Southern Movement Media Fund
The Southern Movement Media Fund provides individual and collective grants to Southern media makers and journalists who practice movement journalism, providing them support to work alongside their communities, with each other, and movement partners to document their culture & history and produce the news and information people need to make informed decisions about their lives.
Who we fund
The fund provides grants to media organizations and individual media makers based in and reporting in one of the following 14 states & territories: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia & Puerto Rico.
We prioritize submissions by Black, Indigenous, people of color, queer, femme, trans, gender non-conforming folks, immigrants and children of immigrants, and folks living in rural communities and urban areas underserved by local news and information. In the spirit of collaboration and because we believe collectivism is foundational to liberation, we welcome and encourage partnerships with community organizations and movement partners.
Fund objectives
- Increase capacity for Southern media organizations and freelance media makers through funding support
- Increase capacity for partnerships between journalists and Southern movement organizer
- Uplift movement news and information, oral history projects, movement broadcast and culture bearing work to/for by and for marginalized and oppressed communities
History
Launched October 2020 in the middle of a global pandemic and one month before a historic presidential election, the fund was born out of an awareness and certainty that marginalized communities would be the most disproportionately affected by current events. It’s at that moment we knew that Press On had to show up for our people. The fund was our answer to the call for much needed resources to increase access to information that integrated healing, local history, and movement organizing in order to advance more just narratives.
In the first two cycles of 2020 funding, we provided grants that supported deep collaborations grounded in reporting and storytelling by and for Black and Brown people in the South. The range of issues covered included, but were not limited to, evictions, marijuana legalization, the uprisings in both small towns and big cities, and immigration and migration. Our grantees approaches included the use of video archives, interactive timelines, live events, podcasts, illustrated oral histories, and written reports.
Grantees were selected by a panel of judges made up of members from the Press On community.