Southern Partners Fund

Southern Partners Fund

Barbara Meyer founded Southern Partners Fund in 1998, using the assets of her Bert and Mary Meyer Foundation to build a grantmaking institution focused entirely on rural communities in the American South. The fund emerged from a recognition that traditional philanthropy rarely reached small, community-based organizations working on racial, economic, and environmental justice. Meyer's original vision was to shift power and resources directly to local leaders, bypassing the intermediaries that typically absorb philanthropic dollars before they reach the ground. Southern Partners Fund deploys capital through a named grant cycle — the Hubert E. Sapp Cycle — that identifies and funds community organizing groups across the rural South. The vehicle provides a mix of financial resources, technical assistance, and leadership training. Its programmatic focus spans immigration rights, voter rights and engagement, education reform, and environmental justice, concentrated in states from the Deep South through Appalachia. The fund's posture was validated by MacKenzie Scott, who made a $10 million unrestricted gift in 2020 and a second $5 million unrestricted gift in 2023, signaling institutional confidence in the fund's direct-to-organizer model. Fernando Cuevas, Jr. leads the fund as Executive Director, with Dianna Freelon-Foster chairing the board. The organization operates from Atlanta's historic West End at 1237 Ralph D. Abernathy Drive. It participates actively in the philanthropic infrastructure through membership in Grantmakers for Southern Progress, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, and the Council on Foundations. The Wellspring Philanthropic Fund serves as a significant institutional partner, particularly on voting rights initiatives across the region. Unlike most foundation endowments that preserve principal and distribute only a fraction, Southern Partners Fund pairs its grantmaking with an explicit mission to share access and power — it trains community leaders on organizational governance and connects them to broader funding networks. This operating philosophy makes it an unusual hybrid: part regrantor, part capacity-builder, and part advocacy coordinator, all within a single 501(c)(3) structure headquartered in a historically Black neighborhood of Atlanta.