The Invitation

The American South is home to more than half of the nation’s Black population — a region defined not by scarcity, but by deep legacy, community brilliance, and underleveraged assets. Southern Rooted, Freedom Bound is a bold, collaborative effort to unlock Black wealth across the South through catalytic capital, policy innovation, and community ownership. Anchored by Kindred Futures, RUNWAY Roots, and Grantmakers for Southern Progress —this initiative transforms local wins into regional systems and invests in the people, institutions, and ideas that are already building a freer, more just Southern economy.

For generations, it has profited from that labor while systematically excluding the very people who built it from land, capital, and power.

We're asking you to help change that with our new initiative, Southern Rooted, Freedom Bound

We're bringing together people who understand that the South holds the stories, legacies, and strength of this country's Black communities while being the cornerstone of extraction, exploitation, and disenfranchisement of Black wealth-building. This continuous disenfranchisement is costing communities land, capital, and self-determination. 

The solutions are already being built within our communities, but simply haven't been resourced at the scale this moment demands, and you have the power to write the future.

The Conversation

Tamieka Mosley, President and CEO of Grantmakers for Southern Progress, brings a philanthropic practice built on moving resources with Southern communities, aligning funders around shared regional strategy rather than isolated giving.

Dr. Janelle Williams, Co-Founder and CEO of Kindred Futures, has spent nearly a decade turning the diagnosis of caste and the vision of restorative capital into policy and practice across the South. Her organization's recent playbook, Now is the Time, lays out concrete state and local strategies — from baby bonds to curbing predatory lending to expanding first-generation homeownership — for lawmakers and communities ready to act.

Jessica Norwood, Founder and CEO of RUNWAY Roots and author of Believe-in-You Money: What Would It Look Like If the Economy Loved Black People?, asks a deceptively simple question and answers it with a direct challenge to how money moves: away from extractive, individualistic investment, and toward the restorative, interdependent relationships required to actually repair what caste has done to Black wealth-building for generations.

Together, they are convening this initiative and hosting this conversation, naming the problem, reimagining the paradigm, and building the infrastructure to get us there, and are honored to welcome Kelly Burton, CEO of the Black Innovation Alliance and author of The Price of Union, as our special guest speaker.

Kelly's work names what many of us have felt but rarely heard said so plainly: that you cannot build an equitable economy on top of a caste system, and you cannot dismantle the caste system without rebuilding the economy. Her presence brings a clarity of diagnosis that grounds the work our hosts have spent their careers building toward — and sets the stakes for the conversation ahead.

Southern Rooted, Freedom Bound

Add what Southern Rooted, Freedom Bound is here

• Communities where wealth circulates locally instead of being extracted

• Land and housing under community control, not absentee ownership

• Businesses built on reparative values, not extraction

• Communities that are resourced, politically organized, and culturally powerful 

This is power-building. It's the unglamorous, essential work of organizing, capital, and governance that makes self-determination possible not just for one organization or one campaign, but for a region. It's coordinated infrastructure. 

Your Presence & Investment Matters 

Everything about this evening, from the room to the guest list to the conversation, reflects one invitation: invest in power-building in the South.

We're not asking you to write a check because it's a good cause. We're asking because you are in a position to move real resources toward a strategy that is already working, led by people who are already doing it, and because the scale of what's needed matches the scale of what's possible in this room tonight.