ImpactAlpha, September 14 – The Southern Black Girls and Women’s Consortium is tackling a glaring lack of investor and philanthropic attention. The Appalachian Community Fund, the Black Belt Community Foundation, the Fund for Southern Communities and TruthSpeaks Consulting launched a fund to finance capacity building for local organizations serving Black women and girls and grants for individual young women “spreading joy during the pandemic” through local art, theater and community engagement. It has provided $300,000 in grants.
The new approach to fundraising “centers our voices and allows us to play a leading role in shaping our own destiny,” said TruthSpeaks’ LaTosha Brown. “This is vision and self-determination in action, because if we change the future of the Black girl in the South, we change the South.”
The seed capital toward the consortium’s $100 million goal came from the NoVo Foundation, Women Donors Network, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Lucy and Isadore B Adelman Foundation, Collective Future Fund, and the Momentum Fund.