Endowment for the Future of the South
photos by David Wharton

Algiers Ferry, New Orleans, LA

A $500,000 grant from the Phil Hardin Foundation of Meridian, Mississippi, will help support the creation of a new Center initiative, the Endowment for the Future of the South. The Center has launched a drive to raise $1 million in matching funds, which will be used to support conferences, publications, and educational work that will address issues related to the South of the 21st century.

The Endowment came out of discussions among Tom Wacaster, vice president of the Hardin Foundation, and Center faculty and staff who were exploring new Center projects. The Endowment brings together the Center’s interest in the humanities with those authorities in business, government, academics, and the nonprofit sphere who are engaging public policy issues. The project aims to anchor discussion of contemporary Southern social issues in an understanding of the region’s cultural and historical context.

The Endowment will be a catalyst to encourage inquiry and conversations throughout the region.

The conversations will take place on the University of Mississippi campus and at other locations across the South. Each year, programs of the Endowment will be focused around one compelling issue of timely significance for the region. Topics will include environmental stewardship, the role of architecture in creating a sense of community, faith-based initiatives for social improvement, technology’s role in increasing access to educational opportunities in rural areas, racial reconciliation, and the role of music and literature in defining Southern futures.

The Endowment will sponsor three interrelated programs. First, the Center will each year invite “prophets and seers” from within and outside the South to come to campus and provide leadership on that year’s policy issue. They will help bring diverse perspectives together to discuss best practices and ideas related to the year’s theme. Second, the Endowment will have a major public role through symposia, colloquia, interactive video conferencing, and other exchanges among authorities on topics related to the South’s development. As part of this public role, reports will be issued to document the Endowment’s discussions and its recommendations. Finally, the Center will invite University faculty to play a key leadership role in the Endowment, developing proposals to further Endowment events, studies, and reports.

The broader purpose of the Endowment for the Future of the South is to promote civic renewal in the South. It will build on earlier efforts to provide a regional meeting place for the discussion of ideas related to the South’s future and ways of implementing them. The L. Q. C. Lamar Society, founded in 1969, represented a notable group of Southerners who came together after the dramatic changes of the 1960s to think about what kind of place the future South would be. Their manifesto, You Can’t Eat Magnolias, was a thoughtful and engaging call to go beyond ideology in rethinking the South’s development. The Southern Growth Policies Board emerged out of the Lamar Society, and its Commission on the Future of the South issued a 1986 report, Halfway Home, a Long Way to Go, which pointed the region’s leadership toward new initiatives in education, technology, and governmental reform.

That report issued a “declaration of interdependence” that continues to be relevant. Governor William Winter, a longtime friend of the Center, was centrally involved in both the Lamar Society and the Southern Growth Policies Board, and he will be a key participant in the planning for the Endowment.

The Endowment for the Future of the South will provide an ongoing academic context, a meeting ground, where leaders of many perspectives and ideologies can come together for civil discussions of the region’s problems. The Center has a long history of convening conferences and symposia to address salient cultural issues related to the South, including meetings on civil rights and the law and civil rights and the media, and this new project will build on the Center’s expertise in the study of culture and its understanding of ways culture can contribute to civic renewal in the 21st century.

Anyone interested in contributing to the financial support of the Endowment for the Future of the South should contact Angelina Altobellis at 662-915-1546 or aaltobel@olemiss.edu.

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