Stories

Inside MRBF

  • Meet our new Program Associate

    The Babcock Foundation is pleased to welcome Katie Sonnen-Lee as our new program associate. Sonnen-Lee will provide programmatic and administrative support for MRBF’s network officers, and guidance to current and potential grantee partners.

    With a background in a broad range of nonprofit and educational environments, Sonnen-Lee brings a wealth of administrative and program-management...

    Katie Sonnen-Lee
  • Celebrating a Year of Successes

    As we begin a new year, we’d like to toast all of our grantee partners across the South for a very successful 2016. Here are a few of the year’s achievements:

    The Georgia Budget and Policy Institute led the successful opposition to a tax-cut plan that would have damaged the state budget and eroded funding for schools and other services. Late in the legislative session, lawmakers...

    Coalfield Development Corporation
  • Staffing Changes and a Shifting Terrain

    In the aftermath of a terribly disorienting week, I have spent some time thinking about the things that give me strength. I keep returning to a set of values held by the committed board and staff at the Foundation: equity and inclusion, democracy, justice and respect for all voices, to name a few.

    I believe today it is even more important that we work from these values, live by these...

  • Envisioning a New Appalachia

    Once a year, the Babcock Foundation travels to a location within our funding footprint to learn from our grantee partners where they work. I always look forward to these trips because they afford us the opportunity to engage with our partners on the ground and meet with some of their constituents and other local residents. To be in their communities, to hear their stories, to see the lay of...

    Coalfield Development Corporation, WV
  • MRBF Joins Divest Invest Movement

    In addition to making grants to organizations across the South, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation achieves positive impact by aligning our financial investments with our mission of moving people and places out of poverty. The Foundation recognizes that climate change has disproportionate impacts on low-wealth people and communities of color across the American South, the nation and...

    Father and daughter fishing on Gulf Coast