2025 started with overlapping crises across our communities. The new administration escalated attacks on Black, Brown, immigrant and refugee, LGBTQIA+, and other targeted communities. In this moment, Southern Vision Alliance deepened our commitment to grassroots organizing and long-term movement building across the South.
As a justice-centered, values-driven grassroots intermediary, we expanded our support for frontline groups led by directly impacted communities—providing incubation, infrastructure, capacity building, coaching, and technical assistance to organizing projects, leadership programs, and collaborations. We also launched our Power Building Department to strengthen base-building and support rapid response in times of crisis. Together, we aligned our work under three core strategies.
Strategy 1: Strengthening Movement Infrastructure in the South
Fiscal Sponsorship Program
SVA is one of the largest social justice intermediaries in the U.S. South, fiscally sponsoring more than 40 frontline initiatives. Our partners are building power across movements for racial justice, immigrant and worker rights, environmental and youth justice, and LGBTQIA+ liberation. We provide the infrastructure and movement support our partners need to thrive – offering HR services, digital tools, fundraising support, and strategic guidance through our Power-Building Program (outlined below). This support extends across our sponsored projects and includes social justice organizations in the broader movement ecosystem we are part of.
People’s Solidarity Hub
SVA operates the People’s Solidarity Hub (PSH), a vibrant community and movement space offering affordable venues for meetings, training sessions, and events. PSH hosted over 600 gatherings in 2025—reflecting the urgent demand for accessible organizing spaces amid rapid gentrification. Located in Durham’s historic Lakewood neighborhood, the Hub also houses a resource library with supplies such as tables, microphones, and first-aid kits to support mobilizations and direct actions.
In 2025, PSH broke ground on building its outdoor pavilion, which will serve as an outdoor gathering space, and held an open house to celebrate all of the folks who keep coming back to this space and engage them in a fun and participatory naming campaign for the buildings.
Strategy 2: Mobilize Resources for Rapid Response, Interventions, and Long-Term Organizing
Movement Lending Library
SVA’s Lending Library is one of its most widely used and completely free resources. The Lending Library has saved the Triangle organizing community well over $30,000 by providing free critical assets like speakers, folding tables/chairs, and canopy tents. In 2025, PSH provided nearly 20k pages of free and reduced printing.
Frontline Funds
SVA’s Queer Mobilization Fund (QMF) is the largest fund supporting LGBTQIA-led organizations in the South, having distributed nearly $1 million to 170 QTBIPOC-led initiatives across the Southeast. We received 165 applications during our 2024-2025 grant cycle, reviewed by a grantmaking panel of 6 individuals and two staff members. We awarded $340,000 in grants to 45 organizations across nine Southern states, broken down by: BIPOC-led (36), trans-led (25), rural-based (5), or first-time applicants (6). This is our largest grant-cycle in our nine-year history. To date, we have awarded nearly $1M to 170 QTBIPOC organizations across the South.
Launched in April 2025, SVA’s Southeastern Block & Build Rapid Response Fund provides time-sensitive, flexible resources to frontline grassroots organizations confronting escalating authoritarian threats, hate incidents, or violence in their communities across the Southeast U.S. on a monthly basis. Groups supported are led by communities most affected, including Black, immigrant, Muslim, environmental/climate, and LGBTQIA+ groups. In 2025, the Block & Build Rapid Response Fund granted $79,440 to 30 grantee organizations located in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana focusing on immigrant defense, Trans rights, and housing justice. SVA aims to regrant $200,000 in 2026, doubling its impact from 2025.
Fundraising Support & Collaborative Fundraising
In 2025, SVA’s Development Team supported more than 40 sponsored projects in raising over $10 million through 277 applications to resource grassroots organizing across the South. These efforts spanned worker rights, environmental justice, immigrant justice, voting rights, campaigns to divest from policing, social and emotional learning for Black youth, farmworker organizing, and more. Alongside fundraising, SVA provided critical digital, financial, and administrative infrastructure. Together, this work reflects how our fiscal sponsorship model removes barriers for under-resourced organizations and builds long-term capacity for movements led by directly impacted communities.
