On August 22, Peacock premiered a new documentary from Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist Trymaine Lee marking the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Produced with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the film, titled “Hope in High Water: A People’s Recovery Twenty Years After Hurricane Katrina,” centers Black leaders, educators, organizers and families who have spent the past two decades rebuilding New Orleans and Mississippi.
“When Hurricane Katrina hit, it disrupted education, health and economic systems — exposing just how fragile and unequal they already were,” said WKKF Director of Mississippi and New Orleans Programs Rhea Williams-Bishop. “Yet from that devastation came the opportunity to reimagine how communities could thrive. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen tangible, systemic progress driven by grassroots leadership.”
WKKF, which has been investing in New Orleans and Mississippi for more than 80 years, has been a central player in the region’s recovery. It deployed more than $27 million in special post-Katrina recovery grants and named the city a priority place to support children and families experiencing high levels of poverty and trauma. In 2007, it named Mississippi a priority place for at least a generation, focusing its efforts in Jackson, Sunflower County and East Biloxi. WKKF invests approximately $34 million annually across New Orleans and Mississippi, with staffed teams in both places.
“Hope in High Water” is an inspiring look into how grassroots organizations are ensuring that the region’s rebirth is built on an equitable structural foundation. WKKF’s support also shows that philanthropy doesn’t need to be bound by the funding status quo. According to Grantmakers for Southern Progress, the South receives less than 3% of philanthropic dollars nationwide, and as my colleague Martha Ramirez has reported, the disparity is more acute for organizations serving the region’s rural communities.
Commentators typically attribute this disparity to the fact that prominent funders are based in and primarily concentrate their support around distant coastal enclaves. Try telling that to the Battle Creek, Michigan-based WKKF, which is committed to building upon New Orleans and Mississippi’s post-Katrina gains in a host of areas, including prekindergarten, maternal health coverage and food access.
WKKF’s role as a regional partner “means staying proximate, listening to communities and honoring the leadership that has carried this region for generations,” Williams-Bishop said. “And it means reminding the country that what happens here matters everywhere — because as the South goes, so goes the nation.”
How WKKF altered its practices post-Katrina
While WKKF had invested in early childhood education, health equity and economic equity in New Orleans and Mississippi for decades, Hurricane Katrina was what Williams-Bishop called “a turning point” for the grantmaker.
The foundation provided besieged organizations with critical emergency support, and as time went on, stakeholders recognized that the storm didn’t just damage buildings and infrastructure, it revealed long-standing inequities in health, education and economic opportunity. “Communities showed us that philanthropy couldn’t just arrive in a crisis and then leave,” Williams-Bishop said. “We had to change how we worked.”
A report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities published a month after the hurricane corroborates this takeaway. It found that 28% of New Orleans residents were living in poverty and that approximately 1 of every 3 people who lived in the areas hit hardest were Black. Critically, 59% of Black households lacked a vehicle before Katrina hit, hampering evacuation.
WKKF evolved its grantmaking practices in acknowledgement of deeply embedded structural inequities. It ramped up flexible, multi-year funding so grantees could focus on long-term solutions rather than running on the annual grant writing treadmill. It also committed to a stronger place-based approach with staffed offices in New Orleans and Jackson, Mississippi, so staff could remain in close proximity with grassroots leaders.
“Across the state [Mississippi],” Williams-Bishop said, “our longstanding presence enables us to align local insight with national resources to improve outcomes for children and families.”
An overview of some regional WKKF grantees
I asked Williams-Bishop to highlight a few regional grantees in the funder’s two geographic priority areas.
The New Orleans Food Policy Council advances community-led solutions to the city’s food access and equity challenges. To this end, it helped launch and sustain local incentive programs that doubled benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children at farmers’ markets, boosting food access and demand for regional produce. Another grantee, For Providers By Providers, gives early childhood educators a voice in state policy. “Their advocacy has helped secure new funding streams and launch Louisiana’s first early childhood educator apprenticeship, ensuring that those closest to the classroom shape the system’s future,” Williams-Bishop said.
