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Calling all courageous leaders! Building off Philanthropy Southeast’s Accelerating Equity Learning Collaborative, we are considering convening in-person forums in 2024 focused on two of the most important issues facing communities in the Southeast: health and housing.

Accelerating Equity Forums will offer members an experience modeled on the dialogues and discussions that form a pillar of the Accelerating Equity Learning Collaborative. Each forum will take place over one day and will include:

• Member speakers and national and regional partners providing a landscape analysis and opportunities for action
• Small group conversations with peers, including affinity group discussions based on organization type, role, or other criteria
• Inclusion of the intersectional issues of education and climate and how those issues affect the forum topic (health or housing)
• Action-oriented tools and resources
• Introduction to advocacy opportunities at the community level
• Optional networking dinner the evening before the Forum

The forums will take place between June and September – the health forum will convene in St. Petersburg, Florida, while the housing event will be held in Atlanta.

We want to learn more about your interest in these events and what you hope to gain from them. Please share your interest via a brief survey – it should take no more than 3 minutes to complete.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts – we look forward to providing more information about the Accelerating Equity Forums soon!

This post is the first in a series that continues to explore the themes and ideas in our report, Leading with Courage: Reshaping Southern Philanthropy for New Era.

The 2024 presidential election is still 18 months away, but already the temperature is rising.

With a potential rematch looming between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, America’s deep political divide will be on full display for the foreseeable future.

The implications of growing political polarization on Southern philanthropy, and the communities it serves, was one of the emerging trends highlighted in Leading with Courage, a recently released report by Philanthropy Southeast.

Polarization touches nearly every aspect of American society – and it is increasingly affecting the work of philanthropic organizations. Polarization has challenged foundations on how to frame and execute on equity initiatives, in some instances leading to a chilling effect on equity training programs that had gained momentum in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020.

Molly Talbot-Metz, president of the Mary Black Foundation in Spartanburg, South Carolina, notes that nearly every aspect of the health foundation’s work – advocating for preventative practices related to the pandemic, Medicaid expansion or access to contraception – has increasingly been viewed through a political lens.

By Stephen Sherman

We’ve recently expanded our Lending Library to include the titles below and much more. SECF members have exclusive access to our virtual collection offering e-books and audiobooks on best practices in philanthropy, advancing equity, and social sector leadership. Visit our website to get started today! 

Read Up On Our Annual Meeting Speakers

Get ready for the SECF 52^nd Annual Meeting with these titles by our opening and closing keynote speakers, Wes Moore and Heather McGhee. 

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore

In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore. Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen?

The Work: Searching for a Life that Matters by Wes Moore

The Work is the story of how one young man traced a path through the world to find his life’s purpose. Wes Moore graduated from a difficult childhood in the Bronx and Baltimore to an adult life that would find him at some of the most critical moments in our recent history: as a combat officer in Afghanistan; a White House fellow in a time of wars abroad and disasters at home; and a Wall Street banker during the financial crisis. In this insightful book, Moore shares the lessons he learned from people he met along the way – from the brave Afghan translator who taught him to find his fight, to the resilient young students in Katrina-ravaged Mississippi who showed him the true meaning of grit, to his late grandfather, who taught him to find grace in service.

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee

Heather McGhee’s specialty is the American economy – and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. From the financial crisis to rising student debt to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common root problem: racism. But not just in the most obvious indignities for people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is the common denominator of our most vexing public problems, the core dysfunction of our democracy and constitutive of the spiritual and moral crises that grip us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out? McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Maine to Mississippi to California, tallying what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm – the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others.

Leadership development in Southern philanthropy has long been part of SECF’s mission and work, as seen in programs like the CEO Forum and the Hull Fellows program.

It made sense, then, to establish a special group dedicated to applying an equity lens to this type of work – that group, the Equity Committee’s Equity Leadership Opportunities Subcommittee, met for the first time in April.

One of the subcommittee’s members, David Lewis, is an equity officer at the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation in Little Rock, Arkansas. Leadership development, he says, is critical to promoting equity in Southern communities.

“Advancing any type of change requires a great deal of courage on the part of those organizing for change – as such, the movement for equity demands a courageous disposition,” David said. “Those who expect to lead the masses must be risk takers who are unafraid to support the unconventional and embrace the idea of reimagining how we show up in communities, how we support communities, and how we build agency within communities for sustainable change.”

The subcommittee is a natural fit for David in a number of ways – his portfolio at the foundation is specifically focused on leadership development and movement building. Plus, as a relative newcomer to philanthropy – he started at the foundation in October 2019 – he is on the same journey as many others who are new to the field.

“The Equity Leadership Opportunities Subcommittee is an excellent place for me to use my knowledge and skills in the areas of organizational and leadership development to advance SECF’s transformative equity framework throughout the region,” he said. “While there were many things that excited me about this opportunity, the most exciting has been the ability to bring a different perspective to the larger conversation as an emerging professional in philanthropy.”

To help ensure SECF lives its values, the Equity Committee recently established an HR Policy Subcommittee focused on the organization’s internal practices. The committee’s roster includes the voices of human resources professionals who work for SECF members – including David Galvin, the senior director of HR and operations at the Coastal Community Foundation (CCF).

David has plenty of hands-on experience developing new HR policies – he was the foundation’s first-ever HR officer when he joined the staff in 2018 after being hired by CEO Darrin Goss, Sr.

“He immediately demonstrated that his commitment to our coastal South Carolina communities included our hard-working staff members, as much of CCF’s success links directly to the success of our team members both at work and outside of work,” David said. “Over the past few years, CCF has improved employee benefits and promoted a healthy work-life balance.”

