, to tell their story and be listened to, and to knock down barriers to opportunity for their communities and others. The most basic form of philanthropy is charity, and structural change grantmaking builds on that foundation by addressing the fundamental conditions that make charity necessary.

Structural change grantmaking is accountable to and informed by marginalized communities, including the grant award decision-making process. When done well, marginalized communities can use these grant dollars for their own self-determination, rather than fitting their work into someone else’s idea of what their priorities should be.

Structural change grantmaking is about trusting communities of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities to know what they need, and to reduce the barriers that prevent these communities from achieving the justice they seek. It’s about recognizing how power and privilege affects every aspect of the grantmaking process and consciously choosing to partner with these communities to acknowledge and subvert those dynamics.

This report and others in the As the South Grows series include the authors’ analysis of Foundation Center grants data. The structural change grantmaking the data describe includes codes like policy, advocacy and systems reform; community organizing; democracy; and human rights. When possible, the data are disaggregated along other factors of identity that impact power and resources like race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual identity and immigration status.

For more on structural change grantmaking, see:

Smashing Silos

Leveraging Limited Dollars

As the South Goes

Power Moves

Criteria for Philanthropy at Its Best

THE BOTTOM LINE

In the two years that the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) and Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP) have been working on an initiative to drive more philanthropic resources to structural change work in the U.S. South, we’ve conducted more than 150 interviews with philanthropic and nonprofit professionals working there (including at national foundations). From grassroots Southern leaders we’ve heard frustration and worry, but more than anything we’ve heard about the resilience and knowledge that exists in the Southern nonprofit ecosystem. From foundation staff, we have heard about the deep interest and excitement that comes from learning from and listening to the most affected Southern leaders.

But interest, concern and abstraction within the philanthropic sector will never be enough to make real progress in the South. And the country writ large will be prepared to confront the defining issues of this generation – changing climate, increased global migration and transition to a new economy – only after a renewed movement for democracy and justice in the South.

“…Folks get disheartened and say ‘We’ve been fighting for this thing for three years and we haven’t won yet.’ How many hundreds of years did it take to get to get slavery abolished? It takes time, and deep investment is necessary. And we know in our hearts that when that deep investment is made, that’s when the South shifts and starts a domino effect. The nation will feel the impacts of that shift.”

The bottom line remains: Southern and national grantmakers with an interest in helping to build power, wealth and resilience in the South still need actionable guidance to help make those investments a reality. Philanthropic leadership is still too often tripped up by stale stories about Southern intransigence or by a false choice between charity and justice.

The framework that follows provides a roadmap to overcome those barriers so that Southern leadership can start taking full advantage of philanthropic resources and turn soil and seeds into a sustainable grassroots ecosystem.

In On Fertile Soil, we spotlighted nonprofit leaders in the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement to refute a frequent philanthropic justification for lack of Southern grantmaking: There is not enough capacity in the South. The capacity for innovative, cross-issue and cross-constituency movement-building does exist across the South – including the rural South – if foundation staff look for it in the right places and with the right lens. Often that work is being done by people of color and especially by women of color, who bear the brunt of structural inequity in the region.

READ AS THE SOUTH GROWS: ON FERTILE SOIL

In Strong Roots, we explored the connection between community-driven economic development and equity in the South, with a particular focus on two communities historically kept on the margins of the region geographically and economically. In the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Coal Country of Eastern Kentucky, and in places like it across the region, Southern leaders are pioneering strategies to lift communities out of generational poverty, and along the way they’re building powerful bases for longer-term policy-change work. Foundations interested in building community wealth must acknowledge the potential of equity-focused, community-led economic development strategies in the South.

READ AS THE SOUTH GROWS: STRONG ROOTS

In Weathering the Storm, we highlighted the enhanced threat to Southern people and Southern land posed by climate change and provided examples of grassroots Southern nonprofit networks waging a fight on multiple fronts to ensure the physical and spiritual survival of their communities. The economic and social devastation of sea level rise and worsening tropical storms is already a reality in places like Eastern North Carolina and Coastal Louisiana. Foundations across the country will soon need to understand how climate, ecology, economics and politics intersect with racism and poverty. Southern grassroots leaders have already developed a sharp analysis of these issues – an analysis they rely on to mobilize Southern communities to build a more resilient future.

READ AS THE SOUTH GROWS: WEATHERING THE STORM

The cover of As the South Grows: Bearing Fruit

And in Bearing Fruit, we traveled to sprawling, booming Metro Atlanta and amplified the work of grassroots and grasstops power-building organizations in the region. Like other growing Sunbelt cities, Atlanta’s reputation for forward-thinking civic and business leadership masks a more complicated reality where gentrification, displacement and criminalization of marginalized communities are too common. A vibrant activism ecosystem has met these challenges, but that ecosystem’s impact won’t reach its full potential without the resources to build out robust, whole organizations with the time and money to collaborate and expand their reach into suburban and rural areas around Atlanta.

READ AS THE SOUTH GROWS: BEARING FRUIT

A new way to do grantmaking in the South

After two years of research and coalition-building, 150 interviews, four Southern focus groups and countless conversations with foundation staff, we believe that, in order for structural change grantmaking in and to the South to increase, the way grantmaking is done in the South will have to fundamentally change. Simply tweaking the frequency or dollar amounts of present grantmaking won‘t bring the change necessary. The South is at a disadvantage in the current dominant grantmaking paradigm of most foundations, and that paradigm has to change in order for grantmaking disparities in the South to change.

More specifically, the way foundations justify making a grant must change to break down the structural disadvantage that Southern equity work is subjected to in that process. The philanthropic sector’s grantmaking process must root out values and practices that have deprived Southern grassroots social change networks of resources.

To do all these, grantmakers need to take the following three steps:

Reckon with shared history.
Weigh the stakes of the status quo and risking our privilege.
Recognize and honor capacity.

This roadmap points toward the ultimate long-term goal of repairing broken relationships – between and within Southern communities, between Southerners and the philanthropic sector, and within the philanthropic sector itself. Repairing broken relationships will require making amends – putting together what’s broken means making it whole again physically, spiritually and financially. And that reparative process will mean redistributing money and power within the philanthropic sector and from the philanthropic sector to Southern communities.

RECKON WITH SHARED HISTORY

Likewise, good structural change grantmaking in the South requires an understanding of the complicated history of the region as well as an understanding of the region’s role in our nation’s history. Understanding that history is difficult because it is complex and includes as much tragedy as triumph (not unlike the country’s history). But glossing over that history in favor of a focus on the individual or on the region’s present challenges isolated from their deep roots makes for ineffective philanthropy. Too often, foundation staff and donors misunderstand or choose not to try to understand the South’s history, and their philanthropy suffers for it.

Often well-meaning foundation staff and donors intend to, for example:

Nurture or reinforce a culture of self-reliance and sustainability without continued public support or charity.
Take a race- and ethnicity-neutral approach to grantmaking to avoid favoring one community or group over others.
Avoid hot-button controversial issues – such as racism, sexism and homophobia – in favor of universal charitable giving strategies for the betterment of all.
Respect the specificity and complexity of Southern history and culture, especially with regard to race, gender and politics; avoid being perceived as a carpetbagger.
Avoid “stirring the pot” by funding work that may generate backlash from civic and business leadership and jeopardize the foundation’s reputation for being “above the fray.”

And the impacts of those choices are to, for example:

Allow history to go unexamined and its impact on the future unchallenged.
Let past wrongs go unrighted and mistake ongoing generational poverty and disenfranchisement for an individual responsibility instead of a shared one.
Let those who benefit from the way things are now dictate the story including what’s off limits for conversation and what is too dangerous to be honest about.
Undervalue the role race and ethnicity have played and continue to play in who has access to resources and who does not and who has a voice in the debate and who does not.
Overvalue the appearance of foundation neutrality, which is not truly possible, nor is it the most effective role for an institution dedicated to the public good.
Fail to appreciate how the past, present and future fate of Southern communities links with the rest of the country and world.
Obscure the role national institutions have played in extracting wealth and power from the South.
Allow those invested in the status quo to drive a wedge between Southerners and non-Southerners and put cross-region collaboration out of bounds.

Instead, foundation staff and donors should, for example:

Embrace the discomfort. Thorny problems like generational poverty persist in part because we – all of us – are on some level comfortable enough with their persistence. It follows that tackling these challenges with deep historical roots will be uncomfortable, even painful for some. Don’t let that deter your grantmaking.
Disaggregate your data. Break down quantitative and qualitative data by race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation and other factors that influence access to opportunity. Ask which communities are disproportionately affected by issues and who stands to benefit from the status quo. Use this powerful data to inform grantmaking decisions. Consider the ways universal strategies can be targeted to those who are already at a disadvantage.
Strive for a balance between linked fate and individual and local autonomy. Grantmaking in the South can and should respect the self-determination of Southern communities and the dignity of each individual as well as reckon with the history of outside interference in Southern communities and the backlash that came with it. But South and North, South and the rest of the country, South and the globe have always and will always be interdependent. Design approaches to relationship-building and grantmaking that hold that tension well and strive for mutually accountable and beneficial relationships between funder and grantee.
Be open and honest about Southern history’s role in the present and keep the conversation going. The history of racism, sexism, extraction and exploitation in the South is complicated, and it has a big impact on the present and future. Ask questions of folks in communities who have unrivaled – often personal – knowledge of that history, and don’t shut down the conversation when it gets hard. Southern structural change grantmaking can only be effective if it grapples with that history sincerely. Perfect understanding should not be the goal; listening, learning and regular re-evaluation of grantmaking strategies should be.

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AS THE SOUTH GROWS

ASSESS THE STAKES OF CAUTION OR INACTION AND RISK YOUR PRIVILEGE

Good philanthropy relies on a solid understanding of the facts on the ground, and a commitment to meeting the needs of those who have the least wealth and power in our society. But when it comes to philanthropy in the South, foundation staff often get bogged down in the learning phase of grantmaking or they take a cautious approach that funds only direct services instead of long-term change.

Foundations not based in the South are right to prioritize relationship-building and learning first, and Southern foundations are often faced with urgent community needs where philanthropy can make a difference. But caution about investing in Southern structural change work without the right information has a cost.

Additionally, pessimism about the potential for changing the root causes of community challenges shouldn’t mean that funding Southern structural change is off the table. At the root of these mindsets is the belief that the status quo is the best we can hope for. Action to change the status quo would require risk, the thinking goes, and that risk isn’t worth it if this is as good as it gets. But grassroots Southern activists know that change for the better is possible.

Often well-meaning foundation staff and donors intend to, for example:

Get smart: Spend time and thought learning all they can about Southern structural change work before they invest any resources.
Go slow: Avoid backlash by investing only in strategies that won’t ruffle too many feathers – real change, after all, happens slow and steady.
Mitigate risk: Identify all the possible outcomes of a grantmaking strategies in the South, then choose the best one.
Fund urgent needs only: Tackle issues that have linear, short-term, “fundable” solutions – like a free clinic or a food bank – instead of controversial systemic challenges.
Prioritize direct service funding, especially in Southern communities where many basic needs are not currently being met.
Protect your credibility and influence at your institution by finding safe ways to channel resources to Southern structural change work in a way foundation leadership can accept – or in ways they won’t recognize as a departure from the status quo.

And the impacts of those choices are to, for example:

Extract the time and expertise of Southern communities without an investment to replace, or even expand, those resources.
Pass up the opportunity to change the conditions that lead to entrenched poverty, environmental degradation and other forms of marginalization.
Assume that slow and steady is the best approach to long-term change when grantee organizations may disagree.
Exacerbate the inequity of grantmaking between the South and the rest of the country and within the South for marginalized communities.
Overvalue your own credibility and career considerations instead of putting mission first.

Instead, foundation staff and donors should, for example:

Understand that inaction has a cost. Find ways to quantify that cost. There’s a time and a place for a slow and deliberate approach to big changes; let your grantee partners lead the way, and you’ll now when that time is. Don’t assume the gradual approach is the best one, and remember that the status quo is costly, too. Knowledge is powerful, and foundations are right to want to gather information. But there will always be more questions to ask and more data to collect. At some point, action becomes necessary. Race, gender and class inequity is costly in financial and social capital, so philanthropic deliberation and slow-walking has a big price tag for communities – and for us all.
Imagine how things could be different. Believe in Southerners’ vision for the future – like applying a bandage to a gushing wound, funding only direct services isn’t going to solve the problems Southern communities face in any long-term way. It accepts a false choice about philanthropy and charity that isn’t necessary, and it reinforces decades of disparity in grantmaking in the South. National foundations that are committed to equity should consider adding a regional equity lens to their grantmaking. And Southern structural change grantmaking can and should employ a multimodal funding strategy that helps meet human needs and builds the power of communities to address the root causes of inequity. In fact, structural change work in the South often grows organically out of organizations dedicated to meeting needs because they are well-positioned to envision how systems can be better designed to be more just and equitable. Often their vision is not linear, but that need not make it unfundable or unmeasurable.
Understand the privilege that comes with your position and your identity. Find ways to quantify privilege that comes from your race, gender, class and other identities, and deploy it strategically to tip the scales in favor of action. Safe, discreet and non-disruptive grantmaking has a value, too, but too often the people it protects are those with the most wealth and power – not the least. Your credibility and influence at your foundation is a powerful tool – use it to drive change and share with marginalized Southern communities who don’t have the influence and access you do. Think of your privilege – the reputational capital and access that come with your position and your identity – as an asset to be invested in grantees and communities who can turn it into change opportunities.*

*Find more resources about understanding and using your philanthropic sector privilege in NCRP’s Power Moves: Your essential philanthropy assessment guide for equity and justice.

