What will it take to win successful economic justice campaigns in the South? With many families facing chronically low wages and economic insecurity, an understanding and attention to the political economy of the South can help funders and field organizations develop successful intervention strategies.
Since last summer, a movement has been brewing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and many others. People across the country have taken to the streets, demanding changes in policies that contribute to government-sanctioned violence against African- Americans and Latinos.
People of color are leading this movement, as they should be, but they shouldn’t be expected to move this agenda forward by...
February 5, 2017
By Edgar Villanueva , VP of Programs and Advocacy at the Schott Foundation for Public Education
These first two weeks in Trump's America have been chaotic and stressful, but already emblematic of the dire needs philanthropy must step up to. From those who could be left out of affordable health care to those bandied about in an educational...
By Khalil Gibran Muhammad Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban...
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As the South Grows is an initiative of Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP) and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) to give philanthropists the tools they need to partner effectively with visionary leaders across the South. The initiative will produce a four-part investigative research and resource report series around place-based strategies for supporting structural change in the South. Through timely...
The current debates within progressive circles about the importance of “winning over” the white working class often fail to directly address the need for honest conversations about race, racism and xenophobia. It is tempting for many political strategists and funders to think that we can find and fund a short cut—better candidates, better field canvassing, better television ads, better framing etc... And, that these solutions will influence white, working class voters to (re)align with progressive candidates and causes.
These interventions are doomed from the start because they...
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"By Gara LaMarche
The following is adapted from the keynote speech at the Funders Committee for Civic Participation conference in Washington, D.C., on October 6, 2015.
In Citizen , the poet Claudia Rankine, writing about the abandonment of Black lives after Hurricane Katrina – a signal event in the shift toward the current political moment – says “the fiction of the facts assumes innocence, ignorance, lack of intention, misdirection; the necessary conditions of a certain time and place.”
To overcome the fictions we tell ourselves requires us to acknowledge that the...
By Jodeen Olguín-Tayler, Let's Talk: At the Heart of Movement-Building - A Blog of the Movement Strategy Center
January 26, 2016
One morning last December, I found myself at the Ford Foundation watching Anna Galland , Ai-jen Poo and Heather McGhee share a stage at an event called The Future of Organizing: Contesting for Power in a...
From Protest to Power is a convening hosted by the Ford Foundation and the Solidaire Network on February 26, 2016. We live in a political era defined by crisis, but also great promise. The effects of climate change, economic inequality, and racial injustice threaten our future. Yet in the face of these challenges, there’s a vibrant, visible resurgence of popular movements, of communities rising up against entrenched economic and political power. And it’s working. Four years after the start of the...
By Julie Quiroz , Senior Fellow, Movement Strategy Center
A few months ago I spoke to Eva Paterson, president of the Equal Justice Society , who described “disturbing trends in some national foundations; a pulling away from race where they seem to be adopting the notion of post-racial America.”
“What,” asked Patterson, “is going on?”
How far have we come from 1993 when — a year...
Funders who have long provided grants to seed social change efforts are becoming interested in fundamental shifts in traditional corporate accountability and disinvestment strategies to consider developing strategies for more values aligned and socially impactful investment alongside grantmaking. These strategies have the potential to help the philanthropic sector invest at scale to change the economy regionally and contribute towards community renewal, power building, and seeding systemic change.
NFG's Project Phoenix and...
