$25,000 / 2016
Greenville, MS
Citizens for a Better Greenville (CBG) was founded in 2001 to focus on parent and student organizing and advocacy for quality education for all local public school students. CBG is a cornerstone organization in the Mississippi Delta and is integral to the region’s movement to fight for racial equity in Mississippi schools. Hazen’s renewal grant will enable CBG to fight for a fair and just education system by ending the discrimination manifest in inequitable funding policies, harsh and exclusionary discipline policies, and inequitable education policies. CBG recently launched an absenteeism campaign that reframes the issue by suggesting that teachers, support staff, resource officers, police are the ones “Missing In Action,” not just the students. CBG will continue to provide leadership at the state and local levels in the framing and enforcement of strategies around Every Student Succeeds Act implementation. As an organization deeply rooted in its African American community in the Mississippi Delta, CBG also continues to play a lead role in a number of regional and national collaboratives including the MS Education Stakeholders Alliance, the MS Coalition for the Prevention of Schoolhouse to Jailhouse, the national Dignity In Schools Campaign, SxSw Experiment, JDAI (Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative), Special Education Advisory Panel and others.