Southern Movement Media Fund
2023-2024 Grantees
Individuals
Melba Newsome is a Southern independent journalist, editor and writer that has written and published hundreds of articles for national, regional and local publications including Scientific American, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Wired, AARP, Charlotte, Glamour, Playboy, Oprah, Reader’s Digest, Parade and The New York Times.
Organizations
Country Queers is an ongoing multimedia oral history project documenting the diverse experiences of rural, small town, and country LGBTQIA2S+ folks – across intersecting layers of identity such as race, class, age, ability, gender identity, and religion.
Mainline Zine is an independent women-led magazine based in Atlanta, Ga., and is recognized as the city’s only antiracist and antifascist press. It seeks to embody the tenets held by abolitionist papers throughout history by intentionally engaging audiences through education and messages that continuously disrupt the status quo and corporatized media.
Louisiana Trans Oral History Project:
Louisiana Trans Oral History Project (LaTOHP) exists to fill the gaps in the written record and to ensure trans voices are included in the history of Louisiana. They are committed to creating the historical sources that ensure future generations know that we were here and what our lives are like.
Georgia Dusk: A Southern Liberation Oral History
Georgia Dusk: A Southern Liberation Oral History is an intergenerational oral history of Southern liberation movements documenting Black, queer, & feminist organizers and cultural workers in the state of Georgia.
Marsha’s Plate is a lively podcast where three friends come together every Thursday to share opinions and perspectives that centers the Black perspective. Hosted By Diamond Stylz, Mia Mix, and LJ aka Jonathan. All Houston-based digital strategists, Black feminists, civil right advocates, and Black trans people.
The podcast explores topics of gender, current events, politics, and scumbags all around the world upholding systems of oppression from a Black trans feminist lens.
Inchunwa Podcast shares the story of the ongoing Southeastern traditional tattoo revitalization movement. They talk with influential artists, southeastern scholars, as well as folks directly involved in the movement: those looking forward to being tattooed and those tattooing southeastern folks.
Transgriot was founded by Monica Roberts, an internationally renowned blogger and activist. Since Monica’s passing, the legacy of TransGriot will lives on as an online publication that hires, supports, and empowers Black trans contributors.
Transgriot provides accurate media coverage of Trans-related issues – especially surrounding Trans violence and murders; and by maintaining a continual push for change in politics and legislature on a national and international level.
Black Nashville Assembly is a participatory democracy, Black organizing, and political engagement project. The BNA is a quarterly assembly of Black people in Nashville. At their assemblies, they discuss the issues that impact Black people’s lives in Nashville, create solutions that will transform the lives of Black people in Nashville, and take collective action to implement those solutions.
Their podcast covers topics including the Black freedom struggle, Nashville & Tennessee politics and more.
EspicyNipples:
EspicyNipples is a Puerto Rican, transfeminist network that documents the lives of members of the TILQAPBG+ community, women, poor people, Black people, immigrants, people living with HIV, single parents and caretakers as well as Indigenous people through popular media. They create digital content that supports the manifestation of a materially transfeminist culture through inclusion, anti-censorship and anti sexism/macharranería.
As a worker-owned cooperative, they produce audio-visual content for communities and organizations while they financially and administratively support the integration of grassroots groups into our network to generate sustainable forms of power in our communities. Their space in the internet is a platform of transfeminist journalism that accounts for their bodies and experiences.
Canopy Atlanta equips Metro Atlanta residents to tell stories about the issues their communities care about most. They help residents access information about their communities, and tell and share stories that truly reflect their priorities.
Southerly is a media organization that serves communities in the South who face environmental injustice and are most at-risk of the effects of climate change. They do this by equipping them with the journalism, resources, and information they need to make their communities healthier and safer, to hold power to account, and to have agency over their future.
As this region changes—environmentally, economically, politically, demographically—they hope this work can help make it a more informed, equitable, healthy, and beautiful place to live.
Atlanta Community Press Collective:
Atlanta Community Press Collective is an abolitionist, not-for-profit media collective. ACPC’s goal is to make the day to day workings of local government accessible to the public and to provide an independent voice in a local media landscape increasingly dominated by corporate interests.
Black in Appalachia is an organization that works in collaboration with public media, residents, university departments, libraries, archives and community organizations to highlight the history and contributions of African-Americans in the development of the Mountain South and its culture. They do that through research, local narratives, public engagement and exhibition.
Black in Appalachia is a community service for Appalachian residents and families with roots in and through the region.
Descendents of the Elaine Massacre 1919:
Descendents of the Elaine Massacre 1919 is dedicated to educating, preserving, protecting and sharing the history and stories of victims, survivors and descendants of the Elaine Massacre of 1919. Their work addresses and seeks to repair disparities left in the wake of the Elaine Massacre by promoting healing and transformational justice.
Grassroots Thinking, a project of Community Movement Builders is dedicated primarily to Black radical politics. The platform is a voice for Community Movement Builders and roots its mission in promoting dialogue that uplifts the Black community as well as making critical interventions in debates in the community.
Community Movement Builders (CMB) is a member-based collective of Black people dedicated to being a force for creating sustainable self-determining communities through cooperative economic advancement and collective community organizing.
WRFG 89.3 FM provides a voice for those who have been traditionally denied open access to the broadcast media through the involvement of a broad base of community elements to guarantee that access.
In the utilization of the station’s facilities and in its programs, the people prioritized are those who continue to be denied free and open access to the broadcast media and those who suffer oppression or exploitation based upon class, race, sex, age, creed, sexual orientation, disability, or immigrant status.
The Asheville Free Press is a community media outlet for news, commentary, criticism, and more. We practice movement journalism, a term defined by southern media collective Press On as “journalism in service to liberation.”