RECOGNIZE AND HONOR CAPACITY

Most thoughtful grantmakers look for high-capacity organizations and leadership that will transform their philanthropic capital into real-world impact on the issues they care about. That’s a reasonable and often effective way to make grantmaking decisions, but capacity is difficult to define objectively. And that makes it susceptible to implicit biases, which are at the root of much of the Southern structural-change grantmaking disparities.

Foundation staff mean well when they place a high value on grantee capacity, but in practice the impact of the sector’s dominant working definitions of capacity – many of which are implicit – has been to deprive the South of needed resources and the nation of much-needed Southern leadership.

Often well-meaning foundation staff and donors intend to, for example:

Invest in organizational leadership with a proven track record of success.
Invest in organizations with the familiar signs of capacity, e.g., staff with advanced degrees, polished grant proposals and external validation from other foundations or established civic leadership.
Seed new nonprofit infrastructure in Southern communities where it appears to be missing.
Mitigate risk by investing in stable organizations – organizations where other foundations have already invested or in organizations with a healthy balance sheet.
Replicate successful nonprofit ecosystems from other places by building something new or by funding big organizational development changes at existing nonprofits.

The impacts of those choices are to, for example:

Perpetuate grantmaking inequities that may be based in implicit biases about region, race, gender, class and other factors.
Reinforce inequitable access to philanthropy that may have been granted by gatekeepers who don’t value a structural change strategy.
Mistake privilege for the capacity to get the work done and put a high value – in real dollars and cents – on grant-seeking skills instead of mission-related skills.
Displace or disrupt existing infrastructure, which may not be familiar or recognizable to inexperienced eyes or which may be hard to find by design.
Underestimate and undervalue the risk to grassroots leaders who often work without fair compensation, without benefits or under threat of retribution.
Underestimate and undervalue the risk tolerance potential of philanthropic capital.
Import a nonprofit infrastructure that is not adapted to succeed specifically in the South.

Instead, foundation staff and donors should, for example:

Spend time and resources identifying existing infrastructure. This means being present in communities and listening with a willingness to be challenged by what you hear. It also means building relationships with local leadership – especially leadership from marginalized communities – and putting some skin in the game up front. In other words, make it clear that you’re not just there to learn, observe and extract information from the community; you’re there to partner and invest.
Change your expectations about what signs of nonprofit capacity look like. Adapt those expectations to place. Consider what signs of capacity might be in a region without sustained philanthropic investment, without high-quality universal education and without a progressive social safety net. Consider how signs of capacity may be hidden in a region with a history of economic, social and even physical retribution for challenging the status quo. In what way might capacity announce itself in a region with a vibrant faith-organizing ecosystem, with a long history of complex resistance mechanisms – small- and large-scale – and with a high cultural value placed on mutual aid and communal life?
Trust that the people closest to injustice, inequity and the work required to correct them are best at that work. Don’t just find and fund those people: hire them. Southern grassroots leadership understands how the work will get done, and this leadership is skilled at allocating scarce resources to make sure the work happens, too.
Measure, value and invest in new signs of capacity – reciprocal relationships, resistance (not always progress) and resilience. We measure what we care most about, and we’ll invest where we find value. Measure each community’s investment of time and in-kind resources in building relationships and in resisting harmful changes. Put a high value on opportunities for you, the grantmaker, to be challenged and improve your grantmaking practice. Invest in whole people – looking beyond their roles in an organization or status as leaders – and embrace the complexities and diversity of each leader’s gifts and needs.

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CONTEXT

VOICES FROM METRO ATLANTA

THE BOTTOM LINE

GETTING STARTED

CONTEXT

Atlanta is not just a city – it is a sprawling region that is rapidly expanding as newcomers arrive, attracted to Atlanta’s businesses, universities and growing metropolitan resources. Among those many newcomers is a booming immigrant population, fueling the growth of already established communities of Hispanic and Asian Americans.

Map of the foreign-born population in Metro Atlanta. Increasingly, Atlantans – both newcomers and long-standing residents – are struggling to find affordable places to live. A Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta study found that, between 2010 and 2014, the city lost 5,300 units of affordable housing while it gained close to 25,000 “luxury apartment” units. During the same four-year period, the share of Atlantans earning less than $35,000 per year who spent more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent (commonly referred to as being “housing insecure”) rose from 80 to 84 percent.

And, Atlanta’s welcoming reputation aside, Georgia state politics are still dominated by those who see these new arrivals as a threat. In the last decade, state and federal policies have targeted immigrants in Atlanta. Undocumented immigrants have been hit the hardest, and deportations are a constant threat.

Percent change in people of color population by country in Georgia from 2000 to 2015.

Institute for Southern Studies research brief.

One such law disproportionately affecting immigrants is SB 350, which increased penalties for driving without a license and made driving without a license a felony after the fourth arrest. The bill required law enforcement to determine the nationality of the convicted individual. Then, in 2011, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act (HB 87) allowed law enforcement to check an individual’s immigration or citizenship status, even for minor infractions such as traffic violations. Individuals who could not prove their status were detained, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents could then start the deportation process.

In 2017, many of the guidelines determining who ICE agents could arrest and deport were lifted. As a result, immigration arrests have risen by more than 40 percent nationwide. In the Atlanta ICE office alone, ICE agents made 80 percent more arrests in the first half of 2017 than in the first half of 2016. It’s the largest increase of any field office in the country.

A graphic indicating that only 2 percent of giving in Atlanta goes to power-building and only 20 percent goes to underserved communities.

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AS THE SOUTH GROWS

The words "Voices from Metro Atlanta" over a woman with her right arm raised in the arm and her hand making a fist.

Photo courtesy of Southerners On New Ground.

Mary Hooks, Executive Director – Southerners On New Ground

Mary Hooks

On the surface, Atlanta looks like it lives up to its “too busy to hate” slogan, with a successful African American political and business elite, a pride in its civil rights legacy, and a city welcoming of immigrants and LGBTQ people alike. But among the skyscrapers, new restaurants and developments filled with wealthy transplants are communities struggling to beat back a rising tide of gentrification, displacement and police violence.

From their home base in Atlanta, Southerners On New Ground (SONG) works for a South that is free from fear – for a region where people of color, immigrant, LGBTQ, working class and differently abled Southerners can live with dignity. SONG Executive Director Mary Hooks understands that won’t happen just with policy wins; they will have to change hearts and minds. That starts with acknowledging the contradictions inherent in Atlanta’s self-image, Hooks explained.

“SONG really wants to see a shift in leadership and a shift in the culture, hearts and minds here in Atlanta,” Hooks said. “It’s still a very conservative place in a lot of ways. Progressive in a lot of ways, but very, very conservative in many others. Most of the city leadership, especially in the City Council, has been on there for 20-plus years. A lot of them are the sons and the cousins of folks like Dr. King and Ivory Young, yet they are on the city council making decisions to put people in cages. So those are hard contradictions, and it’s critical that we intervene around those contradictions.”

The key to SONG’s work is connecting LGBTQ leaders across the South and building their leadership to fight oppression. “The first 10 years of our work were building our kinship network, connecting LGBTQ people across the South,” Hooks explained. “We realized we needed to know where our people are, because isolation is what really kills [LGBTQ people].”

Hooks continued: “SONG has invested deeply in leadership development around campaign organizing. We spent a few years in a democratic process that made sure our members were ready to engage in that type of work.”

Since its founding, SONG has cultivated this kind of powerful queer kinship leadership network in Durham, Richmond, Atlanta and several other cities across the region.

SONG’s key targets have been state interference – often in the form of violence – in the lives of marginalized people: racial profiling, police violence, criminalization of communities of color and LGBTQ people, onerous court fines and fees, and the disparate impacts of cash bail. SONG and its allies recognize that LGBTQ people and people of color are often targeted first in any reactive backlash to significant changes like those happening in the Atlanta region, so they work in coalition with their allies at the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) and other organizations.

“SONG was founded on intersectional organizing principles,” Hooks explained. “For us that means being able to take on campaign fights that are led by LGBTQ people but have direct engagement and involvement with people from across communities of all different sexual and gender identities. Because we’re not just trying to win stuff for LGBTQ people. We want to win stuff for our aunties and our cousins and our neighbors.”

One example is SONG’s work at the intersection of justice and immigration, or “crimigration,” as Hooks called it. They are coalition partners in the Georgia Not One More Coalition, along with their co-anchors at Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR). The Not One More Coalition is a national effort led by the National Day Laborers Organizing Network to stop deportations of undocumented immigrants nationwide.

“SONG came into the national Not One More campaign to bring in the LGBTQ flank,” Hooks said. “Our role was to organize other LGBTQ organizations to see this as a critical issue to be fighting for. Since 2013, we’ve been able to bring over 20 other LGBTQ organizations into that work to advance immigrant rights.”

The Not One More Coalition work in Georgia is part of SONG’s push for an expansive interpretation of sanctuary city status in Atlanta and the broader region.

“We want Atlanta to declare itself a sanctuary city not just in words, but in deeds,” explained Hooks. For SONG and their allies – including Project South, Jobs for Justice Atlanta, GLAHR and others – that means not just safety from deportation but safety from police violence, safe and affordable places to live, safety in the workplace, justice in the court system and beyond.

“When SONG joined the coalition, we were clear that we wanted to broaden our understanding of what sanctuary actually is,” Hooks explained. “Understanding that it has historical roots in the sanctuary movement of the 1970s.”

She continued: “We knew Black and Brown people were going to be attacked under the new [federal] administration, so we can’t just make Atlanta a welcoming city for immigrants and refuse to demilitarize the police, for example. We needed real action to expand sanctuary so that all people – Black, Brown, queer, trans – all of us would be safe.”

Atlanta is often described as being the “Capital of the South,” and the region’s largest city sets an example that other parts of the South are often eager to follow, Hooks said. However, changing hearts and minds in Atlanta – even changing policy – isn’t enough in the long run to ensure marginalized communities in the South are free from fear.

“When Atlanta shifts, it does create a shift in other parts of the South, but Atlanta doesn’t have the political power on its own to be able to shift the state,” Hooks said.

Across the South (and, in fact, across the country) states have taken extraordinary measures in the last five years to restrict the policymaking power of municipalities and counties, including especially what has come to be called “preemption.”

The most well-known example has been the fight in North Carolina to preempt cities like Charlotte and Durham from passing anti-discrimination legislation to protect the civil rights of LGBTQ people.

Southern cities can lead the region by articulating a moral vision – and often a policy platform – that protects working people, communities of color and LGBTQ people from harassment and deprivation. But, building statewide power among marginalized people is the only sustainable path forward in an era when state governments preempt any progressive policy win, Hooks said. And that will only be possible with more resources.

“We’re probably one of the more well-funded LGBTQ organizations in the South, but we still don’t have capacity to build statewide power,” she said.

SONG, GLAHR and other powerhouse community organizations in Greater Atlanta have changed hearts and minds and galvanized successful policy campaigns at the city and county level, but they need more resources to build them across states and the broader region.

“One of the things that we’re grappling with is how to build to scale. How can we get more money to do what we need to do? How do we get other groups more money to do what they need to do? And what’s our role in supporting those groups to do that?” Hooks asked. “That’s always been one of SONG’s priorities when it comes to funding: It’s not just SONG. There are several organizations doing really good work, and if they were able to be brought to scale it could have some major impact.”

Adelina Nicholls, Executive Director – Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights

Adelina Nicholls

One such organization is the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR), led by its co-founding executive director, Adelina Nicholls. GLAHR is also Project South and SONG’s co-anchor of the Georgia Not One More coalition.

In the wake of anti-immigrant legislation in Georgia, GLAHR has mobilized its constituents and allies in the Georgia Not One More coalition. The main goal has been to stop local law enforcement collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who rely on local police to enforce federal immigration law, effectively turning a traffic stop into an opportunity to deport a community member. In the last five years, GLAHR has co-led the Not One More Coalition to victory in cities and counties across metro Atlanta.

Where GLAHR has succeeded in halting ICE collaboration
Fulton County
Clayton County
Dekalb County
Fayette County
City of Clarkston
City of Atlanta
City of Decatur

Despite GLAHR’s demonstrated track record of policy wins as leader of the Not One More coalition, Nicholls echoed Hooks’ concern about the lack of resources for community organizing work in the Atlanta metro region and the broader South.

“This year was the first that I didn’t panic that we weren’t going to have money for next year,” Nicholls said. “As a Mexicana, I have to do what I have to do. We do this work not because of the job, but because we have to.”

Nicholls went on to describe what it’s like working without the financial resources to hire a full staff. “I am the one keeping the books, moving around money and paying the bills. I am the one writing the grants. And I am the one leading our community organizing.”

GLAHR is up against a rising tide of police and ICE harassment of immigrant communities, especially, but not exclusively, undocumented immigrants. As immigrant communities in Metro Atlanta have boomed, enforcement of legislation whose explicit purpose is to criminalize basic daily functions has terrorized those communities and locked many in a carceral pipeline that leads to deportation.