In Mississippi, the Biloxi-based Boat People SOS serves the Gulf Coast’s Vietnamese community and has provided organizing, legal aid and disaster relief for nearly 20 years. The Jackson-based One Voice was born out of the Katrina recovery effort and has become a powerful driver of community organizing and policy advocacy.
Readers will note that a recurring theme in grantees’ missions is advocacy and Williams-Bishop attributes the region’s post-Katrina progress to their collective and tireless advocacy efforts. “Organizing,” she said, “has delivered major statewide wins like the expansion of Medicaid in Louisiana and the extension of postpartum Medicaid coverage to 12 months with presumptive eligibility in Mississippi.”
The momentum has been especially startling in the area of early childhood education. In Louisiana, public-private partnerships helped create one of the most ambitious early learning systems in the country. “Today, more than 90% of economically disadvantaged four-year-olds are enrolled in publicly funded pre-K, and in 2023–24 the state recorded the fastest fourth-grade reading growth in the nation,” Williams-Bishop said.
Meanwhile, Mississippi didn’t even have a state pre-K program before Katrina. Now, its Early Learning Collaboratives serve thousands of children and meet all 10 national quality benchmarks, placing Mississippi among just a handful of “perfect-10” states nationally. “These are real milestones, but the work remains unfinished,” Williams-Bishop said. “Access for infants and toddlers remains deeply limited, and early educators continue to face low wages and high turnover. The gains are strong, but not yet universal.”
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Why does philanthropy underinvest in the South?
Looking ahead, WKKF’s plan for New Orleans and Mississippi is to stay the course and scale what works. “The challenge now is ensuring these models endure beyond a crisis cycle — that quality pre-K, maternal health coverage, food access and pathways to good jobs are permanent parts of the landscape, not fragile wins that can disappear with political or economic shifts,” Williams-Bishop said.
The optimist in me also hopes other major funders will chip in. And yet, at a time when many grantmakers profess an interest in mitigating economic and racial inequity, philanthropy still disproportionately underfunds the South. The posture isn’t tenable. As Williams-Bishop noted, the South is the fastest-growing region in the U.S., has the country’s fastest-growing Latino and Asian American populations, and is home to nearly half of all Black Americans.
Will funders catch up? If geography is destiny, then the prognosis is mixed. According to an analysis of the 25 largest foundations based on 2023 assets by FoundationMark’s John Seitz, four are based in the South — the Musk (Austin), Michael and Susan Dell (Austin), and Walton Family and Alice L. Walton (Bentonville, Arkansas) foundations. But where a funder gets its mail doesn’t fully explain philanthropy’s relative lack of support for the region’s organizations.
“Geography matters — but so do practice and posture,” Williams-Bishop said. “It’s true the South has historically received fewer philanthropic dollars, but the reasons go beyond where foundations are headquartered. The region is often perceived as politically complex, rural in many parts and harder to reach. Many of the most impactful organizations here are smaller, community-based groups that haven’t always fit traditional grantmaking frameworks.”
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy corroborates this point, noting that some Southern organizations don’t comport with funders’ “familiar signs of capacity,” like staff with advanced degrees and polished grant proposals. To better serve these organizations, NCRP argues that funders must “measure, value and invest in new signs of capacity — reciprocal relationships, resistance (not always progress) and resilience.”
They can also emulate WFFK’s post-Katrina approach of having boots on the ground, building long-term relationships with grassroots leaders and giving smaller organizations flexible, multi-year funding.
“The South isn’t under-resourced because of a lack of vision or leadership,” Williams-Bishop said. “Too often, philanthropy has simply overlooked the region. But that’s changing. More funders are beginning to see the South not as a challenge to navigate, but as a place of solutions — solutions with lessons the whole nation needs.”
