Toward a More Equitable South: Meet a Funder Where Rural Grassroots Leaders Call the Shots

Young west virginia power building movement, a grantee of Southern partners Fund. photo courtesy of young west virginia.

Atlanta’s Southern Partners Fund is one of those unique grantmakers working at the intersection of a few of the more urgent themes animating philanthropy today.

The first involves geography. SPF, which has moved more than $15 million to grassroots community organizations in the rural South since its inception in 1994, is among a group of funders working to close the longstanding philanthropy gap in the region, and it’s poised to be an even bigger player moving forward.

What’s more, SPF is moving the needle through a governance model in which leaders of rural grassroots organizations working in its 12-state purview make all operating and grantmaking decisions. “As the buzz around democratic philanthropy keeps growing in philanthropy circles, it is nothing new to us,” said Executive Director Fernando Cuevas Jr. via email. “SPF has been operating this way, successfully, for 25 years.”

Lastly, the fund’s approach speaks to the ongoing debate as to whether organizations or regrantors like SPF can handle a large unrestricted gift. After receiving $10 million from MacKenzie Scott in 2020, SPF dramatically increased its grantmaking, expanded programming and fortifed its endowment. Many funders still aren’t sold on giving large, no-strings-attached gifts due to concerns over a lack of “absorptive capacity,” but SPF’s post-2020 decision-making shows that recipients can effectively and responsibly allocate such a windfall.

Don’t just take my word for it. Last year, Scott awarded SPF a second unrestricted grant, totaling $5 million. The support will further strengthen SPF’s efforts to galvanize grassroots community organizing, which Cuevas, Jr. calls “the strategy with the greatest potential to produce viable, progressive and institutional change for a more economically and racially equitable South.”

Meet Barbara Meyer

The fund’s financial roots date back to 1912 when philanthropist Barbara Meyer’s father began delivering packages for a nascent UPS. When he died in 1964, he left her company stock.

“I had my first real thought about philanthropy in the early 1970s,” Meyers wrote in an essay on the website Bolder Giving. “I lived in Orlando, Florida, 30 minutes from farmworker labor camps, and I saw the god-awful conditions farmworkers lived in.” She spent the next decade as an organizer with the United Farm Workers and allied organizations. In these roles, she “learned a lot about the difference between charity and justice.”

In 1984, with her shares in UPS totaling $2 million, Meyer launched the Bert and Mary Meyer Foundation with an initial investment of $400,000. The foundation focused on rural community organizing in 14 Southern states. A decade later, the family foundation handed over a $7.5 million endowment to create Southern Partners Fund.

In 2010, the Bert and Mary Meyer Foundation officially closed after granting more than $12 million to SPF. The foundation moved its remaining $6 million to a donor-advised fund at Miami Community Foundation designated for SPF. Meyers currently has no role with organization, however.

“Way ahead of the curve”

At a time when grantmakers are being asked to shift power, SPF takes a maximalist approach, handing over all strategic and financial decision-making to its community members, 80% of whom must be “leaders of currently or previously funded grassroots organizations and represent diverse issues and experience.” Members serve five-year terms and are automatically placed in the pool of candidates from which the fund’s board is elected.

With committees for Philanthropic Operations (grantmaking), Membership, Finance and Investments, Resource Development, and Marketing and Communications, SPF’s committee structure dictates the foundation’s work throughout the year. Decisions are sent to the board for ratification and if board members have questions, they send them back to the committee until consensus is reached. The board sets the foundation’s budgets, oversees the annual audit process and reports back any relevant findings to members.

“This is what we mean when we say the foundation is led by community members from the demographics we serve,” Cuevas said. “And it is a testament to what can be achieved when relying on local community experts for solutions to the problems that face their own communities and others like them.”

