Organizing Beyond Survival
Visions from SVA and our Partners about the Future of our Movement
In these critical times, SVA is in the midst of some exciting evolutions. We’ve launched our strategic vision for 2025 and beyond. We’ve vastly expanded our staffing, supportive services, and frontline funding. We’ve planted roots with aligned partners in South Carolina.
Welcome to Organizing Beyond Survival, a collection of narratives, oral histories, thought pieces, and reports. We invite our partners to reflect with us: In the years to come, what’s it going to take to disrupt and transform power?
From Theory To Practice: How Return To The Source Is Building the Conditions for Transformative Change in the South
We envision a future where Black and working-class communities are self-sustaining, politically conscious, and actively dismantling oppressive systems while constructing cooperative, sovereign, and liberated alternatives. Return To The Source (RTS) is a worker-owned...
How Base Building Sustains Southern Movement Organizing
In the intricate tapestry of social justice movements, the South has always been a vibrant thread, woven with resilience, struggle, and triumph. From the civil rights era to the fight for Palestinian liberation, the US South has been a crucible where the flames of...
Black History Month reflections: How can our Southern grassroots movements create lasting structural change?
Originally published in Scalawag. In the U.S. South, race is one of the most significant hurdles to our social political progress. Racialized geographies haunt our daily interactions. They are infused into our collective memory banks, dictating much of the ways we...
Meet SVA’s new interim ED, Joshua Vincent
On February 1, SVA welcomed a new interim Executive Director, Joshua Vincent. We couldn’t be more excited for Josh’s leadership. Josh has served as a Board Chair since SVA’s inception and is deeply committed to our values and strategy. He brings two decades of...
Why I’m transitioning as ED: A love letter to the movement
Over the past decade, the Southern movement landscape has shifted dramatically. In 2014, the year Southern Vision Alliance (SVA) was founded, the global movement for Black lives was just taking off. We were only a few years removed from Occupy Wall Street, and still a...
Reflection on Leadership and Organizations
It is difficult, tedious, and sometimes boring work to build organization, but it is worth it.
Reflections on two general elections from Wesley Morris, NC pastor and community organizer
Nov 9th, 2016 I am not afraid. I am however, terrifyingly aware of the danger that this election season means to my body and the bodies of my people, friends that go to sleep and wake up in the world as the targets of white racism, the fear of difference and the...
Our Southern Vision, Toward 2025 and Beyond
In 2009, North Carolina held off-year, local elections. With only 5% of voters turning out, Art Pope, a millionaire backer of small government and anti-migrant think tanks, financed a slate of candidates to take over the Wake County school board.
