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Friend, The ground was still warm from the summer sun on the 2020 day when Shon Holsey planted collard greens on his farm in Leesburg, Georgia. But as he was laying down the rows, Holsey had a premonition he would need to plant more than usual. When the Black farmer got a call several months later from a group called Black Voters Matter Fund asking if he had any collard greens they could use as part of a novel get-out-the-vote effort for crucial runoff Senate elections, Holsey wasn’t surprised. Sure, the Collard Green Caucus, as the organization dubbed its effort, was a wildly inventive idea, a cheeky nod to the Southern New Year’s tradition of feasting on collard greens and black-eyed peas as a way to motivate Black voters to cast ballots in the January 2021 election in Georgia that would determine two U.S. Senate seats. Holsey was ready for it. The 500 bunches of collards the farmer sold to the organization helped him find a buyer for his produce. And by providing the literal raw material for the get-out-the-vote effort, Holsey and dozens of small-farm owners like him helped Black Voters Matter plant the seeds of Black power at the voting booth and beyond. “He’s a farmer and whatever he has in his heart just goes to his planting,” Chiquita Holsey said of her husband. “I saw what he planted and I said, ‘What are we gonna do with all these greens?’ And he said, ‘I just know that somehow they’ll be needed.’ And it worked out with the caucus that we were able to be a good help.” The sort of innovative approach that paired the organization with the Holseys has earned Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute, a division of Black Voters Matter Fund, an additional $180,000 Vote Your Voice grant from the Southern Poverty Law Center, adding to its earlier grant of $600,000 in 2021. Formed in Alabama in 2017 and now with offices in 11 states, Black Voters Matter is one of 39 voter outreach groups – four of them organizations with multistate operations – that will receive a combined total of more than $4.6 million in funding as part of the latest round of Vote Your Voice grants. Spotlighting community needs The Vote Your Voice grants, announced in late August, are a partnership between the SPLC and the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta to support voter education and increase voter registration, participation and civic engagement among communities of color across the Deep South. The initiative also is strengthening the field capacity of grassroots organizations through data and fundraising support and the testing of effective voter engagement strategies. The grants add to an earlier investment of more than $11 million awarded last year and more than $12 million awarded in 2020. The SPLC has pledged $100 million to support Vote Your Voice through 2032. Black Voters Matter calls itself a power building organization. Its goal is to plant the seeds of voting power by connecting the power of the ballot with the impact of policies on Black lives. So the Collard Green Caucus was about more than getting out the vote. It was about helping struggling Black farmers and about putting a spotlight on the lack of access to healthy foods in many Black neighborhoods. With all its initiatives, the organization digs deep into Black communities, sharing resources, capacity and fundraising experience. But it seeks to learn as much as teach. The group understands that the small community groups it partners with are the experts in their communities. In solidarity, Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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