“Between 2007 and 2013, more than 78,000 people were arrested by local law enforcement,” Nicholls said. “And out of that number more than 54,000 people were processed for deportation. So the way that all these laws and policies and new legislation have their muscle is through the local law enforcement, and that’s exactly the reason why you see all of these people being detained.”

Atlanta’s reputation as the “city too busy to hate” is part of what attracted thousands of immigrants and their families to the metro area in the first place. But the pragmatic civic and business leadership who popularized this image have often responded with apathy to the widespread ICE harassment of immigrant communities.

“We haven’t received any kind of response or even a message of sympathy or support from local business groups,” Nicholls explained. “Deportations have been so normalized for so many years that nobody cares about who is detained as long as [businesses] keep making money.”

Similarly, GLAHR has struggled to secure pro-bono legal aid for its clients because “lawyers here feel we are in competition with their deportation cases.”

Instead of being afraid, Nicholls, GLAHR, SONG, Project South and others are mobilizing communities and empowering them to fight back. Nicholls spends much of her time in communities across metro Atlanta supporting the development of emerging immigrant leaders to spearhead their own local community power-building.

“Part of the commitment for GLAHR is to engage and help those that are directly impacted by police racial profiling or abuses in their own communities,” Nicholls said. “Even if they don’t speak English, or do not have documents; it doesn’t matter to us. GLAHR is there to help with outreach, organize and give them voice.”

GLAHR’s struggle to secure full-time staff – they currently have three – and crucial legal resources was echoed by Southern structural change agents across the region. But, to Nicholls’ point, leaders like those GLAHR is empowering are some of the most valuable to movement work, because it is often their friends and family members on the front lines.

“I was a volunteer for GLAHR for seven years before I became the founding director,” Nicholls said. “For seven years we didn’t have any money for salaries, and for seven years I visited communities across Atlanta and in rural deep Georgia.”

The leadership networks Nicholls helped seed are now beginning to bear fruit in the form of increased community power. “Many of the people that I got to know 15 years ago are the ones right now that are having their own comites populares (people’s committees) in different places around the state,” Nicholls explained.

GLAHR has made progress, but the potential in leadership- and power-building across the metro area won’t be fully tapped until GLAHR has the resources to devote to organizing on that scope.

“I’m glad that after those seven years, we now have resources,” Nicholls said. “But the resources are outnumbered by the work; the demand is more than we can give.”

Southern philanthropy has been a crucial partner in GLAHR’s work, Nicholls explained. When GLAHR began collaborating with its LGBTQ allies, its national Catholic philanthropic support dried up. But Southern Partners Fund, an Atlanta-based regional structural change foundation, came on board. That’s in part because it understands the long-term potential in GLAHR’s work, Nicholls said.

“This network plan of course is long-term, and you can imagine, in a couple of years, we could fight to support Latino legislators, for example,” Nicholls added.

One of the biggest strengths of GLAHR’s work is its cross-issue, cross-constituency collaboration, Nicholls said. The Not One More campaign combined the power of LGBTQ communities, Black communities, labor networks and immigrant communities in metro Atlanta by bringing them together around a shared understanding of how reactionary, often violent, government backlash impacts each community.

Like their allies at Project South and SONG, GLAHR understands that building power within marginalized communities is the only path forward in a metro area where the business and civic elite have often turned a blind eye to community needs.

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Xochitl Bervera, Executive Director – Racial Justice Action Center

Xochitl Bervera

In 2013, Racial Justice Action Center (RJAC) executive director Xochitl Bervera and her allies at other grassroots organizations in Atlanta were made aware of a disturbing new trend in the city’s bustling midtown business district.

An alliance of private security contractors, with the tacit support of the city’s business community, was pushing for a so-called “banishment ordinance” that would bar anyone convicted of prostitution from the city’s midtown core. In effect – and in the statements of some of the ordinance’s most avid defenders – the policy was meant as a tool to legalize harassment of trans and other gender-nonconforming people and criminalize their very presence in Atlanta’s shiny business district.

RJAC joined with trans- and LGBT-led organizations like La Gender, Trans(forming) and others to stop the ordinance’s passing. That fight was the beginning of an ongoing effort to bring together marginalized people in Atlanta around a campaign to stop the mass criminalization of people of color, LGBTQ people and others across the metro area, Bervera told us.

RJAC, based in Atlanta, stands with its allies at GLAHR and SONG in opposing state violence toward marginalized people in all its many forms. Bervera explains that its chief target is the myriad ways communities across Metro Atlanta are criminalized by city, state and federal actors.

“Working against criminalization across communities is the key for RJAC,” Bervera explained. “That is the core issue, and a lot of that is because it’s where white supremacy has dug in its heels the most, is the most aggressive and some ways the most violent toward our communities.”

Xochitl’s leadership, along with that of her partners at other Atlanta-based power-building organizations, has helped nurture collaboration among communities that have not always been able to collaborate in the past. “Criminalization is a place of intersection,” Bervera said. “There are specific campaigns [around criminalization] that unite communities that are often not working together.”

RJAC has brought together LGBTQ people, immigrants and other people of color to build the collective power to fight back against city and state efforts to send more and more Black, Hispanic and LGBTQ to jail.

In 2015, two years after the banishment ordinance victory, RJAC was able to secure a pre-arrest diversion program city-wide in Atlanta that prioritizes connecting people using drugs and engaging in sex work with the supportive services they may need to stay healthy and safe.

A collaborative grassroots campaign led to the implementation in 2017 of a system “where the police have the ability and the capacity to refer people to programs when they have probable cause to make an arrest,” Bervera said. “Instead of making the arrest they can call a care navigator and have an awesome social service program kick in around the person.”

The program does not revert clients back to jail if they meet stumbling blocks in their case management, either. Instead, it prioritizes client-centered wellness and harm-reduction strategies to ensure community members are keeping themselves safe instead of ending up in jail.

“We had to fight really hard for that,” Bervera added, and their victory has already saved hundreds from jail.

At the center of that success was the Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative (SNaPCo). A collaborative effort incubated by RJAC, SNaPCo literally centers the needs and perspectives of trans people because it is designed to be trans-led.

“SNaPCo has been a really interesting experience,” Bervera explained, because instead of a trans-only space, or a space where “one or two trans people get invited to ‘be at the table,’” SNaPCo is a multigenerational, multicultural space where trans folks are setting the culture and setting the standards for what collective action looks like.

One of the first goals of the collaborative was to change the culture of Atlanta metro area organizing and advocacy so that RJAC’s allies “understand the capacity and potential in trans leadership,” Bervera said. “That’s really happened. There are so many more places where it needs to happen, but you can really feel and see that shift in the organizing culture here on the ground.”

Part of that culture change in the organizing landscape in the Atlanta metro area has been a shift away from the “old guard” way of building community power toward a new approach, Bervera said. “There was an old guard organizing style that was really prominent. There were individuals with access to power and credibility maneuvering things but not mass-based or membership-based work.”

“We used to joke that a press conference was Atlanta’s idea of direct action. The executive directors of all the Atlanta nonprofits would speak, and that would be an action.”

RJAC was founded to help fill the gaps left by that individual leader-focused model of organizing. “My experience and the experiences of other RJAC founders in New Orleans during and after Katrina has given us a much deeper understanding about the impacts of trauma and oppression,” Bervera explained. “So the way we talk about our organizing model is that when we started off, we said, ‘Okay we’re going to build grassroots power of marginalized folks, of people of color.”

The birth of SNaPCo was a good example of the pivot toward more mass-based power-building in the Atlanta area. The coalition’s four anchor organizations – RJAC, LaGender, Transforming and Women on the Rise – attracted more than 40 other organizations to the coalition after its inception.

“And then what happened was more and more we felt we needed to build a base of Black, trans and queer people as opposed to just bring together nonprofit organizations,” Bervera said. “The old model was to just get nonprofits in a room together, but those nonprofits too often didn’t speak for a base. Our focus has been on building our membership base so that SNaPCO can be really accountable to them before we bring in a ton of other like nonprofit organizations who come with their agendas and their styles.”

That new model of coalition work, grassroots power-building and community accountability in the Atlanta area is still green, Bervera said. It takes dedicated resources and a deep, broad understanding of shared purpose, agenda-setting and other collaborative techniques that Atlanta organizations are still building. The Not One More coalition is a good example.

“There’s so much desire for folks to work together, but there is sometimes not a shared understanding about how meetings should go or what the structure should be,” Bervera said. “[SONG, RJAC, GLAHR and others] have been working together forever. We’ve built relationships; we’re homies. If one calls another when she needs them, everybody will show up. But formal collaborative work is still green here in Atlanta.”

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Nathaniel Smith, Chief Equity Officer – Partnership for Southern Equity

Nathaniel Smith

One of the Atlanta-based organizations working to ensure coalitions like SNaPCo, Not One More and others have the research, capacity and fundraising support they need to thrive is Partnership for Southern Equity (PSE), led by founder and Chief Equity Officer Nathaniel Smith.

Smith and others at PSE are about nurturing an ecosystem for change, or what he calls the equity ecosystem, in Metro Atlanta and throughout the American South. PSE envisions itself a strong regional anchor organization that can bring data, capacity-building expertise and philanthropic support to bear in the broader region – much like its larger national peers PolicyLink and Color of Change. PSE also works to bring advocates together and advance public policy by deploying its community organizing capacity.

Crucially, PSE encourages the philanthropic sector to support grassroots “frontline” organizations in the region instead of relying solely on the work on national nonprofits.

“Too often more well-resourced organizations exploit the pain, suffering and hard work of the people on the frontlines,” Smith said. “Predominantly white intermediaries are in a position to leverage their relationships and privilege as a way to receive significant dollars, while only rarely does a significant amount of those dollars trickle down to the frontline groups and the communities they courageously serve,” he adds. PSE is working to “redesign and reconfigure the relationship between philanthropy, the intermediary and the frontline organizations in the South.”

“What we often see when funders come to the South is they bring their partners from outside of the South and assume that they know what to do,” Smith said of the tendency for national foundations to deploy national anchor organizations in the region. “Southern change needs to be for and by people in the South, so real investment needs to be committed to that. We need foundations to really be strategic and create long-term investment opportunities for Southern-based organizations they are going to support for the long haul.”

PSE’s key strategy is relationship building, especially in the Southern context.

“We believe that big data, policy and ideas will definitely play a part in the change that we want to see in the South, but it’s really about big relationships,” Smith said. “How can we begin the process of cultivating relationships between uncommon and common allies for justice?”

PSE does this work through “Equity Circles” in the areas of economic inclusion (Just Opportunity), energy equity (Just Energy) and equitable development (Just Growth). More than 70 organizations representing various sectors, jurisdictions and constituencies are engaged in these circles. PSE utilizes them and more localized organizing efforts to grow ecosystems of trust for policy change.

One of PSE’s priorities is knitting together the civic and business communities – those unlikely allies – and leaders from marginalized communities. “We want to work hard at supporting the growth and capacity of frontline organizations and frontline leaders in a way that will begin the process of strengthening the voices of the people who are marginalized – not only in Atlanta but in other places around the South.”

However, building unlikely relationships first requires cultivating trust.

“We have to acknowledge that change moves at the speed of trust,” Smith said. “We have to begin to cultivate a culture of trust between the change agent and the community because the community has been promised so many things,” and too often those promises have been broken.

Those broken relationships can be explained in part by taking a critical look at Atlanta’s “city too busy to hate” self-image, Smith said. Atlanta is known for its role as the logistical home of the Civil Rights Movement and as a longstanding center of power for Black political leadership.

But the city has never fully reckoned with its past. Atlanta has nurtured great leaders, from Dr. King to Shirley Franklin to Hosea Williams to Maynard Jackson, but that hasn’t always resulted in strong institutional power that can weather financial and political storms.

“Atlanta is a city too busy to reflect on our history, on the mistakes that we’ve made, and on the challenges that many of our low-income native Atlantans have faced over the decades,” Smith said. “Atlanta is always a city moving forward. We tear down stuff; we’re not big on preservation. New is better in Atlanta, and we don’t have a rearview mirror.”

This tendency to turn away from its history is troubling especially because Atlanta’s history – and the South’s history – reverberates in public policy, in the economy and in philanthropy in the region, Smith said.

“There’s a ton of philanthropic dollars in Atlanta; there are a lot of funders in Atlanta,” Smith said, but “most funders fund charity-driven, programmatic work.” In terms of systemic change work, “We’re resource-poor in terms of having philanthropic resources that support advocacy.”

Philanthropy’s history in the South can help explain that dearth of structural change resources. Many foundations maintain “a kind of plantation mentality around philanthropy. They don’t want to support organizations and leaders that are going to rile up the community.”

That lesson is an important one for any foundation interested in investing in community organizing and structural change work.

“A key piece that funders can think about is the reality that many Southern foundations have benefitted from the oppression of people of color. We need philanthropy that is committed to undoing systems of inequity which means that those investments have to be long in terms of the time horizon,” Smith said. “Philanthropy has to be comfortable with failure. It has to be patient capital. It has to be money that is comfortable with failing every now and then because there are lessons that can be learned from that, especially in a place like the South.”

Among those lessons is how to build coalitions that have at their center a radical conception of intersectional collaboration. In part, the cross-constituency coalition work exemplified by SNaPCo and Not One More is an outgrowth of the mutuality and reciprocity that is a feature of Southern culture. But he emphasized that it also stems from the historic lack of resources for grassroots power-building in the region.

