Written by organizers, read by funders.
Grantmakers for Southern Progress is a network of funders and practitioners working for structural and cultural change in the Southern United States. We designed its 2024 report, As the South Grows: Propagating Power.
Visit g4sp.orgThirty-seven pages for readers with five minutes.
As the South Grows is written for funders. Its argument is that Southern organizing needs steady, long-term money, not a burst of grants every election year. The people it has to convince are busy, and most of them will flip through it before they decide whether to read it.
Three writers, three openers
The stories in the report come from movement leaders: Erin Dale McClellan of The Partnership Fund, Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter and Tamieka Atkins of ProGeorgia. Each essay opens on its own page with the writer’s name and a photograph, so anyone flipping through always knows whose voice they’re in.
Letting the numbers make the case
Most of the argument is about money: where it goes, when it shows up and what it pays for. We gave the data its own pages. There’s a heat map of democracy funding by state from 2016 to 2022, a chart of the fastest-growing cities in the country (more than half are in the South), voter turnout mapped state by state, and Georgia’s incarceration rate set next to NATO countries’.
A funder who only looks at the charts still gets the point. We’ve met those funders.
Every photo, described
Every photograph in the report has a written image description underneath it, the same text a screen reader would announce. It takes up one line on the page and it means the report works for people who can’t see the photos.
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