Through GSP’s programming and engagement we’ve accomplished a significant body of work that lifts up the values, vision, and mission of GSP. Through this work, we’ve continued to engage our partners and allowed them the space to deepen their strategic thinking about investing in equity focused structural change in the South.
While the country grapples with an uncertain future, given COVID-19 and its disproportionate impact on African Americans in the US South—who are suffering far more severely than their white counterparts—we invite you to look to our past to find answers for our future.
– Tamieka Mosley and Nathaniel Smith, The South Has Something to Say: COVID-19 and Our Chance for Transformation
Featured Programs
Biennial Convening
GSP’s Biennial Convening is a staple of our core programming. The two-day convening creates a unique space for national, regional, and local funders to share and discuss the opportunities, challenges, and best practices for supporting structural change and advancing progress in the Southern region. Our convening serves to mobilize changemakers and practitioners in one space to discuss new ways to strengthen racial equity in the South.
Organizers and movement builders across the South are fighting for justice. Grantmakers for Southern Progress (GSP) was created ten years ago, at a Neighborhood Funders Group conference. A conversation birthed what would become GSP; a network of connected funders whose purpose was to drive a substantial amount of resources to the south for structural change work.
Fellows for Southern Progress
Our flagship leadership development program, Fellows for Southern Progress, creates an intentional space to build authentic relationships, sharpen systemic analysis and technical skills, cultivate passions and interests, and inspire a common vision to help shape and organize institutional philanthropy into a committed and effective partner for structural change and social justice in the South.
The program is cohort-based and experiential. It is designed to combine the wisdom and practical experience of program participants with grassroots practitioners as resource partners in order to create a learning environment that is relevant and informed by lived experience on the ground in the South’s diverse contexts.
Foundational Programs
GSP Strategy Sessions
Strategy Sessions are targeted conversations about strategy in specific locales and across the region overall. We host strategy sessions in the South with southern funders and identify national gatherings where we can engage more national funders in discussing their southern grantmaking
strategies.
Funder Briefings
Funder briefings allow GSP the opportunity to develop collaborative work with our partners: GSP is somewhat unique among funder networks and philanthropic serving organizations given its particular focus on promoting equity focused structural change in the South by increasing philanthropic understanding, relationship building and investment. Because of this, we are often asked to partner and share our expertise with a broad array of other funder networks and groups who are interested in doing work in the South.
Learning Tours
Provide an opportunity for funders to come together in a community, place or space. Funders visit a site to understand what the spectrum of “equity focused structural change” can look like. Learning tours are generally hosted at GSP’s convenings, but learning tours are also conducted outside of convenings.
“If the South—the birthplace of historic and destructive inequities—rallies to end structural injustice, it can model for the country what the journey toward racial justice and equity can look like.”
– Tamieka Mosley and Nathaniel Smith, The South Has Something to Say: COVID-19 and Our Chance for Transformation