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I was born and raised in North Carolina, and Southern values of community, hospitality and mutual aid run deep for me. Even though I no longer live in the South, its ways of being infuses my organizing.

I first learned what community organizing is through my internship with Southerners on New Ground (SONG) in 2008. SONG is a home for LGBTQ liberation across all lines of race, class, abilities, age, culture, gender and sexuality in the South.

After being steeped in Southern organizing, I was disappointed when I moved to Washington, D.C., and experienced firsthand many national advocacy organizations either ignoring the South entirely or only wanting to parachute in to push short-term, top-down campaigns that undermined the place-based, relationship-based organizing that already existed.

I experienced time and again people who identify as liberal and progressive disparaging the South, expressing contempt by using classist slurs like “rednecks and hillbillies,” dismissing any potential for transformation or power-building or writing off the entire region as a “lost cause” because of entrenched Republican control.

My stomach always twists in anger whenever I hear this rhetoric, which is rooted in racism and classism, and erases the power of Southern movement organizing – from the Civil Rights Movement to successful Alabama voter mobilization.

Unfortunately, this dismissal of the South is replicated in too many philanthropic spaces. That is why I was thrilled to see the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) and Grantmakers for Southern Progress issue their in-depth As the South Grows reports, making the case for why it so important for funders to make long-term investments in grassroots organizations in the South.

As they say in the introductory letter to the As the South Grows series: “Our new national reality of unified, reactionary antidemocratic government has been a reality for Southerners off and on for more than a generation. Therefore, national and non-Southern organizations have much to learn from their Southern counterparts.”

Many families’ wealth is tied to the legacy of the Southern slave economy, or to extractive fossil fuel industries that have devastated the South’s natural resources and harmed its communities.

A national community of progressive young people with wealth, my organization, Resource Generation, has an important role to play as proactive and just partners to Southern grassroots organizations on the frontlines of struggles for racial and economic justice today.

Funding in the South is one way to start to repair the harm caused through extracting wealth from the South, and, as individuals, we have more flexibility to give multi-year funding to support long-term capacity building.

The country’s largest foundations gave the equivalent of $41 funding per person in the Alabama Black Belt and Mississippi Delta – the Deep South – from 2010-2014. Compare this to the national funding rate of $451. Source: Foundation Center.

We can be part of reversing institutional philanthropy’s systemic disinvestment from the South. As this chart demonstrates, the South, and especially the Deep South, receive pennies to the dollar in charitable contributions when compared to funding in the North. 

One of our members, Olivia Woollam, is part of a family foundation that has been giving in the South for almost 80 years. Her great-grandfather moved to Louisiana and took advantage of the legacy of the plantation and slave economy in the 1900s that made sugar the backbone of the Louisiana economy.

Although he wasn’t from a planter background, as a white man he benefited from the existing sugar industry infrastructure to create one of the largest Coca-Cola franchises in the country. Olivia’s ancestor created the Rosamary Foundation because he recognized the importance of philanthropy staying in the South.

Today the Rosamary Foundation’s endowment is $52 million, and it grants $2-$3 million annually. The only requirement the foundation has on its giving is that it goes to organizations in the greater New Orleans area.

The foundation has established relationships and is able to fund local organizational leaders who represent and have the trust of the people they serve (which is one of the core “do’s” from NCRP’s recommendations of do’s and don’ts for funding in the South).

However, because of the lack of money coming into the South, especially now that the money that poured in to New Orleans post-Katrina is drying out, “there’s a sense of tenuousness and that we have to be really careful,” Olivia said. “That doesn’t lead to risk-taking in funding which is very in vogue with big foundations – funding early-stage visionary leaders.” 

Olivia also emphasized how, because there are no rules for philanthropy besides tax rules (unless they are restricted by the charter), every philanthropic institution is a site for potential organizing and change. Those who don’t fund in the South “are making a decision not to,” she said.

I’m proud to be a monthly donor for SONG, and I’d like to respond to Olivia’s call to action by increasing my giving to the Southern organizing I hold dear. Will you join me in incorporating a lens around solidarity with the South in your giving plan this year? NCRP’s list of resources and partners is a great place to start. 

