Our Crowdfunding Groups
Thank you for your generous support!
While this project has ended, you can still make a gift at https://umfoundation.com/ignite.
With only a few days left in the #WinterLegacy campaign, we are very close to attaining our $20,000 goal. We are very grateful for all of you who have contributed and believe this special announcement will carry us over the finish line:
Oxford’s own award-winning chef, John Currence, has volunteered to prepare and host a dinner for Gov. William Winter, Winter Institute board chair Dr. Dan Jones, and four contributors to the #WinterLegacy campaign. It will take place the evening of Thursday, Jan. 26, at Currence’s home, which has been featured in Southern Living.
We will select four contributors next week after the campaign closes. Each winner can bring one guest to the dinner. If you’ve already given, you’re automatically entered; if you haven’t, what better reason for contributing today!
Help the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation keep its signature programs like the Summer Youth Institute and the Welcome Table completely free for Mississippi students and communities: Join our #IGNITEOleMiss William Winter Legacy Campaign and donate today!
Because of matching contributions, every $1 contributed to #WinterLegacy now becomes $3! Visit this page to learn about the impact of your donation and to contribute.
Give today and help us exceed our goal. You will:
HONOR a Mississippi icon,
TRIPLE the impact of your donation and
have a chance at a dinner of a lifetime!
ABOUT JOHN CURRENCE:
John Currence opened the iconic City Grocery in Oxford in 1992. In the time since, his City Grocery Restaurant Group -- including City Grocery Catering Company, Bouré, Big Bad Breakfast and Snackbar -- has grown beyond Oxford and Mississippi.
Currence received both Restaurateur of the Year and Chef of the Year awards from the Mississippi Restaurant Association in 1998. In 2006, he garnered the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) Guardian of Tradition Award and captured the 2008 Great American Seafood Cookoff in New Orleans. In 2009, he was awarded the James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef South and won Charleston Food and Wine Festival’s Iron Chef Challenge.
He is a contributing editor for Garden and Gun magazine and an avid outdoorsman who enjoys bird hunting, fishing and golf. Currence is active in the community, having served as chair and president of the Mississippi Restaurant Association and president of the Yoknapatapha Arts Council. He is active with St. Jude Children’s Hospital, Memphis Ballet and Oxford Lafayette Humane Society. Not only is he a sitting board member of the SFA but he has also served as culinary director from its inception in 1996.
For donations, visit this page.
Press, please contact Chris Schultz: chris@winterinstitute.org
We are three weeks into the #WinterLegacy campaign and your generous support has brought our $20,000 goal in sight!
We want to share with you the exclusive video created by the National Civil Rights Museum for the Freedom Award ceremony last month. It reveals Gov. Winter's lifelong commitment to Mississippians, at times in the face of life-threatening opposition.
Gov. Winter's legacy of service is carried on by the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. Help us keep enriching programs like the Summer Youth Institute and the Welcome Table completely free for all Mississippi students and communities. Join our #IgniteOleMiss William Winter Legacy Campaign and donate today!
Because of matching contributions, every $1 contributed to #WinterLegacy now becomes $3! Visit this page to learn to learn how your donation will make a powerful impact.
Contribute today and help us exceed our goal:
HONOR a Mississippi icon,
TRIPLE the impact of your donation and\
SHARE the #WinterLegacy campaign with your networks!
For donations, visit this page. Press, please contact Chris Schultz: chris@winterinstitute.org
#WinterLegacy: Read WWIRR youths’ powerful, inspiring words about Gov. Winter and the work that remains!
We’re halfway through the #WinterLegacy campaign (and more than halfway to our $20,000 goal)!
Thanks to the University of Mississippi, Zacchaeus McEwen (SYI 2012), Tia Toines (SYI 2013), and Anne Buffington (parent of 2013 SYIer Cat Buffington) were able to join Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation staff in Memphis for the recent Freedom Award Ceremony and Celebration Gala.
For Youth Engagement coordinator Von Gordon, having the Summer Youth Institute participants well-represented at the evening’s events was “important so that they could see how the work they’re doing as student leaders is a part of the same movement Gov. Winter and the other amazing honorees from all over the world are a part of.”
Tia Toines, a freshman at Belhaven College, felt as if she were on sacred ground. “To be able to sit in such royal company made a fire burn inside my soul, and to witness Gov. Winter accept the Freedom Award was seeing the person that helped change my life declare that, though we’ve come far, we're far from finished.”
University of Mississippi junior McEwen found the experience to be breathtaking. “I never thought I would ever be a part of something so big and be around influential people who have committed their lives and careers to better the world.”
It is with great pleasure that we include our students and their parents in all aspects of the transformative work that we do at the William Winter Institute. Help us keep programs like the Summer Youth Institute completely free for all of Mississippi’s students: Join our #IgniteOleMiss William Winter Legacy Campaign and donate today!
Because of matching contributions, every $1 contributed to #WinterLegacy now becomes $3! Visit this page to learn what your donation does and to contribute.
Contribute today and help us smash our goal:
HONOR a Mississippi icon,
TRIPLE the impact of your donation and
SHARE the #WinterLegacy campaign with your networks!
OXFORD, MS -- OCT. 28, 2016 -- After a week and many wonderful words about Gov. Winter, #WinterLegacy, and the work of the William Winter Institute, we are more than halfway to our $20,000 goal!
The big news:
An anonymous donor has committed an additional $10,000. It will kick in when we reach $20,000. Because Gov. Winter has committed the $10,000 honorarium that accompanied his Freedom Award to #WinterLegacy, every $1 contributed now becomes $3!
Contribute today and help us smash our goal:
HONOR a Mississippi icon, TRIPLE the impact of your donation, and SHARE the #WinterLegacy campaign with your networks!
For 7 years, the Summer Youth Institute has been producing leaders from Mississippi high schools.
The William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation has anchored its work at the University of Mississippi for 17 years.
Twenty-eight rising high school sophomores and juniors are selected each year to attend the William Winter Institute's Summer Youth Institute on the Oxford campus each June. Each SYIer designs a project that combines a need of their community with a personal passion, and signs an agreement to build the project for two years.
Gov. Winter is 93 years old, and still working for Mississippi every day!
Launches a project in a Mississippi community that combines a passion of a Summer Youth Institute student with a need of their community.
Sponsors a workshop to teach community members the many ways our world benefits from difference, and how to address discrimination effectively.
Regional summits help grow youth community support networks around the state, and allow teachers to share how to effectively include Civil Rights and Human Rights history into their lessons.
Preserve a community's past, and those who shaped it, via an oral history project.
Vital support for a Winter Institute-sponsored (free!) conference, such as "Mass Incarceration in Mississippi."