What would it look like for Black creative youth development organizations to receive significant funding without being subject to traditional philanthropic gatekeeping that was designed to exclude them?
Memphis Music Initiative is launching an ambitious fundraising campaign to provide $1 million each to 17 Black- and brown-led and -serving organizations plus additional resources, by raising $25 million by the end of 2025.
THE GOAL
To create a new funding model so that high-impact grassroots organizations are capitalized with a level of funding that allows them to:
Program at scale
Focus on creative practice and impact.
Hire adequately and pay market rates.
Plan for the future.
Have higher risk tolerance and lower fear of failure.
Build financial resilience and establish operating reserves.
Reduce application writing and reporting burden — even with unprecedented investment.
THE PLAN
With $25 million, Memphis Music Initiative can provide:
$17M
Partner Grants
$2M
Incubation and
Responsive
Grantmaking
$3M
Centralized
Operations
$3M
Capacity
Building
$1M each for 17 vetted partner organizations serving Memphis youth of color.
$2M for incubation, emergency, off-ramping, capital projects, and sustained grantmaking.
$3M to MMI as intermediary and central clearinghouse for data collection and reporting.
$3M for scaled capacity-building supports and technical assistance.
WHY WE KNOW
THIS WILL WORK
Organizations can use the funds according to their own needs toward institution and community building, in which:
#1
MMI builds on our proven successful model, scaling up supports to enable partners to attract additional investments.
#2
MMI provides centralized reporting to funders for data, evaluation, and accountability.
#3
Shared back-end resources result in improved organizational performance, which in turn fuels better data capture, analysis, and reporting on individual organizations as well as the collective ecosystem.
THE
PARTNERS
MMI has identified 17 current organizational partners who serve young Memphians in 28 zip codes across Memphis, Shelby County, and the Mid-South.