Since his hiring, David had helped implement policies that deal with the basics of HR – retirement plans, time off, etc. – while also aligning with the foundation’s values. For example, employees can take paid time off to volunteer with local nonprofits and are able to evaluate themselves with a tool that helps them see how their work connects directly to CCF’s Purpose, Core Values, and Strategic Framework. 

One of those Core Values, a commitment to inclusion with equity, has had a direct impact on the foundation’s recruitment and hiring, David said.

This week, we proudly announced our Courageous Leadership Strategy, a new strategic direction that will guide SECF’s work through 2025. We are incredibly excited to begin this new chapter of SECF’s history – one we believe will be transformative for not just our organization, but also all of Southern philanthropy and the communities in our region.

While this strategic direction will be used to establish concrete goals for our staff and Board – you can view our specific goals here – we sought to develop a plan for 2021-25 that would go beyond a list of items. We wanted to define a new approach for SECF that reflects all we have done in recent years as well as the challenges and opportunities of today. 

Thanks to the hard work of our Strategic Planning Task Force, our staff and our Board, I am confident we have succeeded in putting SECF on a bold path defined by a commitment to courage.

Our overriding goal for this new chapter is to not only demonstrate courageous leadership, but also call our members to it. We believe answering the call to courageous leadership will be essential to meet the opportunities and challenges facing both philanthropy in the South and communities in the South during the next five years. 

We plan to exercise courageous leadership by pursuing 10 priorities, both internal and external, plus a vital cross-cutting priority: ongoing integration of our Equity Framework, first introduced in 2019.

By committing ourselves to courageous leadership, SECF is also committing itself to mobilize people and resources, in our organization and our network, in service to a new mission: We will strengthen Southern philanthropy, welcoming our members to listen, learn and collaborate on ideas and actions to help build an equitable, prosperous South.

This work, we hope, will bring into reality a new vision: a courageous community of philanthropists, leading work that results in an equitable South defined by justice, hope and opportunity for all.

Fulfilling commitments to our new mission and vision, as well as the values and guiding principles we adopted last year, will require hard work. We must address critical issues facing philanthropy in the South and its communities. We must take risks and make bold leaps.

By adopting this new direction, we pledge to do all of these things – and will call our members to do the same. I am confident that many of you will answer this call. We look forward to sharing this journey with you!

Janine Lee is president and CEO of the Southeastern Council of Foundations.

Last month, attendees at this year’s Foundations on the Hill had the opportunity to hear from three SECF leaders on how they can incorporate racial equity into their public policy work. Today, we’re excited to offer all our members the opportunity to view this informative and powerful session!

The session included insights from Darrin Goss, Sr., president and CEO of the Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina, Chynna Phillips, research and policy director for the Sisters of Charity Foundation of South Carolina, and Kenita Williams, chief of staff and director of leadership development for the Southern Education Foundation.

We are deeply saddened and disturbed by yesterday’s shootings in Atlanta that left eight dead, including six Asian American women. These horrific incidents are only the latest in a national wave of violence targeting people of Asian descent. We strongly condemn these actions, as well as the use of racist rhetoric against Asian people that has stoked the flames of hatred and put lives and safety at risk.

We stand with our friends at Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP) who are working to raise awareness of the issues facing the Asian American/Pacific Islander community and the nonprofit organizations that support them. AAPIP has also responded to yesterday’s violence and has prepared a resource guide for grantmakers looking to do more in their own communities – these actions can help support those in need and further the essential work of building a society free of racial violence.

During last week's Annual Meeting, we announced the Winter 2020 selection for our Chair's Book Club: Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law!

As we did with our previous selection, Anthony Ray Hinton's The Sun Does Shine, we will bring Book Club participants together for virtual programs over the coming months while also providing discussion guides to help deepen understanding of the issues Rothstein addresses. All SECF members are eligible to join the Chair's Book Club, one of several initiatives inspired by our Equity Framework.

In The Color of Law, Rothstein argues that unconstitutional government housing policies, not merely de facto segregation caused by private actors, have systematically deprived Black families of generational wealth and access to quality education for decades.

These issues were also the focus of Rothstein's plenary remarks at last week’s Annual Meeting. (If you registered for the Annual Meeting, you can watch Rothstein's plenary now -- other SECF members will be able to access a recording next month!)

You can join the Chair's Book Club today! More information on programming and resources for Book Club participants will be announced soon! If you're already a Chair's Book Club member, you'll automatically receive updates related to our latest selection!

For years, Louisiana incarcerated more people per capita than anywhere in the world. At an annual rate of more than $17,000 per inmate, incarceration costs Louisiana taxpayers almost $700 million each year,¹ and nearly 36 percent of formerly incarcerated persons return to prison within three years of their exits.²

Since 2004, the Huey and Angelina Wilson Foundation has funded programs to reduce the barriers hindering the successful return of individuals to communities in Louisiana. While it may be easy to forget people behind bars, 95 percent of those imprisoned will return to our communities.³ Recidivism – the subsequent commission of a crime and reincarceration – affects every member of the community.

In 2015, the foundation embarked on a journey to become more strategic in its prison re-entry work. We recognized that in order to achieve a large-scale reduction in recidivism rates, it would be insufficient for the foundation to continue to provide small, direct-service grants. The foundation partnered with The Rensselaerville Institute to develop a Strategic Results Framework with two goals in mind: to become an investor in outcomes rather than a funder of activities, and to create an initiative focused on supporting the success of returning citizens. These two ideas came together in the form of the three-year, $3 million Prison Reentry Initiative. 

One of the keys to the Initiative was a shift in the foundation’s decision-making approach: from funding of activities to investing in results. Applications for the Initiative were evaluated from the perspective of an investor answering three critical questions:

• What results are being proposed?
• How likely is it that this group can achieve the proposed results?
• Is this the best possible use of foundation funds?