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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 21th 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.
Click to view other Endowment Images
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