We also partnered with BluePrint NC and the NC Disaster Response and Resilience Network to coordinate collaborative fundraising efforts, strengthening the financial sustainability of our broader movement ecosystem.
Strategy 3 – Space Making and Alignment
People’s Solidarity Hub Events & Activities
The People’s Solidarity Hub has made itself a beloved resource as a sliding scale organizing and event space for 600+ events in 2025, and over 1,300 events since it opened in 2022. The organizations and groups that convene at PSH represent a wide range of movements work across the region, including education justice (K-12 and higher education), environmental and climate justice, abolition and efforts to defund policing, civic engagement and voting rights, workers’ rights, housing justice, immigrant and refugee justice, LGBTQIA+ and gender justice, hunger and food justice. The space also supports arts and cultural programming, youth organizing, and community health initiatives. These events range from workshops, forums, presentations to direct action planning meetings, member gatherings, fundraising events – creating a vibrant hub for community building, organizing, and movement development.
Preparation of 250 backpacks with school supplies by People’s Power Lab volunteers at People’s Solidarity Hub. (Picture by Manzoor Cheema)
Power Building
- SVA’s Response to Attacks on Immigrant
In late November 2025, as attacks on immigrant communities swept through North Carolina, SVA mobilized quickly to protect and support impacted residents. To meet urgent needs, SVA released $50,000 from its reserves, distributing six rapid-response mini-grants to Carolina Migrant Network, SEAC, Action NC, Comité de Acción Popular, Wake Resiste, and Education Justice Alliance. This rapid mobilization reinforced SVA’s commitment to protecting vulnerable communities and supporting grassroots partners during moments of crisis. - Youth Organizing Program
Through Students Organizing the South (SOS), SVA invests in the leadership of BIPOC youth on and around HBCU campuses in North Carolina and South Carolina. SOS develops young organizers at the intersection of racial, gender, and LGBTQIA+ justice, cultivating the next generation of Southern movement leaders. In 2026, we will launch a Youth Landscape Project to map the youth organizing ecosystem and identify strategies to strengthen youth-led power in the South.
Power-Building Cohort
North-Carolina based social justice intermediary organizations, BluePrintNC and Southern Vision Alliance, have collaborated to launch the NC Powerbuilding Cohort. This Cohort is an 18-month program for grassroots organizations committed to growing local leadership, expanding their base, and leading local organizing campaigns. Through this cohort, we support each other with collective fundraising – we sharpen our tactics through constructive brainstorming and strategy sessions – and we learn from each other’s experiences through popular education.
Trainings, Ecosystem Briefings, Narrative Building
In late 2024 and early 2025, SVA strengthened its partnership with Blueprint NC to host a monthly series of online movement building sessions focused on the new federal administration’s first 100 days. These webinars brought together organizers from anti-racism, immigrant rights, worker justice, anti-Islamophobia, and LGBTQIA+ movements.
Between December 2024 and March 2025, SVA and BluePrint NC organized four monthly webinars on the first hundred days of the new administration
SVA joined forces with BluePrint North Carolina to host a social justice convergence in Asheville, NC in November 2025. Over 100 organizers from across the state came together to analyze the landscape, map power, and develop strategies to guide our collective work in the years ahead.
SVA website featured key highlights in 2025 through our blog posts. These included updates from the SVA’s first Power-Building Cohort, Youth organizing campaigns, SVA’s Block and Build Rapid Response Fund, annual report from Queer Mobilization Fund, expansion of the People’s Solidarity Hub campus, digital security workshop by SVA’s Digital Team, SVA and our partners’ movement response in defense of immigrant rights, and updates from our sponsored projects advancing farmworker justice campaigns, responding to disasters, advancing language justice, truckers rights movement, protecting tenants rights in SC, and other blog posts.
We are committed to strengthening movement infrastructure across North Carolina and the South in 2026 and beyond. By putting base building and power building at the center of our work, SVA will help shift the balance of power and create lasting wins for our people.
