about us
The Southern Arts & Culture Coalition commits to these values in all of our work. We ask that everyone involved with the coalition agree to uphold and practice these values, and to keep developing them together.
We seek resources that will sustain the powerful work of grassroots arts and cultural organizations in the South. As we search for responsive solutions to address short-term critical needs, we must also work to reimagine, at a large scale, the systems that have historically failed our community centers of power.
To navigate this challenge, our coalition will practice these core working values.
COMMITMENT
We are committed to supporting Southern community centers of power and their allies. We will hold ourselves and each other accountable to that commitment, and aim to keep growing ourselves and our work.
SELF DETERMINATION
We honor the dignity of all people, and we support communities in telling their own stories and creating their own futures.
PRINCIPLED DISAGREEMENT
We recognize our diversity of perspectives, experiences, and identities as a source of strength, and commit to working together through productive tension. We will constantly be working to not perpetuate harm, and we know we will not always achieve this goal. We commit to create a culture of feedback so that we can do better.
RE-CENTERING
We acknowledge that large-scale, regional endeavors like ours often exclude the voices and knowledge of people based on race, class, gender, sexuality, rural experience, geography, immigration status, disability and many other biases. We believe that every person and every community has traditional and cultural knowledge to contribute. We will work to support endeavors that are of, by, and for communities in their full diversity.
OUR STORY
The Southern Arts and Culture Coalition was founded in 2020 by an intergenerational, cross-cultural, and economically diverse group of Southerners working in the arts and culture. From the Black Belt of Alabama to the coalfields of Kentucky to the urban centers of Baltimore and New Orleans, our founding members came from diverse places, yet we quickly found we share traditions and challenges common to communities across what we broadly call the South. We recognized that our legacy of music, literature, food, and organizing had molded our nation’s identity, and yet our communities faced – and continue to face – a shared, pervasive lack of investment. Historically, our region has received less than one-tenth of the national average of philanthropic funding per capita. This deeply entrenched disparity has been made worse by a long history of federal divestment, as Southern communities, and especially rural Southern communities, have been passed over for government & private funding in favor of Northern population centers.
This disparity has come with some benefit: out of necessity, we have developed sophisticated grassroots methodologies with significant community-level investment. Our neighbors contribute their time, treasure, and talent to keep our doors open, which is powerful. But for that same reason, when our community suffers, so do we–– and these are the very moments that our organizations are needed the most.
The crisis of COVID-19 highlighted this stark reality. Despite the essential role that we play in the livelihood and wellbeing of our communities, we Southerners saw few prospects for securing life support for our communities’ cultural organizations. Many of our founding member organizations were working to provide resources to their communities on the frontlines of the crisis, while facing the very real risk of permanent closure. Staff illness and supply chain interruptions meant the Hemphill Community Center, located in a shut-down elementary school in an east Kentucky coal camp, could no longer sustain its senior citizen and LGBTQ+ youth programming through its homegrown brick-oven pizza bakery. Pandemic-borne restrictions meant that the Arch Social Club, the oldest African American social organization in West Baltimore, was unable to continue the jazz and soul programming that sustained it as an essential community gathering place. This is why our coalition came together.
Our fiscal sponsor, Studio Two Three, faced similar challenges. Studio Two Three is a community print shop and artist studio space that is home to more than 140 artists in Richmond, Virginia. They provide 24/7 access to all members, a sliding scale and barter membership option, and administrative & programmatic support to smaller nonprofit organizations. In the first four weeks, studio staff reoriented their operations toward producing over 10,000 masks for essential workers, despite a loss of more than 70% of their income. They weren’t able to pay their rent during this time, but kept working to provide artist-led support to their community.
In light of these challenges to our founding members, the staff of Studio Two Three drafted a letter in March 2020 that outlined the crisis faced by Southern arts and cultural organizations if private and public funding did not expand to include immediate relief support for the regional South, with a specific focus on the grassroots. The letter circulated quickly and generated significant energy among organizational leaders and funders across our region. Out of these initial conversations emerged a core group of allies, which we called a “capacity building circle,” who began meeting weekly to provide aid to the places that needed it the most and build the framework for a greater coalition.
