Terence Courtney is the Director of Cooperative Development & Strategic Initiatives for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. He began organizing with the Service Employees International Union to improve economic conditions for working people. He led union campaigns and later became the union’s State-wide Representative in Georgia. He co-founded and led coalitions such as Atlanta Jobs with Justice and the Atlanta Public Sector Alliance. Expanding from a city to a regional focus, Terence organized US born and foreign-born people of African descent to educate and raise consciousness about immigrant rights and mass incarceration from a Black Diasporic perspective for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. He co-developed the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy and served as the Director of Organizing overseeing campaigns against school privatization, as well as its spin off project: Cooperative Atlanta.
The fund now welcomes funding from a broad array of donors to continue to support rural Black community self determination throughout the Black Belt region.