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Atlanta, GA: June 9th 2020 —Southern Partners Fund (SPF) has secured over $4M in grants for its Justice Fund for Disaster Relief and Renewal, developed in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. SPF has continued using the fund to alleviate the impact of natural disasters throughout its Southeastern 12-state funding region, while helping its grantee partners achieve equitable redevelopment. As with previous natural disasters, the novel Coronavirus is wreaking havoc on underserved communities throughout the rural Southeast.
COVID-19 has shed light on societal inequities that ravage our nation in an arguably more insidious manner than the types of natural disasters to which we have become accustomed. Due to a higher prevalence of pre-existing conditions and poor access to quality medical care, COVID-19 is having a now highly publicized, disproportionate impact on low-income communities, mostly of color. SPF is continuously working to identify and resource the hardest hit and slowest to recover communities that suffer from lesser developed infrastructure in wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
SPF’s capacity for enabling its grantee partners to build coordinated rapid response teams in their communities is well documented. SPF’s grantee organizations rely on these grants to pinpoint their most vulnerable populations and connect them to agencies and services that can help. In turn, vulnerable populations in these communities trust SPF grantee organizations to provide them with the best support available. In many communities, these grantee partners are their first responders.
Thanks to impassioned funding efforts, SPF has received a milestone $3M grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of its $50 million effort to provide humanitarian aid to families and communities feeling the greatest strain under the COVID-19 health emergency. SPF has also received six-figure grants from the Viking Trust, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, and JPB Foundation along with $40,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, bringing the total to just over $4M.
According to Leroy Johnson, SPF Executive Board Member, “many southern states have refused to expand Medicaid, forcing rural hospitals and clinics to close, leaving our most vulnerable to fend for themselves. These invaluable grants will allow SPF to provide much needed support to our low-income communities of all colors fighting COVID-19.”
SPF’s long-term goal in providing disaster grants is to help these communities attain new standards of political and economic health and wholeness, rather than restore their underserved and impoverished norms of before. Thanks to support from SPF’s funders, this mission is well under way.
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Southern Partners Fund (SPF) is a 501(c)3 regional community foundation located in Atlanta, GA, governed by people of color grassroots leaders from rural communities across 12 states in the Southeast. Its mission is to support grassroots community organizations in the rural South seeking racial, economic and environmental justice by providing financial resources, technical assistance, training and access to systems of information and power.
For more information about the SPF grants process, its grantees, or these projects, please contact Antoine Smith:
antoine@southernpartnersfund.org
(404) 791-9920
For media inquiries, please contact William Nichols:
william@southernpartnersfund.org
(360) 774-6886.