This founding capacity building circle included individuals and organizations from across the regional South, including:
Kate Fowler & Ashley Hawkins / Studio Two Three, Virginia
Ben Fink / Roadside Theater - Appalshop, Kentucky
Trey Hartt / Performing Statistics & Alternate Roots, Virginia/Louisiana
Denise Griffin Johnson / Arch Social Community Network & Alternate Roots, Maryland
Gwen Johnson / Hemphill Community Center, Kentucky
Ron Ragin / Freedom Maps co-author and Alternate Roots member, Louisiana
Maria Cherry Rangel / Foundation for Louisiana, Freedom Maps Co-author, Louisiana
Emily Smith / 1708 Gallery, Virginia
Ashley Walden Davis / Unlock Creative, Georgia
Stefanie Fedor / Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Virginia
Jackie Clay / Coleman Center for the Arts, West Alabama
Taysha Devaughan / Appalachian Community Fund, Central Appalachia
Starting with this circle, in 2020/21 the coalition hosted more than 30 strategy meetings with organizational leaders, 10 grassroots organization-led conversations with regional and national foundations, 5 ‘state of the field’ virtual convenings with 110+ participating organizations, 3 grant writing & fundraising clinics with 25+ participating organizations, 2 regional “anchor” convenings, 2 virtual ACA enrollment clinics and providing (8) organizations with direct support. Together, we were able to provide 6 organizations with sustained low-cost work space during a prolonged period of financial hardship, facilitate 10 successful fundraising efforts, provide over $60,000 in earned-income donations to small initiatives in need, and assist 15 participating organizations in the grant-writing process, resulting in over $1.5 million in grant support. By the end of 2021, participation in coalition activities had grown to include over 110 organizations across the greater South. These results clearly demonstrated the ongoing need for a unified coalition of grassroots arts and cultural organizations.
In 2023, after more than two years of volunteer organizing, members of our capacity building circle gathered to develop a structure for an ongoing expanded coalition, including an organizational structure, a modified-consensus voting structure, a shared strategy for fundraising, and a process for hiring a full-time organizer and support staff.
OUR STAFF
Kate Fowler (she/her) is the Lead Organizer and Co-Founder of the Southern Arts and Culture Coalition. Kate is a documentary photographer & educator from Richmond, Virginia. She received a BFA in Photography & Filmmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and has since directed arts-based programming in Richmond, NYC, Europe and in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
Kate has worked for the Magnum Foundation as Program Director of their Photography Expanded initiative and at Appalshop as the Director of their Appalachian Media Institute. She currently works as the Director of Development and Community Partnerships at Studio Two Three, a community print shop and art organization in Richmond. She also teaches Documentary Filmmaking and Visual Media and serves as a founding member of the board of Looking at Appalachia, a crowd-sourced survey of media representation 50 years after the War on Poverty. Her photography and critical writing have been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Oxford American, American Suburb X and her films have been screened nationally at film festivals.
Kate can be reached at kate@southerncommunity.org
Tiffany Turner (she/her) is a Co-Organizer of the Southern Arts and Culture Coalition and a founding member of the Capacity Building Circle. Tiffany is a Florida borned, Mississippi raised Southern girl. In her former career, she was a healthcare professional (Nurse) for about 13 years. Her expertise spanned across home healthcare, pediatrics and geriatrics. She is a community activist in Columbus, MS where she and her husband have run a youth based nonprofit organization, the Memphis Town Community Builders, for the last 10 years where they focus on growing the community through fun and festivals. Tiffany is a voting rights advocate and has assisted with voting rights restoration in both Mississippi and Alabama. She is currently lead organizer of Performing Our Future, a national coalition of 4 delegations (Alabama, Kentucky, Maryland, and Wisconsin) where we co create and share knowledge to collectively own what we make. She enjoys singing, dancing and changing the world by bringing people together who share the value of positive community building.
Tiffany can be reached at tiffany@southerncommunity.org
Emily Robinson (she/they) is a Co-Organizer of the Southern Arts and Culture Coalition. Emily is a printmaker, organizer, and musician from East Tennessee currently living and working in Richmond, VA. She runs Black Gum Print Shop, a printmaking, design, and illustration practice making work that supports labor unions, environmental organizations, and musicians. Her political background is in youth empowerment work, anti-privatization organizing, and the anti-pipeline movement. Emily sings and plays the hammered dulcimer, banjo, guitar, generator organ, Yamaha DX7, and lots of other things. She's a country girl living a cramped-up city life (for now).
Emily can be reached at emily@southerncommunity.org
