Southern Vision Alliance believes community injustices stem from colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, patriarchy, and economic exploitation. Those most impacted will imagine and lead the movement for change, building people’s power that includes civic engagement as one of the levers for exercising that power.
By connecting and resourcing directly-impacted organizations we strengthen movement infrastructure, and build collective power for lasting change.
What is the scope of our civic engagement?
SVA supports:
- our 36 fiscally sponsored groups located across the South,
- the 14 members of our NC-based Power Building Cohort,
- over 50 annual region-wide grantees.
to advance non-partisan, movement-based civic engagement.
Specifically, we support long term power-building campaigns that have civic engagement components as part of a broader power-building strategy.
Examples of campaigns include:
- Climate, energy infrastructure, and environmental justice fights (opposition to data centers, legacy polluters, farmworker protections from heat deaths),
- immigrant rights (ending ICE raids and protecting refugees),
- diverting funding from police to mental health/social needs,
- Gender, LGBTQ+ and trans-justice,
- Economic justice, tenant organizing, ending anti-Blackness, centering disability justice, and more.
We support our partner organizations throughout North Carolina, from the ocean to the mountains, in both rural and urban communities. Our philosophy of movement-based civic engagement includes base-building and power building before, during and after the elections, in order to build lasting relationships and bring a meaningful change to our society.
Members of the Richmond County Coalition for Justice and Black Empowerment helped mobilize 200 people to a Department of Air Quality hearing against the construction of a $10 billion Amazon data center in their country. Across North Carolina, people have organized against similar projects, holding local officials accountable and winning moratoriums ahead of upcoming elections. July 30, 2026.
Photo Credit: Manzoor Cheema
What are the challenges faced by our people?
Southern working class, Black, Brown, youth, and LGBTQIA+ communities have been historically marginalized by poverty, repression, and structural exclusion.
On top of this, state legislatures have been working overtime to aggressively advance voter suppression through gerrymandering, voting roll purges, restricting and moving polling sites from HBCU campuses, cutting hours and other voter suppression measures.
Compounding these barriers, many grassroots organizations lack the long-term support needed to build their bases and continue engagement beyond election cycles.
Members of People’s Power Lab organized a voter protection and encouragement camp at a polling site in Raleigh, NC (November 2, 2024), in order to oppose voter harassment and other threats from the extremist forces. During the November 2024 election, reports of voter and election worker harassment saw a nationwide spike.
Photo Credit: Manzoor Cheema
How do we address these challenges?
SVA’s commitment is clear — multi-year commitments to building worker and community led organizations are the best way to build a more just and equitable world that centers and uplifts those disproportionately left behind — that is how we build a better world for all.
We support strategies that employ civic engagement goals as a vital part of broad, long-term strategies for shifting power from elites to the people. Our partners are:
- Organizing nonpartisan GOTV campaigns,
- Hosting candidate forums & distributing voter guides,
- Doing voter/poll protection shifts (PPE),
- Post-election ballot canvassing, and other critical work.
Our members have mobilized voters throughout the state — including communities in Western NC after Hurricane Helene ahead of the 2024 election, highlighted voter harassment in Chatham County and ballot canvassing irregularities in Robeson County, fought against student polling site closures in Guilford & Wake, and more.
Our groups’ 365-day-a-year civic engagement includes:
- Mobilizing and prepping residents to speak at public hearings,
- Letters to the editor & postcard campaigns,
- Political education through forums, book studies, film screenings, boat tours and EJ tours,
- Press conferences, vigils, mobilizations, protests, rallies, and direct actions.
Research shows that year-round community organizing builds long-term relationships and inspires people to vote, and vote wisely, far more effectively than disconnected election-cycle GOTV mobilizations.
Participants gathered at a Voters of Tomorrow youth civic engagement event in Raleigh, NC, on August 13, 2026. Young people are organizing against the extremist legislature’s attempts to eliminate campus polling sites and other voter disenfranchisement threats.
Photo Credit: Manzoor Cheema
What have we achieved?
SVA has been part of many movement-based civic engagement campaigns over the years. We have supported our sponsored projects, grantees, and partners to win victories again and again. None of these victories happened in isolation. Each was the result of multi-year grassroots organizing and coalition building. Here are some examples:
- Repeal of anti-Trans HB2 law in 2017. In response SVA launched the Queer Mobilization Fund (the largest grassroots LGBTQIA-led fund in the South).
- Defeat of pro-ICE sheriffs in five counties in NC in 2018. Multiple SVA sponsored projects organized non-partisan campaigns to accomplish this.
- Expansion of Medicaid in 2024. This was a 10-year+ campaign that included worker rights, racial justice, faith-based organizations, and others.
- Maintained high voter turn-out in 2024 in Western NC, despite the devastation from Hurricane Helene.
- Defeat of mass voter disenfranchisement (in the context of the NC Supreme Court race) in 2025. A record number of North Carolinians across the state organized to defeat this attack on voting rights.
SVA joined activists and organizers in North Carolina to organize against the anti-Trans HB2 law in March 2016. That campaign built people’s power, defeated reactionary forces in the gubernatorial election that year, and secured the law’s repeal the following year.
Credit: SONG (Southerners on New Ground)
What is our ask?
North Carolina and the US South have historically lacked adequate resources to build consistently robust civic-engagement muscles tied to local power building and issue organizing.
SVA is seeking $1 million to fund critical infrastructure for our frontline organizations in the 2026 election – with over half of funds passed directly to frontline local and statewide BIPOC-led, multi-racial base building organizations with concrete engagement plans.
This investment will equip SVA with the resources needed to support our sponsored projects, grantees, and Power Building Cohort members through Power Building grants, Rapid Response grants, capacity building training, digital and security infrastructure support, VAN and voter file tools, text blasts, and more.
With over twelve years of experience as a southern “grassroots intermediary,” we have the theory of change, the track record, the trust, and the networks and relationships required to build the collective impact we need to win for the long haul.
