News Release

Center for Civil Rights receives Ford Foundation
grant, allowing increase in community outreach

By KELLY OCHS
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Civil Rights has received a grant that will allow expansion of its outreach to communities across the Southeast and increase opportunities for law students to learn the skill of civil rights advocacy.

The Ford Foundation, an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization that focuses on issues of democracy and justice, recently awarded the $300,000 grant.

"What’s so encouraging about this grant is that it’s a general support grant, so we can use it to support all of our programs, not just one of them," said Anita Earls, the center’s director of advocacy.

The center, created in 2001 and a component of UNC’s School of Law, conducts research and convenes students, faculty, attorneys and policy advocates around issues of civil rights and social justice, especially in the South. The center is committed to advancing civil rights, specifically in education, economic justice, housing and community development and voting rights.

The center’s outreach has included Charlotte, Clayton, Thomasville and Moore County, among others. In Charlotte, the center has worked with the Harvard Civil Rights Project to raise awareness of and create concrete plans to address the resegregation of many Southern schools.

Jack Boger, the center’s deputy director, said he viewed this funding as a second-generation grant for the center. The first-generation grants, including one from the Ford Foundation, were used to establish the center and its programs.

The second wave of grants will be used to expand the center’s programs and outreach.

"It will allow us to take on some new projects that we haven’t yet identified, but for which we now have the capacity," he said.

Boger said support from center director and leading civil rights attorney Julius Chambers and the university have been essential in creating the center, pursuing grants and having a prominent presence in minority and low-income areas statewide and throughout the Southeast.

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(Ochs is a senior journalism and mass communication major from Winston-Salem.)

Center for Civil Rights contact: Catherine Pierce, (919) 843-5463 or cringo@email.unc.edu