Echo Empowerment Institute supports Southern Echo in its belief that all children should receive a free, fully funded, quality, and equitable education. This goal has always proven to be challenge in Mississippi because of its long and violent history of racism and oppression. Many Mississippi systemic structures operate with the taint of exclusionism and prejudice, with the state’s education system receiving the brunt of the disregard. Specifically, the state’s failure to prioritize education has resulted in Mississippi’s public-school system being critically underfunded by millions of dollars.

February 2021 brought with it a historic winter storm that left much of the state, and the South as a whole, suffering in its wake.