A Letter from Our Executive Director

September 2023

Dear Friends of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences,

We write to you from the State of Florida appealing for your support as we continue our critical work here at the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences to carry on amplifying the scholarly output of Global Majority (i.e., BIPOC) scholars across the social sciences and neighboring fields—from economics, political science, and sociology to philosophy, history, and interdisciplinary studies.

THE ASK

The Miami Institute for the Social Sciences is a 501(c)3 founded in 2020 in Miami, Florida. We are currently a virtual space with a global network of scholars, community organizers, and funders ready to move into our next pivotal phase through capacity-building efforts that will allow for us to have a physical community space here in Miami and to grow our staffing to best support our growing portfolio of work. 

Since our founding in 2020, we have received mutual aid support from our organization members. As executive director, I also have brought in funding to the Institute through my research on knowledge production in the social sciences and the U.S. philanthropic sector; connecting in a multiplicity of roles and avenues with U.S. funders on a variety of topics, including how to be more thoughtful in their financing of Global Majority scholars in the social sciences. I also have served as a leading consultant to U.S. universities eager to improve the lived experiences of Global Majority scholars in their institutions.

With an increased demand for the work of our Institute and my own time (which up until now has been pro-bono work), our current model is just not sustainable. We need increased funding to scale and to have the impact we know is possible in our next phase of growth. We are looking for visionary funders to help the Institute’s Board of Directors make the position of executive director both sustainable and equitable and to add two new staff members to build out the capacity we need to move forward: one dedicated to helping with the research and curation of the Miami Institute’s Global Index™ (MIGI) and another to manage the umbrella of organizational operations. Ideally, we also hope to achieve sufficient funding to hire the tech support we need for MIGI; offer honorariums to writers, speakers, and MIGI contributors; secure a physical space here in Miami; and relatedly, start developing our publicly-accessible library of knowledge produced by the Global Majority and host scholars and public events reaching our local community.

With our own physical space in Miami-Dade County, the Institute—with your help—will have the ability to build upon and complement its virtual offerings by also becoming a safe physical space for local thinkers, researchers, and community members to come together freely to learn from each other, do their work, collaborate, and coexist in ways that are becoming increasingly difficult in state-financed settings in the State of Florida. Just as vital, this private funding will allow us to build our publicly accessible library of research and writings produced by Global Majority scholars around the world both past and present and to make these collections accessible to all here in South Florida; an invaluable resource for our staff, visitors, and our local community.  

THE WHO + WHY

We are a local nonprofit in Miami whose work responds to the unique positionality of Miami as a hub for international thought and movement work with global calls to decolonize the academy at large. This work has led to a growing demand to continue to elevate, share, and educate our community here in South Florida (and the broader community at large – both academic and philanthropic) regarding knowledge creation and histories, methodologies, and movements produced by Global Majority scholars in the social sciences and neighboring fields. 

We bring together Global Majority scholars across the social sciences and neighboring fields to discuss our disciplines, to amplify our work in these fields, and to learn about each other’s contributions across the Global South and North through numerous virtual forums, multi-day workshops, and casual get-togethers including our “Café en Casa” series. In doing this work, we have collaborated with the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, the COMPARTE Network in Latin America, Queen Mary University of London, the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) in the U.S., and the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH) in Malaysia. As just one example of our intersectional and timely work, we recently partnered with Black Studies scholars across the U.S. to discuss the past, present, and future of African-American Studies in this country. Want to learn more about our convenings, collaborations, and learning spaces? Please click here.

Complementing our virtual impact and community-building efforts among Global Majority scholars, we also just launched the prototype for our flagship offering: the Miami Institute’s Global Index™ (MIGI).  Still in development, this virtual database will include our collective networks’ contributions to knowledge production in the social sciences and neighboring fields, both past and present. Our mission is to allow users (both from the academy itself and philanthropic and social good scholars and movement actors) to search and access these rich and vast (and often siloed by the sheer nature of their authors) bodies of work into one single database that can be searched with rich and intentional filters that will bring visibility, nuance, and intersectionality to the research, work, and writings of those at the crossroads of the social sciences, humanities, and movements – furthering our efforts to nurture community and belonging among Global Majority knowledge producers in the social sciences and neighboring fields across the world and to further help democratize and decolonize our syllabi, footnotes, conference panels, personal reading lists, and whom we turn to as authoritative and attributed sources of knowledge from the broader world around us. 

At the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, we know the value and impact of increasing Global Majority scholars’ sense of belonging in the social sciences and surrounding fields and, relatedly, increasing the Global Majority’s profile as producers and holders of knowledge, methods, and praxis desperately needed in the world today. We see this as mission-critical work towards shaping learning communities where we all belong. Because from our perspective, a critical step towards treating each other and each other’s communities with greater dignity and humanity in all aspects of life — from employment practices and legal jurisprudence to health, education, housing, finance, and lending policies — is to acknowledge each other and each other’s communities (both elders and youth) as pillars of knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. 

We thank you for your time and look forward to discussing further what is possible. To set up a time to call, please feel free to email us and we will reach out shortly.

In the meantime, below, we include ways to donate today to the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences.

Un abrazo, 

Maribel 

Dr. Maribel Morey, Executive Director, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences 

1825 Ponce De Leon Blvd, Suite #209, Coral Gables, Florida 33134 

About || Board of Directors || Virtual Forums

miamisocialsciences@gmail.com ||