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Friend, Almost two decades ago, Nancy Loome received a call from her state representative in Clinton, Mississippi. It was a plea: Could she stop telling people to contact him about his record on education funding? After three days of persistent calls and emails, he felt harassed at every turn. “I thought, that’s great,” she said. “That’s exactly what we wanted.” Loome had spent a lot of time volunteering in the state’s public school classrooms in the early 2000s. Then a mother of two elementary-age children, she said she was struck by what she described as the “little miracles” she witnessed teachers perform each day. Now, she’s the founder and president of the Parents’ Campaign Research and Education Fund (TPCREF), one of eight Vote Your Voice grant awardees in Mississippi to receive funding from the Southern Poverty Law Center to support grassroots work engaging voters around key issues that impact their communities. In 2006, Loome couldn’t reconcile her personal experience in the classroom with the debate she watched unfolding each evening on the news, about whether lawmakers should follow the mandated education funding formula established in 1997 to ensure districts had adequate resources for each student. “I thought, well, that’s a ridiculous thing to even debate. Of course we should follow the law,” she said. The exchange with the lawmaker prompted Loome to mount a grassroots campaign that brought parents, teachers and community members together. Building on the momentum, she founded an advocacy organization that would reach far beyond her local school district and blossom into a network of people invested in strengthening public education throughout the state. This type of local grassroots organizing highlights the mission of the SPLC’s Vote Your Voice initiative, conducted in partnership with the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta. The SPLC has pledged $100 million in grants over the next decade to support organizations that are involved in voter outreach and civic engagement in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi.
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