Matthew Hammer

Southern Echo is a leadership development, education, and training organization working to develop effective accountable grassroots leadership in African American communities in rural Mississippi and the surrounding region through comprehensive training and technical assistance programs. The organization's work has carried Southern Echo staff into twelve additional states across the South and Southwest. Southern Echo's underlying goal is to empower local communities through effective community organizing work, in order to create a process through which community members can build the broad-based organizations necessary to hold the political, economic, educational, and environmental systems accountable to the needs and interests of the African American community.