Southeast Community Research Center

We started the SCRC to advance the understanding and use of participatory methods. We, along with our partners (see especially, Project South), believe that the investigative and social power of research could advance the struggle of working people and marginalized communities to remake society so that it works for the majority of people.

Our brand of CBPR—an amalgam of science and politics—seeks, primarily, to assist communities and researchers in creating a more human and humane society. As we say in our mission statement, we’re about “community-centered knowledge as a tool for liberation.”

Background: History of the Effort

In 1999, representatives from three organizations—the Brisbane Institute at Morehouse College (a university center) Project South (a community-based organization) and The Loka Institute (a national non-governmental organization)—came together to create a center in the Deep South to promote community-based participatory research. We agreed that it was important to establish a center that reflected the unique history, problems, and strengths of the Southeast. We were committed to building a center that involved research institutions and practitioners, but one that was truly community centered and community directed.

In our first year, we concentrated on securing funding to support the center and to convening “listening” sessions. These sessions provided a forum for community-based organizations, researchers, and community activists to express their views on what the center should be, what it should do, and how it should be organized. We also began the search for funding to support the center and to support CBPR projects identified by community groups. Our strategy was to focus on issues in the Atlanta, GA, first, and then to move out to involve communities throughout the southeast and parts of Appalachia.

Why The South: The nature of the South and the particular needs of the local population.

The “South”, a region defined by the southeast states from Virginia to the eastern portion of Texas, is the chosen site for the Southeast Community Research Center due to the region’s particular history. A commitment to independence, in spite of poverty, the specter of slavery, and the absence of social and material infrastructures have shaped this rich and dynamic area’s identity.

The Southeast has given birth to movements for freedom, economic and social justice. In the 1960’s, the Southeastern United States was the locus for the birth of the Civil Rights movement in America. Again, in the early eighties, the South gave rise to the environmental justice movement.

Yet the Southeast (in particular the Blackbelt region), along with Appalachia, remains a region of the country that suffers in horrific health, economic, and social purgatory.

Economically, the South has remained one of the poorest regions regardless of the fortunes in the rest of the nation. While labor-intensive industry (textiles) has given way to high-tech and service industries, economic and social disparities in the South have intensified. For example, Atlanta, Georgia is one of the fastest growing urban metropolises in the world, yet it is flanked by many of the poorest rural areas in the nation: the Southern Blackbelt.

Significant political barriers to participation in the political process affect southerners. The institutions of the South have a well-deserved reputation for throwing up barriers to public access and participation.

Studies on equity indicators found that economic and social equity improves as voting percentages increase. In turn, states with the highest voter turn out have a smaller income gap between their richest and poorest families (Allen, 1998, Collins, 1999). When we consider that, of the 14 states in the U.S. with the worst voter turn out, eight of them are in the Southeast U.S., we come to see the South as a region where even the most basic of the democratic processes have failed.

The South contains all the ingredients for a research center exploring democratic processes to take off: gaping disparities, unresponsive institutions, and a population that has demonstrated its willingness to solve its own problems. Through the work of the Southern Community Research Center we seek to aid this population with all the tools that will make the resolution of these disparities possible.