“When you’re underresourced, you find a way to make things happen,” Smith said. “Somebody brings a piece of bologna, another person brings some bread and another person brings some mayonnaise and together you make it happen. That’s just how under-resourced people work.”

PSE’s role in supporting grassroots power-building in the Atlanta metro region has been in part to begin articulating a “business case for equity” that will resonate with the city’s powerful and thoroughly pragmatic civic and business leadership.

That pragmatic alliance between civic and business leadership – the same powerful alliance that has largely turned a blind eye to the harassment and criminalization of Black, Hispanic and LGBTQ communities – has a name, Smith said.

“It’s called the Atlanta Way,” Smith said. “And it’s a system that is just glossy enough to keep away deep analysis, and at the same time it’s undergirded by the relationship between the private sector and Black business and political elites. The most effective progressive leaders have had to find a way to navigate through that and leverage that system as a way to realize change.”

Atlanta’s political and business leadership is often pragmatic before it is progressive. That is where PSE’s conception of a “business case for equity” comes into play, Smith explained.

“We’ve been forced to develop a business case for equity before other places,” Smith said. “We’re still fighting many of the battles that folks in places like the West Coast have moved beyond, and our fight requires a level of sophistication [around allies within the traditional Atlanta Way alliance] that other places haven’t been forced to develop.”

Organizations like PSE and its grassroots allies “are trying to push for a new Atlanta Way that is more inclusive, more just and more sensitive to the needs of all Atlantans,” Smith said. “We are pushing Atlanta to become what it says it is to the nation and the world.”

This new way of building and exercising shared power will go beyond just Atlanta or just Southern cities because it has to. As Mary Hooks and Adelina Nicholls attested, building the power of marginalized communities in the South will only be sustainable if and when it extends beyond places like Metro Atlanta.

“Folks who are in positions of power in the region have benefited from the lack of connection between urban, suburban and rural places that make up the South,” Smith said. “It would be great to think through the creation of some type of funding collaborative that is working to connect those dots.”

What happens in Atlanta will have wider implications for the region. But Atlanta is not alone: The tide of organized people power is rising in cities across the South – from Durham to Birmingham to Jackson.

“I think one of the really exciting things about these metro regions in the South is that they provide learning labs and opportunities to refine a strategy, not just in their actions, but in the ways that they are framed and communicated because of the environment they’ve had to grow in,” Smith said. “In many ways, these movements in the South are like the Tupac poem, The Rose That Grew From Concrete.”

“Imagine a Fannie Lou Hamer doing the kind of work she was doing in Mississippi where they could just walk up to you and kill you,” he continued. “The South is an opportunity to learn about courageous action in a way that could teach the rest of the country how to go up against structural racism and actually beat it.”

Tené Traylor, Atlanta Fund Advisor – The Kendeda Fund

Tené Traylor

Atlanta’s booming economy is a key feature of the city’s confident self-image as a forward-looking, welcoming metropolis. But if growth is not carefully managed, it bears a high cost. Gentrification, displacement, inequitable redevelopment and widening income disparity can make it even harder for already marginalized communities to share equally in the city’s ascendency and threaten Atlanta’s status as the South’s ladder of economic opportunity.

Like many Southern cities, Atlanta has arrived at an important crossroads, according to Tené Traylor, The Kendeda Fund’s Atlanta fund advisor.

“The trajectory of Atlanta’s growth offers an opportunity for local philanthropy to lean in and invest in building power in marginalized communities,” Traylor explained. “This is the time for benevolence reimagined, for building a city where equity is not a fringe effort but an essential and elevated philanthropic strategy. Our goal should be to make Atlanta a place where existing and new equity organizations and champions coalesce as a community to influence the established systems that effect our social, political, economic and natural environment.”

Atlanta’s many assets are attracting new investments to the region, but those assets are not flowing in an equitable fashion, Traylor said. “Big business is booming and the city is experiencing unprecedented growth. We are headquarters to multiple Fortune 100 companies who support an extremely strong business sector. Thanks in large part to a responsive philanthropic community, we have a strong safety net hospital in Grady and a thriving arts scene. Yet at the same time, the city is divided by Interstate 20, with wealthier, majority-White communities to the north of the interstate and poorer, majority-Black communities to the south.”

In Traylor’s view, Atlanta’s test is to ensure its assets are developed in ways that genuinely advance economic inclusion and not just growth. Since 2000, the number of high-poverty neighborhoods in Metro Atlanta has tripled. As Atlanta has grown and spread, so have its disparities.

For The Kendeda Fund, increasing economic opportunity means supporting transformative leaders and ideas that enhance or reinvigorate livable and vibrant communities, especially communities that have experienced a generation or more of disinvestment.

“We have a great opportunity to engage small and emerging nonprofits that are primed for growth and impact,” Traylor said. “With equity and sustainability at the center of Kendeda’s strategy, we hope to expand Atlanta’s network of transformative and bold community leaders. And through those leaders and organizations, we can begin to tip the balance from marginality and exclusion to well-being for all.”

Traylor believes these leaders will play a crucial role in piloting new models and programs that repair and heal. One of the greatest challenges, specifically as a Southern community, will be sorting through a culture and history that promotes (and at times rewards) social complacency and individual activism, but not collective action or organizing rooted in dismantling legacies of harm.

Because economic and demographic vibrancy exist side-by-side with poverty, underemployment, educational disparities and stagnant social mobility, The Kendeda Fund has identified a three-pronged strategy for advancing economic equity in the region. The foundation is focused on two primary areas of focus. The first is economic opportunity with an emphasis on:

1. Developing models for permanent housing affordability.

2. Building community wealth through worker- and community-owned development.

3. Increasing access and connectivity to quality transit.

The second priority is education: transformation dedicated to advancing options for children and families to have a high-quality education by supporting great schools, high-quality school-level talent, community engagement and supportive educational equity policies

As Atlanta grows and becomes more of a sprawling metro region than a city, transit is becoming more important than ever. It’s not just about being able to get from one place to another, it’s another way to think about economic opportunity, Traylor said.

“Transit is not just the way that we connect to our work. It’s the way that we connect to our friends and families, the way that we connect to a quality of life,” Traylor said. “Kendeda is looking at transit in that broader sense of quality of life, thinking about walkable communities, innovative and sustainable mobility, and access to green space. And we’re encouraging our transit authorities to think about transit as it relates to affordability and housing.”

In many ways, Atlanta’s current transit challenges pose barriers to shared prosperity, Traylor explained. “Housing prices have pushed many low-income workers to the south of the city, while the job hub is to the north. So there are substantial infrastructure challenges around fair access to employment – both in terms of how people initially get hired for a job, and then around how those same people can get to that job.”

The racial and historical context for Atlanta’s transit challenges reflect the broader themes within the city around systemic racism and access to public spaces. It is common knowledge in Atlanta (and attested to in scholarly research presented in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research*) that MARTA, the region’s mass transit system, was for decades referred to inappropriately as “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.” Political opposition to deeper and more equitable investments in transit infrastructure are of a piece with tacit approval for – and even sometimes explicit endorsement of – the state harassment of immigrant and LGBTQ communities.

As leaders like Traylor and the grantees in Kendeda’s Atlanta Equity portfolio begin to speak of transit access as an important piece of the regional development conversation, philanthropy is getting more engaged. Kendeda grantees such as The TransFormation Alliance are leading the equitable transit-oriented development conversations. A collaboration of private, public and nonprofit groups, the alliance works to ensure that the needs of low-income residents are represented, as pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use communities are built around rail stations.

“Equity issues are increasingly present in public education conversations among Atlanta-area funders, yet we haven’t really figured out how to do community development in a way that incorporates all of our players,” Traylor said. “It’s definitely a friendlier environment than it once was. The funding community is becoming more sophisticated and open to solving questions about increasing transit ridership or improving access to employment centers and services for all Atlantans.”

But the region’s philanthropic community still has more work to do on integrating an equity lens into every level of its transit, housing and economic development grantmaking.

“The funding community will certainly lag behind the organizing community, but when it comes to working on an issue that grantmakers feel they have a stake in, funders are finding ways to work together,” Traylor noted, pointing to a recent meeting that included foundations from across the “charity-to-systems change” spectrum.

“We recently participated in a conversation focused on economic opportunity with local funders such as Woodruff [Foundation], the Blank Foundation, the Community Foundation [for Greater Atlanta], Kaiser Permanente and Annie E. Casey [Foundation],” Traylor said. “It was a good group, a great meeting. And I remember thinking to myself: ‘Well that doesn’t happen very often.’ So I would definitely say there’s been progress.”

Traylor and Kendeda believe it is crucial for nonprofits and foundations alike to understand that Atlanta philanthropy – and Southern philanthropy more broadly – is not a monolith.

“Philanthropy in Atlanta is simple and dynamic at the same time,” Traylor explained. “It’s primarily family foundations, and that’s probably the simple part, but it’s dynamic, too. There’s no single, shared definition [among the region’s grantmaking foundations] of what equity even means.”

Grantee organizations and other foundations that fund structural change work in the Atlanta region should not expect all foundations to follow their lead, Traylor added.

Some Atlanta funders lack the structure, the staff experience and the board expertise to engage meaningfully and effectively in structural change grantmaking, she said. They serve a purpose, and when they are ready to partner on things that make sense to them, they will. But it would not be realistic to expect those foundations to be something they are not.

On the other hand, grantees and foundations ought not underestimate the potential for collaboration with some of the corporate foundations prevalent in Atlanta and the broader region.

“You’ll see [corporate foundations] show up in ways that doesn’t necessarily apologize for the things they do, but shows them in a different light,” Traylor said. “While I wish I could convert even half of these organizations into social justice funders, I do think the corporate community recognizes the income inequality gap. They recognize the challenges that flow from a lack of social mobility. And they recognize that the economic competitiveness of Atlanta can be challenged if we don’t all figure out ways to invest in community.”

But as public and private entities think about how to increase economic opportunities in Atlanta, Traylor also emphasizes that, in order to think about an economically viable Atlanta, we must also start to think about Atlanta as an expanding metro region.

“I don’t think you can talk about the city of Atlanta without talking about greater Atlanta,” Traylor said. “It’s hard to have a thriving city and not have a thriving region because they’re connected. We’re seeing a lot of growth in the surrounding counties; we are seeing leadership strengthen and evolve in those areas; and it is incumbent on foundations to move in a similar direction. We’ve got to encourage philanthropy to keep looking outward, beyond the city’s boundaries alone.”

Just as funders have learned how better to fund systems change work following the lead of power-building grassroots partners, Traylor also thinks social justice funders will be responsive to the nonprofits and intermediaries doing cross-county and regional work.

To that end, The Kendeda Fund and some of its peers have already begun investing in work that extends beyond the city of Atlanta, but it is just a beginning.

Atlanta foundations have begun to fund service providers to work in the metro region, but “some of the social justice work has to get outside the city, too,” Traylor said. “As we have more nonprofits and intermediaries cut across different areas, I think you’ll find philanthropy will be responsive.”

*Jason Henderson, “Secessionist Automobility: Racism, Anti-Urbanism, and the Politics of Automobility in Atlanta, Georgia,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol 30 (2) (2006), p. 293-307, http://online.sfsu.edu/jhenders/Writings/ijur_final.pdf

Janelle Williams, Ph.D., Senior Associate, Atlanta Civic Site – The Annie E. Casey Foundation

Janelle Williams, Ph.D.

Despite its rich civil rights legacy and booming economy, Atlanta remains a divided city – communities of color are largely cut off from the progress and prosperity seen in more affluent white neighborhoods.

Janelle Williams, a senior associate at the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s (Casey) Atlanta Civic Site, is working with her colleagues and several local partners to turn this tide. The foundation supports strategies that increase access to good jobs, good schools and stable housing for all families and communities – and that means confronting the policies of the past that have discriminated against people of color and disconnected them from these opportunities. Resilience, power and the know-how to effect the type of change folks want to see for themselves is embedded in these communities, Williams said.

“We cannot continue to call Atlanta a Black Mecca without first confronting the deep racial inequities that exist,” Williams explained. “As of 2015, 80 percent of the city’s Black children lived in high-poverty areas that keep them from realizing their full power and potential.”

She went on to say: “Georgia has been ranked a top state, and Metro Atlanta is second amongst 12 peers for job growth, but it is still one of the top cities for income inequality in the country. The reality is: Long-time Black residents are seeing a city that is changing, too often, without them.”

Ultimately, success for grassroots movements in the South and for the funders supporting them requires an honest reckoning with the South’s sometimes painful history and an understanding of its promising future, Williams said.

“While supporting direct service is important, we must also tackle advocacy because the policies that got us here will not change unless we invest in true, resident-led organizing,” Williams said. “That’s why we invest in advocacy and research efforts like those of the Georgia Justice Project and the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, while concurrently working with partners to support a community-oriented ecosystem that can influence the systems and practices that ultimately affect the lives of millions.”

Casey continues to embrace the hurdles that come along with investing in a power-building infrastructure in Georgia. “It’s very messy and unnecessarily complex,” Williams said. “We have deepened our work with system partners to provide targeted assistance on some of these administrative policies that can be hard nuts to crack.”

Sometimes, those “hard nuts to crack” within the state policy-making machinery are differences in values, not just lack of information. Casey has learned to rely on a mixed approach to its systems-change work, Williams said.

