Ms. Foundation for Women - Southern Focus

http://ms.foundation.org/our_work/broad-change-areas/building-democracy/southern-focus

Southern Focus

In 2005, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita exposed deep inequities and longstanding discrimination across race, class and gender on the Gulf Coast. At the same time, the disaster revealed a number of severely under-resourced, though visionary, social justice organizations that strove—often in isolation—to address the urgent concerns of women, low-income people and people of color before and after the storms.

Through the Katrina Women’s Response Fund, the Ms. Foundation began investing in the social justice infrastructure on the Gulf Coast with a particular eye towards groups led by low-income women and women of color—the most marginalized of them all—to bolster the power and possibility that grassroots, progressive organizing held for struggling communities.

In 2008, the Ms. Foundation was able to expand its grantmaking focus to include a broader region of the South* to which the Gulf Coast is intimately linked and with whom the issues they face deeply overlap. The Ms. Foundation’s Southern Focus brings new resources to progressive groups throughout the region; develops the leadership of low-income women and women of color; supports strategies to address discrimination and inequity across race, class and gender; and connects leaders, organizations, issues and policy advocacy for truly systemic change.

We know well that the South has a rich history of progressive, grassroots organizing, and is no stranger to struggle. Today, the region faces a host of complex challenges, including entrenched poverty, particularly among families headed by low-income women, an expanding—and increasingly privatized—prison system, rapid urbanization, an influx of new immigrants (and with it growing anti-immigrant sentiment), and the degradation of the environment. The solutions to these problems, just like a generation ago, will prove instructive for the entire nation. As W.E.B. DuBois once said, “As the South goes, so goes the nation.”

The Ms. Foundation made its first round of Southern Focus grants in 2009. Taken as a whole, the Ms. Foundation’s grantees are a cross-section of the strongest and most innovative grassroots organizers in the region, working towards a range of wins from non-traditional job training for low-income women and millions of additional dollars to support childcare subsidies to criminal justice reform, workplace protections and immigrants’ rights.

*The Ms. Foundation’s Southern Focus grantmaking currently includes Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

show/hide

Change List

Remove List

Edit List Properties

show/hide

Change List

Remove List

Edit List Properties

Story of Impact and Innovation: Ms. Foundation Southern Strategy

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation produced a video and publication to tell the story of the Ms. Foundation Southern Strategy. Read more and view the video.

Katrina Women’s Response Fund

In 2005, immediately after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast, the Ms. Foundation established the Katrina Women’s Response Fund. Read more

show/hide

Change List

Remove List

Edit List Properties

Read about our Spring 2010 Southern Focus Convening and hear powerful audio -- recorded by StoryCorps -- of our grantees' fight to create a progressive base in the region.

show/hide

Change List

Remove List

Edit List Properties

share ms.foundation.org:

Ms. Foundation for Women, 12 MetroTech Center, 26th Fl, Brooklyn, NY 11201 Telephone:(212) 742-2300|Fax: (212) 742-1653|Email: info@ms.foundation.org