I reached out to participatory grantmaking expert Katy Love for her take on SPF’s model. The fund’s founding members “were way ahead of the curve,” she said via email. “While participatory grantmaking models are much more common these days, SPF still has a relatively rare model that invites their community not only into the grants decision sphere, but also the heart of the organization — at the governance level.”

In 2013, SPF adopted its Southern Organizing Strategy (SOS), allocating 60% of its grantmaking to three major initiatives — voter rights and engagement, immigration rights and education reform. Leaders earmarked the remaining 40% to nine other program areas, including environmental justice and health care reform. As the 2010s came to a close, SPF’s voting rights work centered on making sure as many people as possible were counted in the 2020 Census. In 2021, it pivoted to ensuring that efforts to redraw congressional districts do not disenfranchise voters from low-income communities of color.

How SPF allocated Scott’s 2020 gift

Cuevas, Jr. said Scott’s $10 million gift in 2020 “gave us the breathing room to dramatically increase our grantmaking, distributing just under $5 million in the years 2021, 2022, and 2023 combined to rural grassroots organizations in the Southeast.” SPF also poured significant resources into our Social Justice Institute, which houses all of the fund’s programs, such as workshops led by redistricting experts.

Lastly, SPF put several million dollars towards its endowment, “which was another opportunity to help underserved, rural communities in a small way by parking it amongst local banks and credit unions whose values and leadership align with ours,” Cuevas said. In 1998, SPF’s endowment stood at $7 million, but thanks to Scott’s largesse, it’s approximately $22.5 million — “nearly halfway to our goal of raising $50 million, a number that would allow SPF to sustain its overhead and all of its grantmaking and programming initiatives at its current state.”

While we’ve seen some signs of greater flexibility in recent years, such large, unrestricted gifts remain rare in philanthropy overall. Some funders fear that leaders will spend the money on misaligned expenditures, while others believe a large gift, once made public, could disincentivize other funders from providing support. SPF’s post-2020 strategy — supercharge grantmaking, build out programs, shore up the endowment — is another good example of a grantee disproving these vague and unconvincing concerns. As if to further drive the point home, last year, Scott gave the SPF a second gift, totaling $5 million. (Cuevas is on Scott’s Yield Giving Open Call evaluation panel, which just awarded $640 million to 361 organizations.)

SPF has also received support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, New York’s Wellspring Philanthropic Fund and the Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation.

Building power across the rural Southeast

The fund disbursed $4.8 million in grants from 2021 to 2023, with the largest amount of funding flowing to its three major initiative areas — Voter Rights and Engagement ($2.5 million), Immigration Rights ($649,555) and Education Reform ($498,000). 

This year, the board will revisit its SOS strategy and its Justice Fund for Disaster Relief and Renewal, which provides disaster funding to eligible organizations. “While adding Environmental Justice to SPF’s SOS hasn’t been officially approved by the board, it is imminent,” said senior development consultant and SPF founding member Leroy Johnson via email. “The need to increase funding in this strategic area of work brings us back full circle to the early 2000s when environmental justice was one of our strategic areas of funding.”

The fund has a refreshingly open grantmaking process for rural organizations based in one of 12 Southern states. Organizations must “be governed by community leaders from the same race and class as their members” and “use grassroots organizing strategies in their fight for justice, aimed at enabling members to become community decision-makers.” Click here to learn more about the fund’s grantmaking process.

As a founding SPF member, Cuevas is attuned to funders’ historically tepid support for grassroots organizations in the South, while also acknowledging “all of our funders who have made getting to this point possible.” Thanks to Scott’s $15 million in combined funding, he believes the fund can build a more sustainable, responsive and impactful regional ecosystem — and he hopes other grantmakers follow its lead.

“Rural communities across these Southeastern states are not a white monolith but a multiracial, multicultural and multi-ethnic mosaic of people and geographies,” he said. “In order to really push for a progressive region and build power that sustains and holds government accountable to the needs of poor and historically marginalized communities, we must grow the resources and capacities of these communities, starting with their local leaders and organizations.”