“We have to work with specific agencies and provide technical assistance and support while also investing in research, advocacy and organizing to change practices that are perpetuating inequities,” she said. “We heavily rely on partnerships to tackle these issues.”

For example, Georgia Justice Project recently partnered with another Casey grantee, Atlanta CareerRise, to launch a collaborative of business and community leaders, policymakers, grassroots organizations and funders that will examine strategies for supporting residents returning to their communities after incarceration.

Atlanta is one of two civic sites, along with Baltimore, where Casey has a special connection and long-term commitment to child and family well-being. Its status as a national foundation gives it a perspective that some local organizations may not have.

But, that does not change the fact that working in historically disinvested communities in Atlanta requires a certain level of grounding.

“It is really about being thoughtful around how we show up with and for communities that have experienced decades of systemic disenfranchisement,” Williams explained. “How do we show up in a way that is respectful and supports them to lead, to create the type of community and the type of home that they want?”

Having a local presence enables Casey to build deep, long-term relationships within communities. It also allows the foundation to leverage the resources and support of its national network, Williams explained. “The leverage we bring as a national funder is to elevate how this work in place can happen.”

Williams and her colleagues also recognize the value a funder like Casey can bring to the national conversation. “We can also lean on the support of our national colleagues to elevate a new narrative of the South that is counter to mainstream perception.”

Williams echoed much of what Southern grantee organizations had to say about the dominant narrative about work in the region. In conversations with national allies and potential funders, many Southern organizations encounter the perception that Southern grantee organizations lack capacity or lack strong effective leadership. This is especially true for organizations that work to build power among communities experiencing displacement and economic distress.

“The movements we’re seeing in the region now are highly organic,” Williams said, echoing points made by Mary Hooks and Xochitl Bervera. “They’re not individualistic; they’re very strategic. And they run counter to traditional barriers of organizational development and the way [foundations] think of funding institutions.”

Southern movement leaders have focused their efforts on disrupting some of the most pernicious trends in the region – entrenched poverty and structural racism, for example. And, disrupting negative trends and reimagining new possibilities are core values to understand and support across the funding community.

“Those are some of the themes that we have to hold and value and honor,” Williams said. “And within those themes is a history of pain and blood and tears that have been shed in the South. We have to acknowledge that this region built this country, and there are people/communities who are still paying the cost.”

Williams emphasized that part of repaying the toll exacted on Southern communities and Southern leaders is to invest in the valuable capacity that already exists at Southern organizations. Williams and her colleagues are learning from their Atlanta grantees about how to define capacity in a way that better reflects the reality of grassroots organizing in the region.

From Williams’ perspective, grassroots capacity shows up in a few ways:

1. Representation: “Does the organization represent the racial and ethnic diversity of the communities they serve? Not only at the administrative and support level, but at the senior and director levels — at the board level?”

2. Relationship with community: “How does the organization see community? Do they see them as places they have to fix? Or do they enter into place in partnership with a community in an asset-based way? What are the inclusionary practices embedded in the program design?”

3. Understanding organizational value proposition: “Philanthropy has played a role in reinforcing the notion that organizations often try to overreach to serve as the end all/be all for everyone and everything. But if we want to address entrenched issues, we need to make space for organizations to understand their value and their contribution in the broader ecosystem. We need to help organizations be clear, intentional and deliberate about where they provide value and support them to execute in that area and partner with others.”

Williams urges those in the funder space to redefine what capacity means. “As a program officer, I have to think: What is my criteria for assessing capacity? What is that magic operating budget? What is that magic board composition? So many opportunities for implicit biases are embedded in those questions and process.”

Confronting those capacity biases will not be easy. “That work requires a certain amount of embedded leadership and competency and a comfort with discomfort. It will require leadership and effort from [funders] to understand the stories behind the data and a willingness to disrupt negative trends.”

The risk of grantees failing or supporting nontraditional strategies, for example, manifests in time-consuming and sometimes onerous grant applications. Speaking about that point, Williams said she understands that many grassroots organizations do not have the time or resources needed to complete the application process, so they work in partnership with local intermediaries to make sure grantmaking dollars are getting to the right places quickly.

“We try to be intentional about opening up opportunities for funding,” Williams explained. “We fund intermediaries because we understand the value of accessibility and adaptability.”

The ideal intermediary brings community voice into the grantmaking process and decreases barriers to securing funding. “We piloted a Neighborhood Economic Justice Institute and partnered with an entity (Fund for Southern Communities) that had more flexibility and brought thought leadership in the organizing space,” Williams said. “We gave them a grant, and we brought organizers and neighborhood residents together to design a request for proposals (RFP). That advisory team, which included the organizers and residents, scored the RFP, and the grants were awarded based on their decisions.”

Casey has also worked closely with their grantees, including the intermediaries, to ensure racial equity is at the heart of their work. After releasing Changing the Odds: The Race for Results in Atlanta*, Casey launched cohorts so partners could learn and apply new strategies to address economic and educational inequities in Atlanta.

“We continue to provide partners with technical assistance to strengthen the racial equity lens they bring to the work. It’s to the point now where our letters of agreement with those grantees also embed a racial equity lens,” Williams said. “It’s not just serving X number of people of color, but really thinking about ‘How does my work advance racial equity. How does racial equity reflect in my strategic plan? What does it mean in my advocacy agenda?’”

Additionally, Williams explained the value of fostering authentic partnerships amongst grantees. “We ask our grantees to meet, to share their success and pain points, and we explore how we can help support new realities.”

Initially, this was admittedly awkward, but in time, trust was fostered and grantees began to adopt shared performance measures. They embrace the opportunity to collaborate instead of competing.

Casey has also expanded and reinforced partnerships with other funders to also be more strategically aligned to address deeper structural issues. For instance, the Casey Foundation and The Kendeda Fund partnered to launch a collaborative to strengthen business ownership among African Americans in Atlanta. By supporting entities to intentionally learn and apply new strategies together, the collaborative has developed an agenda to increase Black business owners’ access to resources and advance community wealth.

“There is a mainstream narrative of an absence of capacity in the South and a lack of leadership in the South, when actually we know it is the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. We know the most-traveled airport in the world is in the South; we know the density of the Fortune 500 companies that are migrating to the South.”

Despite the national narrative about the South, “Really everything points us in an absolute different direction of who the South is,” Williams said. “There is value, there is hope, there is our shared future in the South. Supporting community-led, groundbreaking strategies and intentional partnerships helps to reimagine new possibilities for our region.”

*Janelle Williams and Sarah Torian, “Changing the Odds: The Race for Results in Atlanta,” Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2015, http://www.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/aecf-ChangingTheOddsWeb-2015.pdf

The words "The Bottom Line" appear over a group of people walking and carrying a sign that reads "Destroy Fear, Unleash Power"

Photo courtesy of Southerners On New Ground.

“They don’t see a place for themselves in this city,” one interview respondent said of multi-generational Atlantans faced by a rising tide of gentrification and criminalization.

Atlanta’s explosive growth has kicked off a process of cascading displacement of low- and moderate-income communities. Its roaring commercial sector has turned a blind eye to state crackdowns on immigrant communities, Black communities and LGBTQ communities while it touts a reputation as a city that defies the South’s reputation for regressive politics.

Metro Atlanta’s transition along with that taking place in cities across the South poses a few thorny questions: Who gets to take up space in Atlanta? Who gets a place – at the decision-making table, on a sidewalk, in a home of their own? How can the economy of space in booming Southern cities be made more just?

The South encounters these challenges around spatial economy, displacement and criminalization at a time when they are beginning to become more prominent challenges for the nation. In many ways, Atlanta’s physical and political environment will be the harbinger of things to come for other Southern communities, and then for the nation beyond the South.

In order for Atlanta to “be what it says it is,” as Nathaniel Smith said, grassroots coalitions that build the leadership and voice of marginalized communities need resources quickly. Intermediaries will be part of the resource mechanism for those coalitions, but ultimately foundations within Metro Atlanta and beyond must be willing to commit long-term funding for the messy, forward-and-back work of community organizing.

Metro Atlanta and other cities like it across the South are home to deeply intersectional grassroots power – building movements that have racked up significant policy change achievements by articulating a uniquely Southern vision for what it means to be a “sanctuary.”

As Mary Hooks put it, “we’re not just trying to win stuff for LGBTQ people. We want to win stuff for our aunties and our cousins and our neighbors.”

The successes of Georgia Not One More and SNaPCo have come despite the historic dearth of foundation grantmaking for structural change work in Atlanta and in the region. But foundations can no longer use the “make-do” attitude of Southern organizers – and the success that comes with it – as justification for this continued lack of investment.

Because building the power of marginalized Southern communities within nominally progressive (or at least liberal) cities will never be enough to affect the regional, structural change necessary to liberate the South and in doing so liberate the nation. Foundation grantmaking to build the statewide and regional reach of grassroots nonprofits will be crucial to that liberation.

Southern cities are indeed “learning labs” for philanthropy and the nonprofits they fund to learn how to act courageously in what can be a hostile environment, as Nathaniel Smith put it. As Southern cities attract new residents, sprawl into once-rural areas and begin exploring new definitions of what it means to be welcoming, forward-looking places, they will produce important lessons for cities across the country who have experienced decades of disinvestment and displacement.

Atlanta’s identity as “the city too busy to hate” and the “Black Mecca” are mutually reinforcing articulations of the same self-image. The Atlanta Way – as we heard from Janelle Williams, Nathaniel Smith, Xochitl Bervera and others – has been a robust center of political and economic power in the region for decades and an enthusiastic booster for that self-image. But why should progress in Metro Atlanta require the displacement and criminalization of Black, Brown and queer Southerners?

The Atlanta Way and the complicated, “glossy” image it projects is not isolated to Atlanta. Southern powerbrokers across the region in the civic, business and political spaces have found ways to market the South’s cultural and human resources to sources of capital outside the South for a long time. And that marketing push has obscured the reality of a persistent racial wealth gap; rampant criminalization of Black, Brown and queer communities; and suppression of grassroots political power. In the context of structural change work, these marketing ploys focus Southern communal life on individual behavior instead of assigning responsibility for inequity where it often belongs – on decisions being made at the institutional level.

Any funder interested in building the wealth, power and resilience of Southern communities must invest deeply in the region’s cities and metropolitan areas. But they ought to approach the rhetoric of civic leadership with healthy criticism, and ask themselves and trusted community leaders: Who is left out of that narrative? Who benefits from that elision?

The opportunities for foundation investment in Atlanta and other Southern cities are exciting, and with patience, trust and deep relationships with grassroots partners, they have the potential to bear fruit for the broader region.

The words "Getting Started" over a group of people.

Photo courtesy of Southerners On New Ground.

Are you ready to get started investing in Southern grassroots leadership? Here are a few recommendations to guide the way:

1. Don’t accept that a highly productive economy and robust social service sector are enough for people to have what they need to thrive. Make sure data that inform your priorities and strategies are disaggregated by race, gender, income, sexual identity, etc.

2. Recognize how much work it takes to organize marginalized communities against Atlanta’s and other Southern cities’ dominant political culture and invest in the evolution of policy and culture in a way that is defined by people who don’t see themselves in the glossy marketing materials for a bustling city.

3. Be prepared to make long-term investments in grassroots organizations to build their base and build formal and informal relationships with allies – that means patient, risk-tolerant capital – and coalition on your grantees’ terms, not yours.

4. Give general support grants to your Southern grantees – invest in infrastructure organizations to exist – not just to complete projects.

5. Understand who your philanthropic partners are and who they aren’t, wrestling with history, context, power and priorities.

Who Can Help
Project South
Southern Partners Fund
Highlander Research and Education Center
Black Women’s Roundtable
Atlanta Jobs with Justice
National Domestic Workers Alliance
Georgia Coalition Against Hunger
SPARK, Housing Justice League
Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta
SisterSong
Women Engaged
Peace by Piece
ProGeorgia
The Kendeda Fund
The Annie E. Casey Foundation
The Sapelo Foundation
Latino Community Fund Georgia
GALEO: Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials

WHAT’S NEXT?

Among the “learning lab” Southern cities Nathaniel Smith lifted up as opportunities for national organizations to learn about “courageous action,” Atlanta is often listed first. The Capital of the South has long been at the center of a national narrative around a “new South” – a South where growing cities provide oases of political and economic progress in a region perceived by many to be backward and stagnant.

This story – told often in conference exhibition halls and in the pages of reports like this one – explains away entrenched rural poverty and regressive politics in the rural South as fading relics of the past, soon to be supplanted by a bright urban future, a future that looks like Atlanta.

This narrative is false at its core – not least because it creates a dichotomy between urban and rural regions that does not really exist, but it helps explain why Atlanta civic and business leaders have devoted time and marketing resources to promoting a “glossy” self-image. And it helps explain why the city’s identity is such an electrically charged political issue.

But it is false in a deeper way, in a way that is at the root of the philanthropic sector’s lack of investment in the region despite its reputation for nation-changing movement-building. The contradictions in Atlanta’s identity and in the identity of the broader South can be roughly summarized as a dichotomy between secession and survival.

How do these identities live on in the minds of Southerners and non-Southerners alike? And how have they reinforced the structural, systemic philanthropic neglect of the nation’s largest region – the region where national movements are born? How can Southern and national philanthropists overcome that structural bias that denigrates Southern leadership and perpetuates a cycle of disinvestment and exploitation? Where are there paths forward for philanthropy in the South?