Southern grassroots leaders have been making do with what they have and leading in innovative organizing – from bailouts to Moral Mondays to creating co-ops and alternative economic systems – for decades. They have shifted culture, consciousness and power on shoestring budgets.

I can only imagine the impact they would have if leaders had the resources to reach their full potential. I hope to be a part of a fundamental shift towards robustly funding Southern social justice organizing, because as the South transforms, so do we all.   

Iimay Ho is executive director of Resource Generation. Follow @iimayho and @ResourceGen on Twitter. Resource Generation has two chapters in the South: Raleigh-Durham and New Orleans. Reach out to their organizers (Yahya Alazrak and Kirin Kanakkanatt, respectively) if you’d like to get involved.

Photo by Jloranger, used under Creative Commons license.

Before we get too far into 2018, I’d like to take this opportunity to remember some of the bright spots of 2017 related to philanthropy that advances equity and justice. 2017 was NCRP’s first full year of implementing its new strategic framework, enabling me to delve more deeply into health equity issues and the world of individual donors.

Here’s my chance to give a shout out to activities and organizations I learned about and wanted to blog about but couldn’t find the time:

Public Health Heroes. While I was familiar with highly impactful health access advocacy and organizing groups, the role of public health professionals specifically in advancing equity was eye-opening for me. I was blown away by the women I met who are using their backgrounds in public health to do critically important and cutting edge systems change:

Speaking Truth to Power. A number of innovative strategies that challenge philanthropy to be more responsive and accountable to their constituents, and especially to those advancing justice and equity, are taking off:

  • Thanks to Linda Campbell of Building Movement Project for meeting with me to learn about how small, people of color-led organizations have banded together in Detroit to push foundations to invest more in their grassroots efforts. The Detroit People’s Platform and Allied Media Project released detailed recommendations, then organized several learning sessions for funders conducted by community leaders in neighborhood settings. Learning tours in other regions are in the works to inform local efforts to create a community-led participatory grantmaking program that would fund community organizing in Detroit. The Ford Foundation funded the report.
  • Grantadvisor.org offers a platform for nonprofits to rate funders and give feedback on their performance, and for grantmakers to respond to the feedback. The creators of this website may finally be succeeding where others have failed, including Inside Philanthropy, which scuttled a little-used interface for rating program officers, and our own Philamplify initiative.
  • Old Money New System is an evolving community of social justice leaders and donors seeking to elevate and promote equitable and participatory approaches to grantmaking in social movements. Additionally, this community aims to challenge the status quo in philanthropy to end extractive practices. Initially convened by Movement Net Lab, this group is gearing up to grow its influence and presence in the sector in 2018.
  • Jara Dean-Coffey, principal of the Luminare Group, and colleagues at the Center for Evaluation Innovation and the Johnson Center are taking on the sacred cows of research and evaluation to challenge how foundations measure performance and impact. They argue that many of the presumed best practices in evaluation actually work against equity and inclusion. Equitable evaluation is necessary to ensure funders don’t undermine their equity goals when assessing their effectiveness. 
  • The Movement Voter Project has grown from a year-to-year operation to an ongoing organization, one that is proving highly successful at helping donors identify effective grassroots organizations mobilizing and organizing voters. MVP offers state-by-state and issue-focused web search features as well as high-touch one-on-one advice. MVP helped drive donor giving to local groups that successfully educated and turned out voters in the recent Alabama senate election.

Kudos to the foundations and donors supporting these initiatives. Also, a shout out to the state of Michigan – four of the women I met are Michiganders!

Because of these individuals and organizations, as well as others I learned about in 2017, I’m hopeful about what social movements can accomplish in 2018 and beyond – with strong funder support.

Lisa Ranghelli is the senior director of assessment and special projects at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. Follow @lisa_rang and @NCRP on Twitter.

Creative Action logo

Editor’s note: This post is part of an ongoing series of posts featuring NCRP nonprofit members.

