1,300 Black women and girls will soon gather in Memphis for the third annual Black Girls Dream Conference, hosted by the Southern Black Girls and Women’s Consortium.
The event will take place from Friday, June 9th, to Saturday June, 10th at the Sheraton Memphis Downtown located at 250 North Main Street.
According to event organizers, Southern Black Girls is “coordinated entirely by a community of Black women in philanthropy, activism, and girls’ work, who hold deep roots in movement-building throughout the southeast.”
Malikah Berry Rogers, executive director of Southern Black Girls, said the decision to host the conference is intentional, so as to be easily accessible to their target audience.
“There are so many states that border Tennessee, and Memphis is an easy drive,” said Rogers. “We really wanted to be sure that we were speaking to Black women and girls. We center our work, our very grantmaking, our movement building, even in this conference, we center the voices and needs of women and girls.”
According to Southern Black Girls, the collective is led by four anchor institutions: the Appalachian Community Fund, BlackBelt Community Foundation, Fund for Southern Communities and the TruthSpeaks Innovation Foundation. Their work is centered in 12 southern states including Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi.
Rogers said that they were founded as an effort to make sure that “underfunded, Black-women-led organizations were supported.”
“We did this because there had been a study earlier by one of our partners that revealed that out of the nearly five billion philanthropic dollars allocated to the south, less than one percent of those dollars were focused and funneled at Black women and girls organizations.”
According to Pocket Change, 2020 study released by the Ms. Foundation for Women, “the average per capita funding for WGOC (women and girls of color) is only $2.36, well below half of the national average, $5.48.”
“Black-women-led organizations that intentionally support Black women and girls are underfunded, but their reach is broad,” said Rogers.
Rogers explained that the intergenerational space that the conference provides will be a place for Black women and girls to talk about “what is real in their lives,” and to give advice and share direction. They also plan to “reach in deep to rural communities.”
“We want very much to make sure that this is an opportunity that Southern girls get a chance to take advantage of, that had perhaps not been offered to them before,” said Rogers.
“We believe that when you give Black women and girls the grace and space to dream, it opens a new path for us to activate and elevate higher toward our destiny,” said LaTosha Brown, founder of Southern Black Girls. “The Black Girls Dream conference is the first step to putting those dreams and those visions in motion. That is what the Black Girls Dream Conference is all about.”