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Neighborhood Funders Group’s Funders for a Just Economy (FJE) brought 27 funders from across the U.S. to Alabama in November 2017. They met with local funders and grassroots organizations to learn about movement building strategies being implemented for economic Justice.
The learning tour started in Montgomery, and ended at Birmingham City Hall. In between Funders learned about economic justice issues in Uniontown – a rural part of the state – and walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Explore the videos in this site to experience the tour, and learn about the economic justice organizing happening in Alabama, and throughout the south.
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.
Across the Deep South – where building democratic accountability and collective power for disenfranchised communities was once a globally recognized specialty – there are exciting opportunities for philanthropic investment. If Southern and national funders as well as individual donors come together and identify specific places and causes that align with their values, Southern leaders in the Deep South can and will change their communities for the better.
Learn more about the As the South Grows series at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) website, and download As the South Grows, a publication produced by the Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP) and NCRP below.
Focusing on Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, this report assesses a range of economic indicators affecting quality of life in the South, examines some of the corporate strategies that are driving these changes, and presents some of the efforts underway in the region to improve economic opportunity through labor organizing and strengthening workers’ rights.
Read more in the New Southern Strategies: Employment, Workers’ Rights and the Prospects for Regional Resurgence publication by Nik Theodore, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Black Belt Community Foundation
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Funders for a Just Economy
Funders for a Just Economy (formerly known as the Working Group on Labor and Community Partnerships – WGLCP) is a national network of funders committed to advancing the philanthropic conversation about economic and social justice, and the centrality of unions in those efforts. FJE is part of Neighborhood Funders Group.
FJE promotes funding strategies that expand access to higher quality employment, with higher wages, better working conditions, comprehensive benefits, organizing opportunities, community asset building and financial stability for working families. At each of the Funders for a Just Economy’s (FJE) program activities, field leaders and grant makers have the important opportunity to align their grant-making strategies with one another and to be in better coordination with the field. These activities allow for broader foundation-community partnerships on policy issues and campaigns that seek to protect the rights and improve the economic well-being of low-income and working class people.
Are you interested in joining a future tour or getting involved with Funders For a Just Economy?
Get in touch with Manisha Vaze at manisha@nfg.org.
