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Friend,
Providing the people of Mississippi with tools to raise their collective voice, the Southern Poverty Law Center is setting up policy education seminars across the state to build advocacy skills among those most affected by discrimination.
Participants will learn how to talk to legislators, how to communicate with media outlets and how to canvass in their communities. They will get instruction on the importance of voting to effect change at the local level, how to forge coalitions and uplift their communities, and how to advance policy initiatives to improve the lives of people across Mississippi.
Dubbed the Advocacy Institute, the initiative will launch later this spring with an initial cohort of 30 fellows. The fellows will be formerly incarcerated people who, despite having been released from prison, are denied the right to vote, in some cases for the rest of their lives, by state laws conceived just after the Civil War to suppress the votes of Black people.
The fellows, chosen with input from Mississippi-based advocates who are formerly incarcerated themselves, will receive stipends to participate in the institute sessions. The sessions will take place on a series of Saturdays over a five-week period. The SPLC’s community partners are fanning out into communities across the state to get word out about the program. The institute began accepting applications on April 20.
“When there is an imbalance of power at the top, how do you counter that? By building power from the ground up,” said Waikinya Clanton, the SPLC’s state office director for Mississippi. “And so that’s how we’re looking at this Advocacy Institute. We are going to be teaching people how to build power, how to understand the rules of engagement, and how to work through and navigate the resources that are actually available to them, suffrage being one of them.”
‘Dismantling the system of racism’
Organizers plan for the first group of fellows to be followed by many more. Future sessions of the Advocacy Institute will draw from a broader group of impacted communities to teach skills that will tackle economic inequality, poverty and white supremacy.
The Advocacy Institute is co-led by the SPLC’s Mississippi state office and the SPLC’s Voting Rights Practice Group, with plans to develop the institute into a training ground for new organizers across the state focused on community education and transformative change. The curriculum will include lessons on how to push for change through protest, advocacy and organizing.
The institute is one of a number of new initiatives and partnerships the SPLC is undertaking in Mississippi, as the organization founded more than 50 years ago builds on its landmark legal victories against discrimination, inequality and white supremacist groups to work more closely than ever in partnership with local communities. The initiatives being launched in Mississippi are laying the groundwork for establishing similar programs throughout the Deep South.
“It is a beginning that we’re proud to be shaping here in the state of Mississippi,” Clanton said. “And we’re looking forward to growing it and using it to be part of dismantling the system of racism and hatred and bigotry that exists here.”
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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