DigiCommz Working Group

The DigiCommz Working Group is a space for members across the region to help build capacity for SONG regionally and for our chapters and crews moving active campaign work. DigiCommz aims to identify members who are moving communications or digital work in our membership and support their leadership through cross team skill building, regional projects, and providing training and resources. We know the importance of organizers also being communicators – to not only speak of their work, but create crafted messages and narratives in line with their politics and organizing to translate into tactics to win campaigns.

Contact: Auburn Wideman (auburn@songsouth.org)

Arts + Culture Working Group

The Arts & Culture Working Group is a space for members across the region to support SONG organizationally to use art as an essential political education tool that can create deep connection with our communities. With the help of AgitArte, a community based grassroots arts organization, members learn how to develop an Arts & Culture crew locally, experiment with guerilla theatre tools, and develop plans for how regional Arts & Culture work in can move campaigns.

Contact: kindred@songsouth.org

Small Town + Rural Working Group

The Small Town & Rural Working Group comes from a long legacy in SONG to fight isolation and build power with our queer and trans folks acorss the South. We understand that the South is primarily rural and many of our folks are systematically ignored from the primary narrative of what liberation and freedom for LGBTQ can look like. Rural queers face many of the same predicaments and challenges of our urban counterparts, but they are often magnified by this social economy of small places.

For more context on the history of our Small Town & Rural work read our “Small Town Cross Roads” report.

Contact: kindred@songsouth.org

Language Justice Working Group

The Language Justice Working Group is a space for members across the region, bilingual or monolingual, to help SONG strategize, build and fortify our values around creating authentic communication across race, culture and difference. This is imperative for movement building. Language justice as a framework allows us to explicitly name the grief associated with the loss of our ancestral languages, as a result of colonization and imperialism as well as heal and advocate for our inherent right to communicate in our most authentic form.

Contact: kindred@songsouth.org

Firekeepers Working Group

The FIREKEEPERS working group, dreamed up by members during our Strategic Planning Process, is a space for those who want to hold and shape the culture of conflict transformation within SONG. Together, we’ll develop processes for addressing conflict, learning and building from the practices that came before us. 

Contact: sumi dutta (sumi@southernersonnewground.org)

Grief + Spiritual Care Working Group

The Grief & Spiritual Care Working Group is a space for members across the region to center the healing and spiritual work needed for us to sustainability continue this movement towards liberation. The South is built on sacred ground that has entire histories of trauma for Black folks, indigious folks, and queer and trans folks largely. How can we create systems, processes and more to fortify our people and build up practices of resilience to do the work we need to do for our communities?

Contact: Carlin Rushing (carlin@songsouth.org)

Political Education Working Group

The Political Education Working Group is a space for SONG staff, SONG members and Forever SONG family to identify the current political education needs for our membership. We know that grassroots organizing work requires intense study in rigor, and this space will help us continually provide tools and curricula for our membership. 

Contact: Angela Henderson (angela@songsouth.org)

Make It Rain Working Group

The Make It Rain Working Group is a space for members across the region to build their fundraising muscles via sharing tools, strategies and ideas to move resources to our communities and strengthen SONG’s campaign capacity. Our hope is to lead a cultural shift through building, sharing and redistributing collective resources to movement by engaging in political study and actively encouraging donors and funders to do the same. Our topics range from discussing philanthropy and its pitfalls and cooperative economics to guest interviews about grassroots fundraising in alignment with our politic.

Contact: kindred@songsouth.org