How do you get young people to express themselves? How do you encourage them to think creatively? And in what ways can you create space for them to share the results? Creative Action has some compelling answers.

The Austin, Texas-based nonprofit’s programs equip kids with the tools to build healthy relationships, successful careers and active roles in their communities. But gentrification has its foot on the scale in Austin, and white kids have better access to Creative Action than black and brown ones.

Funders need to commit not just to investing their money into beneficent organizations like Creative Action, but doing so in amounts commensurate with the scale of impact gentrification has wrought.

Born in 1997 and incorporated in 2001 with a focus primarily on theater arts, Creative Action has blossomed into an organization with a diverse array of programming in visual arts, filmmaking, music, puppetry, creative writing and acting.

Though the organization primarily works with school age children, it also serves the greater Austin community. There’s arts-based social and life-skills classes for young adults with Asperger’s or mild to moderate autism, and creative writing/storytelling for seniors wishing to unlock their latent artist within.

Creative Action’s office and arts center is located in the heart of “Six Square,” a six-mile region officially designated Austin’s African American Cultural Historical District. The facility helps ground Creative Action in the neighborhood.

Since they finished construction in 2012, the organization has adopted the local elementary school and helped it integrate arts learning into every class every day, and has installed a community-designed mural portraying the African American history of Six Square.

In a city that’s rapidly gentrifying, Creative Action partners with the local cultural preservation organization to develop creative placemaking strategies that uphold the area’s hard-fought African-American identity.

Gentrification is no small matter to Creative Action. The process has pushed Latinx and black students into suburban and rural settings outside Austin, where the cost of living is lower, but so too are the funds to support Creative Action’s work.

The organization has shifted resources to follow them when possible, but as the city continues to change, bringing its programming to communities of color has grown increasingly difficult. A higher cost of living has also made it harder to find and retain people who can work the hourly positions necessary to keep up with the increasing demand for Creative Action’s services.

Certainly it’s great that Creative Action is reaching its large student population, but if fewer black and brown kids are included in that reach, is their work really maximizing the good it could do?

Creative Action is not just scraping by. Almost 60 percent of its funding comes from earned revenue via payments from schools and a fee-based version of its after-school program.

The organization has grown by at least 15 percent every year for the past 15 years. Aside from the schools it works with, Creative Action partners with 25 to 30 other nonprofit and community organizations to deliver arts education programming to young people. Yet the disparity between who Creative Action serves and who they need to serve continues to swell. Children of color are being pushed faster and further into the margins while their supporters struggle to keep pace.

But there can be no giving up for funders committed to equity. Creative Action transforms the way kids think, feel and act through art skills development. If it were to have all the resources it needed, it would identify high-need schools without the discretionary funds to host them and bring more of their programming to those locations.

Greater funding would also mean increased compensation and benefits for Creative Action employees, thus making arts education a viable career path for Austin-based teachers and artists. Creative Action alone won’t stop the demographic shifts within its city, but funders can make sure the organization has the resources to better stick with children of color when they are displaced.

Empowering black and brown kids to advocate for themselves is direly important. There can be no underestimating the value of joy, self-expression and community pride in childhood development. Let’s make sure that as many kids as possible, both in Austin and nationwide, have unrestricted access to them.  

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

Image by LoneStarMike, used under Creative Commons license.

This year’s drought, hurricanes and other extreme climate and weather events have been devastating, and many experts predict that they will become the new normal as a result of climate change.

Unfortunately, foundations and other donors have not stepped up to support communities working to alleviate the impacts of climate change. This is particularly important in the South, which has emerged as ground zero for the effects of climate change.

Our newest As the South Grows report, “As the South Grows: Weathering the Storm,” includes three Do’s and three Don’ts to help foundations and wealthy donors invest in climate resilience effectively and sustainably.