NCRP and GSP will explore these questions and try to offer some concrete action steps for philanthropy to invest in a growing South in the final installment of the As the South Grows series.

Sunny day on the marsh in Louisiana

The floods come bigger and more often these days in North Carolina. On the fertile coastal plains and wetlands of the eastern part of the state, water is central to nearly everyone’s livelihood. Waterways knitted together small Native and early colonial communities and, later, nurtured a thriving textile industry. Generous rains still irrigate big industrial farms and small family plots. But in just the last two years, the mostly poor region has also borne two historic floods: Twice-a-century events that have begun arriving annually.

Hundreds of miles away in the backwoods and bayous of coastal Louisiana, history seems to be accelerating, too. The region was already saddled with environmental toxins from a petro-chemical industry that decimated the region with 2010’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. And 2016 brought the displacement of the country’s first seawater rise refugees. Water made Louisiana the jewel of colonial America’s inland empire; now it threatens whole swaths of the state.

Southern communities are on the front lines of an ongoing global climate crisis, one whose threats grow in scope and magnitude each day. In many ways, Southerners have been among the first to learn what it’s like to live with a new climate – the more hostile one we have created for ourselves over decades of living outside our planetary means. More intense storms, hastening sea level rise, agricultural disturbances and other climate factors present an existential threat to Southern communities and an uncontainable, exponential one for the country. Many Southerners know this; they understand the threats and their enablers in concentrated, reactive, corporate-backed power. Although many of those same Southerners are organizing and mobilizing around a resilient and just new future, foundation investment in Southern communities does not match that reality.

In its As the South Grows series of reports, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) and its partner Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP) have begun exploring the challenges and opportunities to increase equity in Southern communities. Foundations, as the data and others’ lived experience demonstrates, have for too long neglected funding the most promising structural change strategies in the South. As the South Grows is an attempt to examine the reasons for that neglect and to propose solutions:

On Fertile Soil, the first in the series, explored Southern nonprofit leadership and the biases and misperceptions of both Southern and national philanthropists that have led to effective, leaderful Southern organizations being overlooked by most grantmakers. Contextualized in the fertile Black Belt and Mississippi Delta regions, the report pointed out the ways racism, sexism and prejudice can disadvantage some of the most investable Southern organizations.
Strong Roots, the second report, highlighted the structural change potential that lies in investments in community-led economic development in the South, with a specific focus on Appalachian Kentucky and Coastal South Carolina. Economic transition is well underway across the South, where old industry has collapsed, new industry has blossomed and an economic system of exclusion and exploitation remain the norm.

“We will have a transition no matter what,” said Mountain Association for Community Economic Development President Peter Hille, “but if we want a just transition, we have to work at it.”

Hille’s quote refers to the difficult economic and social transition away from a coal economy that has been rocking the Appalachian South for years, but it could just as aptly be said about the transition to a new climate already underway globally.

Weathering the Storm, the latest installment in the series, continues the first report’s exploration of building power and the second’s examination of building wealth and looks closely at building resilience. There will be a transition to a new, and in many ways more hostile, climate that could result in disproportionate harm to already struggling communities.

In the South, the work to avoid a transition that results in disproportionate harm to already struggling communities is well underway. Weathering the Storm explores the intersection of economic, environmental and social systems where the Southern movement for climate resilience is growing. It will make the case that funders concerned about threats from our changing climate are missing a crucial opportunity to invest in solutions of national and global relevance if they are not investing in Southern organizations and networks.

“Speaking for myself, the notion that ‘as the South goes, so goes the nation’ is key. We’re not trying to stop ship building or oil extraction or Mississippi River operations in New Orleans. But hopefully by thinking about water management and other emergent sustainable industries, we can make the economic case for them and have proof that equity is a growth strategy.

“And if we’re able to do that here, then maybe we can do it with transportation, trade and logistics and other legacy industries in our region. And if we can do that then we’ll be a model for elsewhere in the South and elsewhere in the country and elsewhere in the world.

“It is a really interesting and privileged position to be both resident community members and strategic funders. It’s exciting to be able to be a part of these conversations and think about what the ripple effects of our work can be, and to be very rooted in knowing that we will see the changes within our own families and friends and neighbors and communities if we’re successful.”

— Liza Cowan, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

read related sections

Background

Voices from Eastern North Carolina and Southern Louisiana

The Bottom Line: Do’s and Don’ts for Greater Impact in the South

Getting Started

BACKGROUND

Although Eastern North Carolina and Southern Louisiana are in very different parts of the South, they share many of the same challenges that stem from their locations in coastal lowlands threatened by climate change. Both regions have land- and water-dependent economies such as agriculture and commercial fishing. Small farmers and commercial fishers have seen the impacts of development on the vitality on the natural resources they depend on.

Both regions are home to large, diverse communities of color with significant Black and Native communities as well as growing Hispanic communities.

The political landscape in their respective states is different, and Southern Louisiana includes large urban areas – New Orleans and Baton Rouge – while Eastern North Carolina does not. But the similarities in each region’s experience with environmental challenges brought on by climate change and extractive industries make them a useful lens through which to explore those issues in the South.

Between 2010 and 2014, foundation support for communities in Eastern North Carolina and Southern Louisiana did not meet the challenge presented by environmental threats, nor did it capitalize on the opportunities for long-term structural change that are growing at the grassroots in these two regions.

During this five-year period, only 4 percent of foundation funding to support work in Eastern North Carolina was designated for systemic change strategies such as community organizing, advocacy and policy change work. In Southern Louisiana, that number was 8 percent, but almost all of that systemic change funding went to New Orleans. Outside of Orleans Parish, just 0.3 percent of all funding in Southern Louisiana was invested in systemic change strategies.*

These statistics present a significant missed opportunity. In Leveraging Limited Dollars, NCRP research has demonstrated a return on systemic change investments of $115 in public benefits for each $1 invested in those strategies. Foundation support for marginalized communities was troublingly low between 2010 and 2014, too. For example, 0.5 percent of total funding in Southern Louisiana and 0.2 percent in Eastern North Carolina was designated to support Hispanic communities. In Southern Louisiana, 7 percent was designated to support African-American communities, and in Eastern North Carolina that number was just 2 percent.

In Southern Louisiana, about one-third of the population is comprised of people of color, and in Eastern North Carolina that number is nearly one-half. In both regions, about three-quarters of foundation funding between 2010 and 2014 was invested in either health, human services or education. In both regions more than half of funding was not designated to benefit any marginalized community.

The total foundation funding flowing to these two regions lags well behind other parts of the country in per capita grant dollars.

New Orleans has been the focus of national philanthropic attention since Hurricane Katrina, and its per capita funding shows that clearly. But Southern Louisiana (when Orleans Parish is excluded) and Eastern North Carolina saw per capita foundation investments of less than $70 per person between 2010 and 2014. Nationally, foundations invested $451 per person during the same period.

The scientific community is confident beyond doubt that global climate change is underway and that it will continue – perhaps accelerating quickly in the coming decades – for the foreseeable future. Academics and government experts have known that for some time, but predicting the specific economic impacts of climate change on regional and local levels had, until recently, been elusive.

But, in June 2017, Science magazine published a peer-reviewed study that constructs the first comprehensive predictive model of global climate change’s economic impacts on the local level. The authors concluded the South would be most negatively affected.

One climate scientist described the prediction as a “large transfer of wealth between states,” with impacts from dangerous heat, sea level rise and other effects battering the economies of Southern states and giving a slight boost to many in the north and west. More specifically, the study predicts that climate change’s negative impacts will fall disproportionately on the poorest counties in the country, many of which are in the South and many of which are home to large communities of color.

The lived experiences of folks residing and working in the coastal plains, wetlands and barrier islands of the South would corroborate this research. And especially to those who lived through any of the handful of historic tropical storms that have socked Southern communities in the last 20 years, the news matches hard economic data to difficult memories.

*Orleans Parish and the city of New Orleans are coterminous. For the purposes of analyzing funding data, NCRP has separated Orleans Parish from the surrounding Southern Louisiana region in some places because New Orleans has historically been the recipient of a large majority of funding to benefit the Southern Louisiana region.

Learn More:

As the South Grows

A shrimp boat on the water.

Photo by Bill Metcalf Photography, used under Creative Commons license.

REV. MAC LEGERTON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, and DONNA CHAVIS, CO-FOUNDER – CENTER FOR COMMUNITY ACTION

Rev. Mac Legerton

“Hurricane Matthew [in 2016] really set us back. Robeson County, North Carolina, was hit harder by Hurricane Matthew than any other county in the nation. We’ve learned a lot about how to facilitate the empowerment of individuals, families, communities and institutions over the past 50 years, but hardly any of that learning is utilized in disaster relief and recovery. What we need is a social justice perspective and practice approach in disaster relief and recovery. As of now, we approach each natural disaster as a rehearsal for another, then another.”

These reflections by Rev. Mac Legerton, executive director of the Center for Community Action (CCA), arise out of his experience working in rural Eastern North Carolina for more than 40 years. “For low-income survivors, our present model of disaster relief and recovery magnifies every division, demoralizes every spirit, and disempowers every family and community.” said Legerton. “I have been traumatized twice – first by the hurricane disaster and secondly by the disaster recovery process itself.”

Donna Chavis, co-founder of CCA (and Legerton’s spouse), views disaster recovery from the perspective of neglect and exclusion.

“Systems aren’t in place for hearing the voices of those most affected. When people talk about wanting to get things back to the way they were, that often means going back to the way it was 20 years ago. This is because of the lack of inclusion of those most impacted by the storm. Some leaders use disaster as an opportunity to further disempower people and to try and strike down some of the gains that were made over so many decades.”

Donna Chavis

Because federal and state disaster response leaders exclude marginalized Southern communities from conversations about how to recover from a storm, they are negatively impacted by policy decisions, too. According to Chavis, when Eastern North Carolina communities responded to Hurricane Matthew many state and county officials advocated for rezoning plans that would level historic Black communities to make way for parkland and recreational areas.

While recognizing the challenges of institutional abuse and neglect in communities of color, Chavis, a member of the Lumbee tribe, is well aware of the gains made in Native American and African American communities in Eastern North Carolina and across the Rural South over the past 30 years, particularly in the area of environmental justice. She brings a deep well of experience and knowledge to her work in Eastern North Carolina. On the national level, she served on the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ, the planning committee of the historic 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, and chaired the boards of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and the Fund of the Four Directions. She was also the founding director of Native Americans in Philanthropy.

The impacts of worsening environmental crises in the South have left a legacy of trauma that divides Southern communities and impairs their long-term climate resilience. Although these communities are not defined by this trauma, funders and organizers alike must understand it in order to begin addressing it.

Government and philanthropic responses to acute environmental crises like historic tropical storms are representative of the same sector’s responses to our ongoing, long-term climate crisis. CCA recognized this when it first organized as a nonprofit in North Carolina 37 years ago. Its proactive solution was to ensure from the beginning that CCA’s leadership would reflect the communities it served.

“The leadership at the Center had ideas about what to do but the very first active months of meetings were predominantly in church basements – countywide community gatherings where there were small group discussions. The organization was triracial in its staff in the beginning because at that time [the community] was almost exactly one-third Native American, one-third African American and one-third Caucasian. So the staff started that way, too. We had one salary, and we divided it three ways,” Chavis said.

CCA is one of the oldest multiracial grassroots social justice organizations in the South and the nation. It is situated in one of the poorest and most racially diverse rural counties and regions in the nation. Faced with the dual disasters of intensifying storms and a proposed natural gas pipeline, more and more its work is “glocal” – implementing effective and successful organization and pursuits that combine local with regional, state, national and global issues and solutions.

Despite what Legerton described as the “deconstruction” of rural North Carolina communities over the last several decades – the effects of criminalization, economic disinvestment and environmental degradation – both he and Chavis emphasized the deeply rooted resiliency pervasive in the region.

“Philanthropy can take words and use them so much that they become meaningless, and ‘resiliency’ is one of those words that’s everywhere now, especially when it comes to climate change and other disasters,” said Legerton. “But it is a word that CCA has used from the very beginning of our work. The center was started on not just the hope but on the fact that our communities are resilient. They have great potential and have gone through so many various forms of disaster and have survived through it.”

JOHN DAVIES, PRESIDENT AND CEO – BATON ROUGE AREA FOUNDATION

John Davies

The deep-rooted resilience present in Southern communities emerged in many of our interviews. Still, our nation’s comfort with racialized and entrenched poverty echoes historical struggles with racism, classism and deprivation, threatening to undermine that resilience. John Davies, president of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, spoke about that challenge and about the disruption climate change will wreak in Southern Louisiana.

“The biggest challenge that we face on the Gulf Coast is there’s been no comprehensive response and no strategy around how to address the challenges that are being brought about by climate change, and they’re incredibly destructive,” said Davies “For example, [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] recently made a $50 million grant to a Native American community in South Louisiana called Isle Jean Charles to relocate the whole community to higher ground. That’s pretty disruptive. They’ve never done that before; this is the first. That’s going to happen more and more all along the coast – not just in Louisiana. So one of the biggest challenges not being paid attention to is the fact that we’re going to lose coastline and communities as a result.”

Davies went on to explain that, in the face of these existential challenges, communities in Southern Louisiana have grown closer, more trusting of each other and better able to meet the threat head-on.

