Meet the Woman Encouraging Philanthropists to Invest in Southern, Black Women and Girls

In 2015, the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative released a report entitled “Unequal Lives,” which showed how Black women and girls were severely underrepresented in the rural South. One statistic included in the report revealed that out of the $4.8 billion in philanthropic funds that went to the South in 2012, less than one percent went to programs specifically for Black women and girls.

When LaTosha Brown, the founder of TruthSpeaks Consulting and the co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund, first read this report, she had an epiphany.

“As an activist for my entire adult life, I’ve literally been trying to convince philanthropy to invest more money in the South, invest more money in Black women and girls, invest more money into the empowerment of people,” Brown told the FBomb. “And philanthropy would still operate like it wasn’t a priority.”

The report helped her realize that Black women could, and must, create their own solutions to the problems they face. Brown envisioned the creation of a program anchored by Black women and girls in the South that is today known as the Southern Black Girls and Women’s Consortium (SBGWC), a union of four organizations led by four Black women in the South — a region they define as the 12 states in the Southeast, from Arkansas to the Carolinas, Virginia and West Virginia, and even Florida. The four women are Margo Miller, who is the executive director of the Appalachian Community Fund in Knoxville, Tennessee; Felecia Lucky, the president of the Black Belt Community Foundation, in Selma, Alabama, and Alice Jenkins, the executive director of the Fund for Southern Communities, in Decatur, Georgia. Jenkins believes this is the first consortium for Black women and girls. The program also has an accompanying fund called the Southern Black Girls Fund, which aims to raise $100 million over 10 years.

“I want us to create a region [where] our dreams can manifest and take place,” Brown said, adding that women like Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, and Nina Simone were Southern Black girls, but who all left the South to pursue their careers. “We don’t have to be secondary in the same places that we are building up and contributing to,” Brown added. “We would be the very vehicle that would transform this region and transform this country.”

Brown believes her vision could also shake the foundation of the county’s racism and sexism because Black women and girls have experienced both. She also says the South is where white male patriarchy is rooted, and it is also where most of America’s Black women and girls live.

“At the end of the day, we’re going to shift that narrative,” Brown says. “Who would be better equipped to root that out? Wouldn’t it be poetic? I think the South is ground zero for building a progressive political nation.”

Brown and her partners hope that the SBGWC can eventually lead to an increase in more programs and organizations investing in Black girls, which would lead to new opportunities for them in the business and education sectors. They also hope that this would lead to a shift in how Black Southern girls see themselves and how the world sees them.

The SBGWC has already raised $10 million in seed capital from the NoVo Foundation, which was started by Peter Buffett, the son of billionaire Warren Buffett, and his wife, Jennifer. There have also been contributions from Women Donors Network, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Lucy and Isadore B Adelman Foundation, Collective Future Fund, and the Momentum Fund. There are also opportunities for both public and private sources to give to the Consortium.

When asked where she sees the Consortium 10 years from now, Brown hopes that “we’ve shifted the culture of philanthropy [to] look at marginalized communities as a rich, fertile soil,” she said. “Ten years ago, you couldn’t say Black in a grant proposal; we would always have to hide under the guise of ‘people of color.’”

But most importantly, Brown hopes her work will result in “a shift in how Black girls in the South see themselves. Not as victims, but as victors. If we don’t do anything else but that, then we would’ve been highly, highly successful.”