Do's and Don'ts

“Weathering the Storm” is the third report in the five-part As the South Grows series. The fourth report will be released in February.

https://twitter.com/kendedafund/status/940679158375636992

We hope “As the South Grows” inspires you to look at the South as an important opportunity for deeper engagement, investment and partnerships.

https://twitter.com/LoraEliSmith/status/938526712429719553

Read the first two reports in the As the South Grows series:

As the historic 2017 Atlantic hurricane season has demonstrated, extreme weather events can have devastating impacts. And such events are becoming more and more common as the effects of climate change take hold. But those impacts are heightened in the American South, which sits on the front lines of the global climate crisis.

Our newest report, “As the South Grows: Weathering the Storm,” explores opportunities for philanthropy to invest in environmental, racial and climate justice in the South. Using examples in Eastern North Carolina and Southern Louisiana, the report details how the organizing and mobilizing of Southerners around these issues is not matched by foundation investment in their communities.

Learn about:

“As the South Grows: Weathering the Storm” is the third report in the five-part As the South Grows series. The fourth report will be released in February.

We hope “As the South Grows” inspires you to look at the South as an important opportunity for deeper engagement, investment and partnerships.

Yna C. Moore is senior director of communications at NCRP. Follow @ynamoore and @NCRP on Twitter.

On Nov. 1-2, the Executives’ Alliance for Boys and Men of Color convened its foundation CEO members and other community stakeholders to explore the idea that boys and men of color (BMOC) are the architects of their own liberation. The leaders of the convening – mostly young men of color who are organizing for systems change in their communities – repeatedly reminded us that they are not helpless souls who need saving but human beings with agency and vision that need to be respected if we are all to be free.

Executives’ Alliance applied the wisdom of these young men to its practices. Its members provided $3 million in seed funding last year for the National Youth Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, which then re-granted funds to grassroots groups and local youth campaigns. Equally as important, several of the grassroots leaders are key partners and advisers to Executives’ Alliance so that operations and philanthropic strategy more accurately reflect their lived experiences. These young leaders, as well as other men of color who contributed to the convening, had clear advice for philanthropy and the role our sector plays in supporting the liberation of BMOC.

The closing plenary invited grassroots leaders to explore the nuances of the popular movement chant by Assata Shakur:

It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

It is our duty to win.

We must love each other and support each other.

We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Calvin Williams, senior associate at Movement Strategy Center and coordinator of the National Youth Alliance, moderated an unapologetic and clear call to action among current and former organizers about how funders can genuinely contribute to freeing us all from our chains.

1. Fund the stuff. Jamal Jones, co-executive director of Baltimore Algebra Project and National Youth Alliance reminded funders that they have the money. He is tired of hearing how work that makes a difference doesn’t fit into a portfolio or priority area. David Celedon, also with the National Youth Alliance and with Resilience OC/Sons & Brothers Funders agreed with Jamal. David mentioned that some of his partners who have low incomes use their personal resources to advance their work. He noted the hypocrisy of funders being able to host an event in a four-star hotel in one of America’s most expensive cities but not being able to find ways to fund grassroots work.

2. Protect grassroots leaders. Jamal encouraged funders to read the literature their grantees are reading. Once funders understand the frameworks that influence grassroots work they can protect the people looking to change the system instead of protecting the systems.

3. Take risks, and fund healing. Greg Hodge, an organizer and owner of Khepera Consulting, reminded philanthropy that racism is traumatic. Organizers and community leaders have wisdom that heals such trauma. Funders need to support those practices, even if it seems risky, because they are key to liberation.

4. Flip the table. Funders tend to be afraid of supporting 501(c)4 work, but Lateefah Simon, CEO of Akonadi Foundation, wants philanthropy to anoint communities to take back local governments. Government is the largest funder, and unless we support those who are willing to flip the table and reclaim power in their communities, grant dollars will not be affective.

Those in formal political leadership at the convening also had directives for philanthropy. Marc Philpart, senior director at PolicyLink, moderated a panel of politicians who are men of color, equally committed to liberation.

1. Do advocacy. Washington State Sen. John McCoy explained the importance of educating people in positions of power about the realities of BMOC, the scope of inequity and the kind of changes that have impact. Every time a new leader takes office or acquires power, philanthropy should educate them about the realities in our communities.