“Our Coastal communities are very diverse – Croatian, Native Americans, First Nations, African American, Vietnamese, white folks. Over time, faced with the challenges that they’ve had – hurricanes, the BP oil leak – the communities have become closer and more forgiving of each other, more willing to accept each other. We’re deeply interested in that resilience dynamic.”

Community cohesion – the ability of communities to rally around a shared understanding of its challenges and co-strategize around solutions – will be essential to places across the South and across the globe that are threatened by climate change. The deepening climate crisis will present an existential threat to many communities, and divisions along lines of race, class and other factors will undermine our collective response. NCRP’s conversations with Southern nonprofit leaders indicated that they consider themselves well-positioned to build that cohesion, drawing on the region’s culture of mutual aid and relationship-oriented community organizing. But entrenched poverty, and especially poverty that disproportionately has an impact on communities of color, has and will continue to challenge those efforts.

“In general we live in a racially defined world. The parish I live in is 50-50 black and white. There is a growing middle and affluent African American class here. But there is still a dominant and very poor Black economic layer to our community. It’s ever-present and we’re hyper-aware of it; it’s just a reality of life. It strikes me that because it is such a prevalent part of our lives, we’re very comfortable with this reality,” Davies said.

LIZA COWAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, and ERIKA WRIGHT, VICE PRESIDENT GLOBAL PHILANTHROPY – JPMORGAN CHASE & CO.

Erika Wright

Southern communities have the opportunity to respond to climate change threats with coordinated planning processes that bring together government, business, community-based organizations and residents to ensure the voices of marginalized communities most impacted by environmental challenges are not excluded from these conversations.

Representing the philanthropic arm of a bank with a large footprint in the region, Liza Cowan, Erika Wright and their colleagues at JPMorgan Chase are in a unique position to bring diverse partners together around a vision for an economic future where opportunity is available to all Louisianans, regardless of race or class. Though not specific to climate resilience, the foundation’s work often involves supporting that planning process and ensuring community voices have strong representation.

“Certain voices have historically been excluded from certain conversations be it intentionally or unintentionally,” Wright said. “I think New Orleans is actually an interesting case study for this in that there are a number of high-capacity nonprofits led by people of color. There are a lot of people of color in positions of leadership within city government. And yet there is still a challenge around ensuring that voices that are truly representative of community concerns are at the table.”

Wright explained that representation within the nonprofit sector and especially in cross-sector collaboration is challenging, but folks in Southern Louisiana are gaining practice doing it well.

“Once you have new community voices in the room, you have to navigate an additional set of needs and constraints. You have to be responsive to an additional set of concerns. While it’s an ongoing challenge in [the region], I would venture to guess that many of the tables where I sit include more representation by people of color and community organizations than in other cities. I think we’re probably further along than we get credit for, but not as far as we need to be. The experience of Katrina really did help build out our civic capacity to implement collective visioning and co-creation.”

Wright and Cowan are not the only folks in Southern Louisiana who described a marked shift in the quality and tenor of nonprofit-government-business collaboration since Hurricane Katrina. But the sense of emergency that often accompanies climate resilience collaboration, especially in light of the real and urgent physical threat to already vulnerable communities like Isle Jean Charles, can be a challenge.

“In the post-Katrina environment, there is this sense of urgency,” Cowan explained. “After the storm, we had to build back, we had to recover, we all wanted to get things moving again as fast as possible. We had federal money that we had to spend by a certain deadline. And building a robust engagement process – navigating amongst different perspectives – that does take additional time and resources. Urgency is important and laudable. But at times that sense of urgency can preempt a more robust engagement process.”

JPMorgan Chase’s work in Southern Louisiana has evolved through their engagement in the Greater New Orleans Funders Network. In 2015, around the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, JPMorgan Chase and several other regional funders co-founded the network out of a desire to better align investments in Greater New Orleans for long-term change.

“Equity and inclusion are the underlying core values of the Greater New Orleans Funder Network and that runs across our investments at the action table level,” Wright explained. “JPMorgan Chase has co-chaired the equitable development table at the network, specifically to make sure our investments are aligned with bringing greater economic prosperity in the communities where we’re investing and ensuring we’re actually closing disparities.”

One of the network’s greatest assets is the opportunity it provides grantmakers like JPMorgan Chase to deepen relationships with local and national funders who bring to the table a strong analysis of the ways race, class, gender and other factors impede equitable economic growth in the region.

“Having foundations like the Ford Foundation and Foundation for Louisiana sitting at our table – a local and a national foundation with equity as a guiding principle in their work – has been huge for us. It gives us another lens to look at our investments and make sure we’re aligned with that stated value. In the South, we don’t often get credit for thinking about or wrestling with equity in the same way as folks nationally, even though there are folks locally doing that work like Foundation for Louisiana.”

The role of corporations in the marketplace can complicate any narrative about corporate philanthropy. Cowan said JPMorgan Chase Foundation’s philanthropy and their corporate responsibility work is guided by a central value: Equitable growth is the best, most sustainable way to increase prosperity – in the South and nationally.

“That work hasn’t just been happening at a network level,” Wright said. “It’s been happening internally for JPMorgan Chase too. While I think our investments in the region have definitely been influenced by having relationships with those other funders, we’ve been thinking about our own internal model and how we move toward equity and inclusion for a while as well.”

“We’ve been really intentional about continuing to sit at the table with folks who are not necessarily investing in underrepresented populations and being the voice that says ‘Why don’t we invite these folks here?’ and ‘How is this strategy addressing the disparities that we know exist because we have funded the data that shows it?’ We’ve been intentional about saying ‘OK, who are the organizations that are working with women, working with people of color?” Wright said.

At the same time, the threat posed by climate change in Southern Louisiana is an opportunity for the region to prove the feasibility of a regional response to coastal crises and to prove the centrality of equity and inclusion to any climate change funding strategy, Cowan and Wright pointed out.

“Because of that interconnectivity between and among [Louisiana communities] because of the bipartisan agreement around the coastal master plan, because of the funding available and because of our long history of working on the coast and having to manage living with water and wetlands, we have this asset in terms of [the region’s] knowledge that can be transformed to be a knowledge-based export industry to other communities around the world that are facing this threat,” Cowan said.

As its philanthropy has evolved in recent years, JPMorgan Chase has strived to deploy the company’s resources – people, data and partnerships – to ensure greatest impact in line with values of strategic philanthropy.

“From our perspective, the emerging water management industry represents a huge opportunity and one that could increase or significantly decrease disparity in the South,” Wright said. “If we can be ahead of the game in thinking about how we train a workforce or prepare small businesses to address some of these issues, then we’re not only addressing environmental concerns, but we’re also addressing economic concerns. But if the coast disappears, it won’t have mattered what we did or didn’t do.”

Read these practical tips to boost your philanthropy in the South:

Do’s and Don’ts
4 Recommendations to get you started

Updated 2/5/2018 to correct spelling of Naeema Muhammad’s name.

NAEEMA MUHAMMAD, ORGANIZING CO-DIRECTOR – NORTH CAROLINA ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE NETWORK

Naeema Muhammad

Naeema Muhammad and her colleagues at the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (NCEJN) understand how and why local private and public sector leaders often exclude grassroots environmental organizations from conversations like the ones Liza Cowan and Erika Wright spoke about. As heirs to the legacy of longstanding environmental justice organizations in Eastern North Carolina, NCEJN represents the potential for building a diverse, climate-resilience movement that builds the power of people to advocate for themselves.

NCEJN has grown out of a people-of-color-led movement in North Carolina to emphasize the disparate impacts of environmental challenges in Black, Native and Hispanic communities. Their focus on protecting people and communities with the least wealth and power in the state has often been met with intransigence and neglect by more powerful nonprofit sector actors, elected officials and business representatives.

“The problem has been getting the other parties to the table in a way that they would look at anybody in Eastern North Carolina as their partner,” Muhammad said. “Businesses and government [representatives] really don’t see the need to work with communities. So they don’t necessarily come to the table to take part in a working relationship to resolve these issues. When we try to [bring them to the table], what we’ve seen as a matter of fact more than anything else is that they try to pit communities against one another.”

Muhammad went on to describe a specific example when government and business representatives who ought to have been collaborating with community partners – like NCEJN – instead sowed division.

“One of the main issues that we’ve been addressing for over three decades is our animal feeding operations,” Muhammad explained. “Government and industry have been a constant source of challenges for the communities fighting that issue. The industry is constantly telling the contract growers that we are their enemies and we’re trying to put them out of business. But we have never ever advocated for any of those businesses to be shut down. We always say what we want is for them to clean it up and become a better neighbor.”

Commercial agriculture has deep, long-term negative impacts on environmental and public health in Eastern North Carolina, but messages like the one in Muhammad’s example resonate in small communities where agriculture is a major source of stable work. Compounding that challenge, Muhammad explained, is the extent to which commercial agriculture (and other industries with harmful environmental effects) have captured the levers of policy and regulation.

“The industry has government so deep in their pockets, so we can’t get much help from government either even though the examples [of harm] have been made very clear. That’s the source of the problem; it’s the industry’s money. And it’s spread so far and wide in North Carolina that it just outweighs almost anything that you could try to do. But we haven’t given up and that’s the key.”

The NCEJN’s perseverance has earned it the respect and attention of bigger, better-resourced environmental groups that have shifted their focus to address the human costs of environmental degradation and climate change. But those large environmental groups’ newfound solidarity warrants close examination, added Muhammad.

“Historically the big green groups never included the human cost of environmental issues or preservation,” said Muhammad. “But then everybody started jumping on the climate change bandwagon because that’s where the money was. Then [big green groups] started calling on NCEJN because we had been talking about climate change in relationship to environmental injustice. But [the big green groups’] interest was not sincere and you could see that. They still were not truly looking at the cost of climate change [for marginalized communities].”

In the course of researching this report, Muhammad and NCEJN were not the only Southern environmental justice groups to raise concerns about the depth of larger environmental organizations’ – funders and grantees – commitment to the justice part of the work at hand. And their concerns carry a rich history of self-determination and grassroots activism that began in the South.

The modern environmental justice movement – with its focus on disparately impacted communities and on the power-building necessary in those communities to achieve lasting impact – has some of its deepest roots in the South. In fact, scholars of the movement’s history locate its origins in Eastern North Carolina. In the 1970s, the mantle of “environmentalism,” which had historically been associated primarily with middle- and upper-class white activists, was claimed by residents in Warren County, North Carolina.

The state of North Carolina proposed a toxic waste disposal landfill in the county, which was 75 percent Black and ranked 97th out of North Carolina’s 100 counties by GDP. Residents organized, deployed tactics and rhetoric learned in the Civil Rights Movement, and successfully halted the state’s plans. The systemic pollution and exploitation of poor communities and communities of color gained national attention, and the modern environmental justice movement was born.

Groups like NCEJN, CCA and close partner organization Concerned Citizens for Tillery are the direct heirs of that pioneering work. But, as Muhammad pointed out, too often larger, better-funded environmental organizations either under-invest in Southern organizations that defined (and continue to define) the modern movement, or they engage with those organizations cynically out of a desire to exploit their well-earned reputation to the big green groups’ advantage.

“Funders say they want to fund social change, but if they’re not putting the money where the problems are, they must not really want to fund that kind of change,” Muhammad said. “The big green groups can get any amount of money that they request, but the groups that are on the ground – the ones that are down in the trenches – we get the crumbs off the table.”

MIKKI SAGER, DIRECTOR, RESOURCEFUL COMMUNITIES – THE CONSERVATION FUND

Mikki Sager

Despite the challenges organizations like NCEJN face, the South is home to high-impact intermediary organizations that leverage their expertise and, more importantly, their deep relationships with grassroots organizers to drive more resources to those groups “down in the trenches.”

Mikki Sager, director of The Conservation Fund’s Resourceful Communities program in North Carolina, spoke about the impact of investing in capacity and building a resilient grassroots nonprofit infrastructure to mirror the resilient communities necessary to meet the climate change challenge. Part of Resourceful Communities’ success can be credited to Sager’s nimble way of connecting issues larger foundations have prioritized back to the South’s natural resources. At the center of this holistic and intersectional understanding of environmental preservation is the power of land to restore communities, right past wrongs and build wealth, power and climate resilience.

=“Environmental funders are the few folks in the philanthropic sector that are investing in rural places and they often give big chunks of money to buy land,” Sager said. “One of my colleagues made a map of the biodiversity hot spots and the [USDA-designated] persistent poverty counties. Not all biodiversity hot spots are home to the persistent poverty counties, but persistent poverty counties are consistently home to biodiversity hot spots.

“Biodiversity is threatened not just by environmental stress but by the degradation of the environment because of the persistent poverty, so my plea to funders would be to help people gain ownership of working land, like for community-based agriculture. Conservation groups are really good at buying land, so we can buy land and help communities build wealth, build power and build resilience with it.”

Southerners’ connection to the land is a deeply held regional tradition, and capitalizing on the productive potential of land to benefit all Southerners is at the root of Resourceful Communities’ partnerships with funders who may not otherwise prioritize environmental funding. It also means partnering with traditional environmental funders to invest in innovative community economic development strategies as a means to protect ecosystems.

“At the grassroots, people understand the power and the possibilities in owning and controlling land and economies. What we have done and are doing is leveraging conservation tools to increase land ownership by low-income households, communities of color and tribal communities. We are also supporting community economic development, small business development, community-led health programs, food sovereignty and helping rural and Native communities advance family income equality.”

