Call For Proposals: GSP 2025 Convening
Grantmakers for Southern Progress | 2025 Convening Call for Proposals
We are excited to invite you to submit a proposal for a session at our upcoming 2025 Convening: The Seeds of Sovereignty. This call for proposals is open to movement organizers, social impact funders, and leaders whose work centers rural people and communities in the South. We are seeking engaging sessions that highlight rural power-building strategies across issue areas with a particular focus on racial, economic, and climate justice, worker rights, infrastructure and resource access, rural healthcare, and more. While we encourage submissions centered on Arkansas, successful proposals will include rural places spanning across the Southern United States.
Submission Information
Submissions open February 19, 2025 with a deadline for submission by April 2, 2025. Final decisions will be made in Late June/Early July. Questions and concerns can be sent via email to info@g4sp.org with the subject line “CALL FOR PROPOSALS.”
The goal of our Convening is to make space for leaders across the South to share Southern-based strategies, build relationships with one another, and inspire funders to directly support Southern community-based movements. Sessions should highlight and foster collaboration between funder and practitioner presenters. Each session should have funder representation, and we encourage representation by practitioners. A successful proposal will center the voices of people of color and rural folks while deeply engaging and moving funders to action.
Be sure to read all the information on our call for proposals PDF to ensure a successful submission. We recommend compiling your responses in a separate document and copying them into Microsoft Forms when you are ready to submit.
Submit your proposal here.
Our Audience + Session Information
GSP’s network consists of our 40+ member organizations and over 1300 philanthropic leaders, practitioners, and individuals dedicated to leveraging resources for structural change in the South. We engage, build community, and bolster capacity in the region by increasing the strength in infrastructure, intentional collaborations, and the overall scope of philanthropy. We anticipate hosting 350 in-person Convening attendees across our three-day event. Our intention is to create a learning and networking environment that centers the voices of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and directly-impacted people working to build a just and inclusive South.
We encourage innovative and collaborative sessions that inspire, challenge, and motivate our funder audience to build transformative, trusting relationships with community members and move money to the most vulnerable communities across the region. We are especially excited by sessions that resist a typical panel-style presentation model and instead, intentionally foster dialogue and connection among participants. We want attendees to leave our Convening feeling refreshed, renewed, and better equipped to make bold changes across the South.
About the Convening
GSP’s Convening brings together funders and practitioners to discuss strategies and move resources to the Southern communities that need them most. We center the wisdom and expertise of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks in philanthropy and Southern movement and community-based organizations driving change. Our 2025 Convening theme, The Seeds of Sovereignty, honors the history of movement work coming from the rural South, acknowledges the growing phase we are in, and highlights rural Southern strategies that can lead the way for the structural change we want to see. It is time for philanthropy to partner with community to help shift the notion of rural scarcity into Southern prosperity.
GSP’s Convening includes engaging sessions, local Learning Tours, cultural groundings, our annual Membership Meeting, and more. The Seeds of Sovereignty will be hosted in Little Rock, Arkansas from October 14-16 and will span across several issue areas impacting the rural South. Early bird registration will open in April 2025. For the most up-to-date information, please sign up for our mailing list here.