MS Delta Voter Engagement

ABOUT THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA VOTER ENGAGEMENT PROJECT

Our Objective is to resource young leaders across Mississippi - "the blackest state in America" - with $15/ hour stipends to learn about and conduct voter engagement and policy advocacy.

Our youth conduct registration and advocacy in towns ranging from population 154 in Glendora to 72,105 in Gulfport to 149,761 in Jackson.

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Population denisty ranges from 129 persons per square mile to 1,638 persons per square mile.

Median household income ranges from $13,382 in Glendora to $68,561 in Vancleave.

Mississippi is the blackest state in America.

The state has a total population of 2.99 million, including 1.12 million African Americans. It is among the most impoverished, with the highest rates of over-incarceration. Mississippi has the lowest median income, highest rate of childhood poverty, and lowest rate of broadband access among all states, as well as high income disparity. Yet, Mississippi sent the first two African Americans to the United States Senate - Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce in 1870 and 1875, respectively. We believe that with two decades of sustained investment of financial expertise and campaign expertise in local community organizers, Mississippi can again be represented by black senators.

Here and now is an opportunity for pioneering leadership from supporters as modest, early-stage investors in some of the toughest - under-the-radar- places from which the next wave of black leaders will emerge.

A get-out-the-vote achievement of 200 or 300 votes can make a huge difference in Mississippi. For example, Alderpersons in the City of Canton won by 5 votes, by 15 votes, by 67 votes. It is from the hamlet of Bolton, MS, population 560 that The Honorable Bennie Thompson hails. The first offices held by House Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Thompson were Alderperdson and Mayor of Bolton. Before that, he helped to organize voter registration drives in the Mississippi Delta most of which he now represents in Congress.

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"The current generation of young people is the most racially diverse in American history,...There remains a major gap in youth voter turnout by race/ethnicity, with white youth voting at nearly twice the rate of Black and Latino youth" according to Young Voters in 2022 by Race/Ethnicity: CIRCLE’s post-election survey report, October 2023. Youth civic engagement in Mississippi rates lower than the national average. The national youth citizen population is 30,339,089, while in Mississippi it is 286,864.

THE SOLUTION
THE MS DELTA VOTER EDUCATION PROJECT

Gulfport's 18-year-old Kennedy Pace tells why she is voting for the first time

The MS Delta Voter Engagement Project builds hyperlocal infrastructure at the grassroots!

We reach deep into small, local communities and focus on young people from 16-24 years of age many of whom have not completed high school. Some have high school diplomas or two-year community college degrees.

Our project believes that these young Black people are inherently gifted.

We resource them with training and $15/hour stipends so that they can earn while they learn.

By harnessing training from our partner organizations like Opportunity Youth United, Vot-ER, TurboVote, Nonprofit Vote, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Black Voters Matter Institute, our project effectively offers young people in the blackest counties in Mississippi an array of paid training opportunities so that they can share whatever are their gifts by acting on their concerns by practicing voter registration and organizing, policy advocacy,

and leadership development.

Click here for a Definition of Opportunity Youth

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Not only do we provide nonpartisan voter registration and mobilization training and seasonal paid work through our partner organizations Vot-ER, Nonprofit Vote, Black Voters Matter and TurboVote, we also provide advocacy training through NAACP Legal Defence & Educational Fund, Mississippi Center for Justice that leads to advocacy opportunities like appearing before the Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors to argue for fair districts being drawn.

Project Partners

Spencer Nash was a community organizer engaged in the voting rights struggles of Mississippi when he and others were among the 14 civil rights and community organizations that founded Delta Foundation in 1969.

Beginning then, Mr. Nash served on the board until assuming leadership of the foundation in 2010 as President. On the belief that the principal vehicle for the attack on poverty is the creation of for-profit enterprises that increase control and ownership of resources by the poor, Delta Foundation was chartered to benefit the economically disadvantaged residents of the Mississippi Delta many of whom were one generation from sharecropping and two generations from American slavery.

The proposed new host of the Greenville CAT, Delta Foundation, Inc. is a tax-exempt 501(C)(3) determined not to be a private foundation, as defined under Section 509 of the Internal Revenue Code. Delta Foundation owns and operates a non-commercial Community Radio Station, the motto of which is to “Empower Through Education and Information.” In recent years, Delta Foundation has partnered with the Western Line School District providing summer and after school enrichment activities funded by a $700,000 grant from the Mississippi Department of Education.

Jeffrey Thomas was born in Mississippi in 1963 to parents who put their lives at risk in the struggle to vote. While serving on YouthBuild USA founder Dorothy Stoneman’s team, Jeffrey led national advocacy efforts that engaged programs in local policy advocacy with their state and federal representatives and the attorneys general of six states. He supported the advocacy efforts of state-wide coalitions in New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, Louisiana, and California in their efforts with state attorneys general or local legislatures. In 2019, Jeffrey launched a $1.1 million federally funded YouthBuild program in the Mississippi Delta.

Jeffrey has a track record in deep community collaboration that centers people who live in economic poverty and that results in the creation of concepts that lead to durable projects that achieve impact in low-income communities of color.

Carol Blackmon is the Mississippi Coordinator for Black Voters Matter Fund, a nonprofit whose goal is to increase power in our communities through effective voting that allows a community to determine its own destiny.

She is a Senior Consultant and Human Rights Coordinator for Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Economic and Social Justice where she trains community leaders and their commissions on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 2017, Ms. Blackmon led a delegation of 30 rural black women to the United States Human Rights Network Conference to provide testimony related to Extreme poverty in the United States to the United Nations Special Rapporteur for his 2018 report. As Managing Consultant for the Deep South Delta Consortium, she successfully managed the submission of a non-commercial educational radio application to the Federal Communications Commission.