Sager tied Resourceful Communities’ work back to a long history of environmental racism whose negative impacts will be amplified by our changing climate.

“There are these very fundamental environmental issues particularly around land and water in the rural South,” Sager said. “Part of the reason poor rural communities in the South are going to be more disproportionately impacted [by climate change] is because, historically, society relegated poor people and people of color to the flood plain. We have to understand the environmental issues but we also have to take into account the social and economic injustices and the related impacts.”

Resourceful Communities is a grantmaking intermediary organization. Sager and her staff help grassroots organizations across the South –especially in North Carolina – access funding and capacity-building tools and support. They also do it on those organizations’ terms, making sure the philanthropic investments do not overburden organizations with onerous requirements and restrictions and that capacity-building tools are tailored to their needs. Resourceful Communities describes it as a triple bottom-line approach.

“What we do is we say ‘Tell us what you need money for, then tell us what you’re going to do that’s going to help the economic, social justice and environmental conditions in your community improve,’” Sager said. “And we are re-granting to get the money to them – up to $15,000 grants, often to groups that are too small for most funders to justify giving grants to. We use a three-pronged strategy: We provide the grants and capacity building work, which covers everything from how your board operates, to project planning and fundraising, whatever they need, and also a lot of connecting people to each other, to resources, to funding.”

Resourceful Communities’ approach gets crucial philanthropic capital to underinvested parts of the South, and it attracts other funders to the table. By building capacity, investing in grassroots organizations and connecting those organizations to strategic partners and other sources of funding, Resourceful Communities is building a resilient “triple bottom line” nonprofit ecosystem in an area where resources for such an ecosystem have historically been scarce.

“What we have seen over the years is that communities have been able to leverage an average of $12 to $16 for every $1 we invest through small grants,” said Sager. “That includes additional funding that the groups have built their capacity to access. It includes funding that we have been able to help bring to the community, and it also includes in-kind contributions. We saw a long time ago that people [in rural communities] were getting all kinds of work done, but they were not tracking or documenting the in-kind contributions of their time, supplies and all they put into improving their communities. The amount that people put into helping themselves is a really important indicator of resilience.”

The prevalence and real value of mutual community aid, emphasized over and over in our interviews across the South, makes philanthropic investment in Southern communities high-leverage investments.

Sager shared one of Resourceful Communities’ many stories of impact. During post-hurricane recovery in Sampson County, North Carolina, the federal government funded a project to clear a critical waterway of fallen trees and other debris. The debris had caused damaging floods, especially on land where the Coharie tribal members live. But the recovery project received funding to clear debris only on parts of the river adjacent to white landowners. Resourceful Communities partnered with the Coharie to connect them with the North Carolina Forest Service, which invested $6,000 in Coharie-led recovery work.

The tribe bought equipment, and by restoring the waterway, which has significant cultural significance for the community it avoided further damage to its land and helped the young people who worked on the project gain valuable skills and reconnect with their heritage. After three years and $20,000 total in grants from Resourceful Communities and support from the University of North Carolina American Indian Center, the Coharie Tribe recently secured a $250,000 contract from the North Carolina Department of Agriculture to continue the work with the potential for developing it into a workforce training program.

Sager and her colleagues at Resourceful Communities bring a deep understanding of the structural issues that will exacerbate climate change’s impacts on Southern communities to their work. But another crucial ingredient in their success has been their capacity for high-impact, high-leverage intermediary re-granting that is done with integrity and equity in mind.

When asked what makes a good Southern intermediary organization, Sager provided a few key points:

Representation: “We have more authentic relationships with communities when they can relate to our staff. The majority of our RC team members are people of color, grew up in low- and moderate-income households and have a broad range of skills and expertise.”
Integrity: “We are committed to working in equitable partnerships with communities, sharing the resources and leveraging the access we have as a national nonprofit.”
Multi-Issue Strategy: “Our partner communities are dealing with multiple issues so the triple bottom line approach helps them address multiple issues with a single funding source.”
Equity: “You need team members who understand power, privilege, race, class and equity and who understand and are willing to address pervasive institutional racism.” And you have to be willing to use an equity lens to evaluate your work, especially to take a hard look at your grantmaking and where your other resources – like funding and staff time – are going.

As an intermediary in close relationship with funders and grassroots grantees, standing at the intersection of economic, social and environmental justice, Sager offered a sage perspective on how government, the philanthropic sector and the communities both serve will need to come together around a shared understanding of the climate challenges Southern communities will face in the coming years.

“In my experience, elected officials are pretty much saying ‘Pfft, I’m not going to worry about this. [Climate change] is not going to happen for 70 years, and I’m not worried about running for office 70 years from now,’” she said. “And when the environmentalists have meetings about climate change, they often don’t invite community leaders and activists.

“But we’ve found that, if you bring together community organizers and activists [with environmentalists and elected officials], activists are the ones who say ‘We need to be talking to the kids, to the schools, organizing and educating our communities [about the threat] and the environmentalists and elected officials get a new perspective.’ The community leaders and activists get right to the heart of it; as they say ‘Our young people are the ones who are going to inherit this mess, what can we do right now?”

And, she noted, “There is great power in connecting communities and building relationships, especially among peer community leaders. Our partners are already actively engaged in things that are now having impact on the effects of climate change – the kinds of jobs being created, parks, education, where and if development happens, etc.”

What Sager and her peers understand is that climate resiliency for already marginalized communities is an urgent need and that those communities have the skills and the leadership to build that resiliency. But few funders have met that potential with the investments to make it a reality. One foundation that has begun to invest in a holistic understanding of climate and community resilience specific to the threats faced by Southern communities is The Kresge Foundation.

On Fertile Soil

Despite growing challenges to civil rights, inclusion and economic justice across the country, and especially in the South, the philanthropic sector has not recognized the potential in local organizations and the legacy civil rights infrastructure of the Alabama Black Belt, the Mississippi Delta and places like them across the South. These two regions benefitted from just $41 in foundation funding per person between 2010 and 2014, compared to the national funding rate of $451 per person and the New York state rate of $995 per person. Just 16 percent of the $55 million given by foundations to benefit these two regions in that five-year timeframe was for power-building strategies like policy reform or community organizing.

Southern communities are rich with natural leaders and existing organizations – whether incorporated as a 510(c)3 or not – but often funders don’t recognize them. Sometimes, foundations and donors disregard Southern leaders because these individuals seem to lack the educational credentials or formal capacity that grantmakers expect from experienced nonprofit executives. Sometimes, foundations and donors defer to existing power structures by working only with established political, business or social sector leaders.

Strong Roots

As the South Grows: Strong Roots cover

The South’s economic history is dominated by extractive industry, artificially cheap labor, unbridled economic development, and exploitation of the region’s human and natural resources. As different as the region’s mountain hollers and sea islands may seem demographically, politically and economically, they share this history. The fate of Appalachian coal miners and Lowcountry farmers is linked.

And as nonprofit and community leaders in the Lowcountry and in Appalachia understand, dramatic economic transition for many Southern communities is underway. Community-led economic development organizations are breaking down barriers to access to wealth-building tools for historically excluded Southern communities. They are changing the narrative about the region’s economic past and future. They are capitalizing on the South’s rich assets: its people, its land and its culture.

Weathering the Storm

Both regions are home to large, diverse communities of color with significant Black and Native communities as well as growing Hispanic communities.

Bearing Fruit

The cover of As the South Grows: Bearing Fruit

So Grows the Nation

The cover of NCRP's As the South Grows: So Grows the Nation report. Between 2011 and 2015, foundations nationwide invested 56 cents per person in the South for every dollar per person they invested nationally. And they provided 11 cents per person for structural change work in the South for every dollar per person nationally.

It is hard for Southern leaders, especially those at the vanguard of social change work in their communities, to reconcile the reality of a region full of innovative and effective social change networks with the long-standing dearth of resources to support their work.

The soil for growing exciting solutions to national problems is deep and fertile in the South; the seeds are present, and foundation staff haven’t turned on the water. It’s time to open the spigot.

The Case for Funding in the South

Cover page of "The Case for Funding in the South" Investing in the South is essential if we want to win a better future for all. The South is home to more than one-third of the country’s population, including many of its fastest growing cities and regions.

The South is also the proving ground for some of the nation’s most regressive public policies. In the Midwest, wages are too low to support working families because of anti-labor legislation exported from Southern states. The policies and practices of the Jim Crow-era South have been adapted to harass immigrants in the Southwest. Anti-abortion laws passed in the South are aimed at overturning Roe v. Wade.

Individual philanthropists have the opportunity to fuel new movements born in the South that can transform the nation.

How to Start	Who Can Help
Build learning relationships with other funders who are already leading in this space. If you already make climate-related investments, ensure they center the needs of people and communities most impacted by environmental challenges. If you already include an equity lens in your funding, consider what justice means in the context of preserving and utilizing natural resources.	Local environmental organizations and leaders Concerned Citizens of Tillery The Conservation Fund/ Resourceful Communities The Kresge Foundation Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Funders Building Equity and Alignment for Impact Solutions Project Surdna Foundation Coastal Community Foundation

How to Start	Who Can Help
Use your political and reputational capital to invite community representatives to the table with business, government and philanthropy. Fully engage grassroots partners in designing your environmental grantmaking strategies.	JPMorgan Chase & Co. North Carolina Environmental Justice Network Center for Community Action CHANGE Philanthropy Foundation for Louisiana

How to Start	Who Can Help
Acknowledge the full history of Southern communities’ relationships to the land and ask grassroots organizations how to learn about that history. Lean in to conversations about the real and perceived harm done to Southern communities in the name of racism, class-ism and other discriminatory practices. Acknowledge your and your foundation’s shared complicity in that history, too.	Local environmental and community organizations and leaders Local historians, cultural leaders Grantmakers for Southern Progress Greater New Orleans Funder Network Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation

As the South Grows: So Grows the Nation

INTRODUCTION

READ RELATED SECTIONS

What do we mean by structural change grantmaking?

THE BOTTOM LINE

A new way to do grantmaking in the South

RECKON WITH SHARED HISTORY

Often well-meaning foundation staff and donors intend to, for example:

And the impacts of those choices are to, for example:

Instead, foundation staff and donors should, for example:

LEARN MORE:

ASSESS THE STAKES OF CAUTION OR INACTION AND RISK YOUR PRIVILEGE

Often well-meaning foundation staff and donors intend to, for example:

And the impacts of those choices are to, for example:

Instead, foundation staff and donors should, for example:

RECOGNIZE AND HONOR CAPACITY

Often well-meaning foundation staff and donors intend to, for example:

The impacts of those choices are to, for example:

Instead, foundation staff and donors should, for example:

RELATED READING:

How to move forward

The most promising way to overcome this lack of trust between philanthropy and grassroots Southern leadership is to build relationships. And to do this, grantmakers need to:

8 Things you can do right now to jump-start your high-impact grantmaking in the South

Conclusion

BONUS

Eight tips for organizing in philanthropy

But what if I’m a…

Actions you can take today

Appendix

READ RELATED SECTIONS

CONTEXT

LEARN MORE:

Mary Hooks, Executive Director – Southerners On New Ground

Adelina Nicholls, Executive Director – Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights

READ THESE PRACTICAL TIPS TO BOOST YOUR PHILANTHROPY IN THE SOUTH:

Xochitl Bervera, Executive Director – Racial Justice Action Center

RELATED READING:

Nathaniel Smith, Chief Equity Officer – Partnership for Southern Equity

Tené Traylor, Atlanta Fund Advisor – The Kendeda Fund

Janelle Williams, Ph.D., Senior Associate, Atlanta Civic Site – The Annie E. Casey Foundation

WHAT’S NEXT?

read related sections

BACKGROUND

Learn More:

REV. MAC LEGERTON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, and DONNA CHAVIS, CO-FOUNDER – CENTER FOR COMMUNITY ACTION

JOHN DAVIES, PRESIDENT AND CEO – BATON ROUGE AREA FOUNDATION

LIZA COWAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, and ERIKA WRIGHT, VICE PRESIDENT GLOBAL PHILANTHROPY – JPMORGAN CHASE & CO.

Read these practical tips to boost your philanthropy in the South:

NAEEMA MUHAMMAD, ORGANIZING CO-DIRECTOR – NORTH CAROLINA ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE NETWORK

MIKKI SAGER, DIRECTOR, RESOURCEFUL COMMUNITIES – THE CONSERVATION FUND

Related Reading:

CHANTEL RUSH, PROGRAM OFFICER, AMERICAN CITIES PRACTICE – THE KRESGE FOUNDATION

COLETTE PICHON BATTLE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR – US HUMAN RIGHTS NETWORK

PRACTICAL TIPS FOR FOUNDATIONS AND DONORS FOR GREATER IMPACT IN THE SOUTH

DO’S:

DON’TS:

1. Identify opportunities to fund climate, economic and social resilience and solutions in the South within current grantmaking priorities or expand priorities to include those strategies.

2. Deploy your financial, human and political capital to ensure underrepresented communities – those most impacted by environmental injustice – are meaningful partners in climate resilience conversations.

3. Seek reparative, healing, honest relationships between grantee and grantor and within grantee communities.

4. Make a healthy, resilient social change infrastructure a strategic priority.

WHAT’S NEXT?

On Fertile Soil

Strong Roots

Weathering the Storm

Bearing Fruit

So Grows the Nation

The Case for Funding in the South