Rooted in Southern soil.
Reaching toward something better.
The South is not a problem to be solved. It's a place where 28 million people are waiting for someone to speak honestly about what's making their lives harder — and what could actually make them better.
"Education, media, and community for a more equitable South."
The New South Project creates the policy education infrastructure, media platform, and community spaces that Southerners deserve — but have never had. We believe the South's future depends on honest, grounded conversation about the issues shaping everyday life here. We're building that conversation.
A flagship podcast, newsletter, and social media presence covering Southern policy — with a voice that is distinctly and proudly from here.
Accessible, deeply reported explainers on the issues that most affect Southern lives: healthcare, wages, education, democracy, and the environment.
Town halls, panels, and community gatherings that bring Southern people into direct conversation about the issues shaping their future.
Seven of the ten states that still refuse to expand Medicaid are in the South. That's a political choice — not an economic one. Meanwhile, rural hospitals are closing across Mississippi and Alabama, leaving some communities hours from emergency care. We believe that in the richest country in history, a working family in Georgia or Texas should be able to see a doctor without going bankrupt.
The United States has the worst maternal mortality rate in the developed world — and the South leads that grim ranking. Black mothers in the South die at rates more than double white mothers. A culture that says it values life and family has to reckon with why its own mothers are dying at Third World rates.
Southern states cluster at the bottom of national wage rankings — not because Southerners work less, but because the political system was built to keep wages low and unions weak. Economic dignity isn't a coastal idea. It's a Southern one — buried under decades of policy designed to serve someone else.
Southerners — Black and white — bled and died for the right to vote. Yet our region has become the front line in a sustained effort to make voting harder: shorter hours, fewer polling places, purged rolls, and bureaucratic barriers that fall hardest on working people. We don't think making it harder to vote is patriotic.
Southern states rank among the lowest in per-pupil spending and teacher pay, while billions of dollars are being diverted from public schools into voucher programs with almost no accountability for results. We believe in public schools — not because they're perfect, but because they belong to everyone.
You don't have to call it climate change to see what's happening. Hurricanes are stronger. Summers are longer. Flooding is hitting places that never flooded before. The South — coastal communities, farming families, Gulf Coast workers — is on the front lines. Loving the land is a Southern tradition older than any political party.
The South incarcerates more people per capita than almost anywhere on earth. Families are torn apart. Communities are hollowed out. And the costs — financial and human — fall overwhelmingly on the poor and Black. The South has a generational opportunity to lead the nation in reimagining what real justice looks like.
"The South has always been a place of deep contradiction — and deep possibility. We're here for the possibility."The New South Project · Est. 2025
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