2. Build coalitions. While Sen. McCoy called for advocacy, Dr. Edwin M. Quezada, superintendent of schools in Yonkers, New York, emphasized that we don’t need new data about disparities: “The data is clear.” He values assistance in building coalitions and cultivating more leaders of color. Philanthropy can develop the necessary diverse and broad coalitions to advance successful strategies more easily than politicians can.

3. Teach people how to build financial resources. Our sector has knowledge about investments and wealth management that are assets to those cultivating liberation for BMOC. California Assemblymember Reginald Byron Jones-Sawyer Sr. wants philanthropy to teach others about how to start endowments whose expressed purpose is to support BMOC.

The leaders at the Executives’ Alliance general meeting were clear: Philanthropy has a role to play in our liberation. Which of these steps is your foundation willing to take? Whatever the risk may be, we have nothing to lose but our chains.

Jeanné Isler is VP and Chief Engagement Officer at NCRP, and is a big advocate of liberated spaces. To learn more about the most recent Executives’ Alliance general meeting, follow #OURLiberation on Twitter.

From street-level interactions between law enforcement and the undocumented to penal systems obscuring the incarcerated, the unique concerns Latinx communities face in the American criminal justice system are often overlooked in conversations about reform.

Last month, Public Welfare Foundation (PWF) hosted the discussion El Color de la Justicia: Raising Latinx Voices for Criminal Justice Reform. PWF works to advance justice and opportunity for people in need, focusing its grantmaking on criminal justice, youth justice and workers’ rights – often through multi-year and general operating support grants to bolster grantees’ staying power.

The event highlighted the challenges criminal justice reformers face when fighting alongside Latinx populations. Ryan King, senior fellow of the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center, Juan Cartagena, President & General Counsel of LatinoJustice PRLDEF and Sara Totonchi, executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights discussed their work on these challenges.

Ryan discussed the paucity of data across nearly every state illustrating even the most basic information about incarcerated Latinos and Latinas. According to Justice Policy Center data, states usually fail to even delineate Latinx individuals from other races. For instance, Florida officially claims its prison population is 48 percent white, 48 percent black and 4 percent other.

Juan talked about simple desires for fairness in the application of law and the fostering of safe communities. Stereotypes still play an undue role in interactions between law enforcement and people of color. Latinx people are particularly victimized by associations with the drug trade in Central and South America – Juan made sure to call out Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration writ large for their role in furthering this stigmatization.

The intersection of immigration and the criminal justice system, or “crimmigration” as Sara termed it, is fraught with perverse incentives. She dived into how the criminal justice system can often be used as a form of social control. In Atlanta, where her organization is located, it’s not uncommon to see ICE vehicles parked outside public schools – waiting to detain parents of undocumented students should they arrive to pick up their children. Agreements between local police and the federal government, formalized through 287G forms, authorize state and municipal law enforcement to join ICE in this campaign of immigrant intimidation and imprisonment.

The experts weren’t without solutions, though. Funders need to be agile, Sara said. Both rapid response funds and long-term investments are essential. Ryan cautioned funders not to fixate solely on change at the federal level, as there’s fruitful work to be done at the state and local levels too. Juan would like to see broader stakeholder engagement to ensure prosecutors, police, victims and others are seated at the table when working toward change.

The struggle for justice besetting the Latinx community existed long before last November’s election, and will not fade any time soon. It’s time we take this to heart. Our great privilege as white Americans lies in the energy we spare not fretting our place in America, and it’s paramount we invest this surplus into action. Guiding lights like the Justice Policy Center know where the battles are, and steady hands like the Southern Center for Human Rights and LatinoJustice PRLDEF know how to fight them. Let’s make sure they and their allies have the resources they need, like access to rapid response funds and multi-year, general support grants, while we stand with fortitude beside them.

Troy Price is NCRP’s membership and fundraising intern. Follow @NCRP on Twitter.

NCRP Members engaged in activism around Latinx immigrants’ rights and quality of life include: