Anneshia Hardy | The Hardy Exchange
I’m honored to share that I have been selected as an Ignite the South Fellow, joining a cohort of Southern organizers, strategists, and culture makers who are shaping what our region can become when we center people, possibility, and power.
For me, this isn’t just a fellowship. It’s another homeplace , a space where Southern storytellers and movement builders can stretch, dream, interrogate, and practice what it means to build a future worthy of our communities. Ignite the South is committed to resourcing leaders across the South who are transforming systems and nurturing community-rooted solutions. To be welcomed into this ecosystem is an affirmation of the work I’ve been committed to for years: using narrative, messaging, culture, and community wisdom to organize, protect, and reimagine democracy.
Why This Fellowship Matters in This Moment
The South is often talked about but rarely talked with. Too often, narratives flatten us, as if our region is only defined by its challenges and never by its brilliance, creativity, or generational knowledge.
Ignite the South flips that script.
They invest in Southern leaders who are grounded in place, accountable to community, and building toward liberation with tools that honor both our history and our horizon.
As someone who works every day at the intersection of culture, media, politics, and public life, this fellowship offers something invaluable: intentional space to deepen my research, sharpen my narrative theory, strengthen cross-state collaborations, and pour into a community of people who, like me, believe the South is not a problem to solve but a landscape of possibility.
What I’m Bringing Into This Fellowship
I’m entering this cohort with my full self, a Southern-grown, truth-telling, community-centered narrative strategist; a mama raising Black sons in the Deep South; a movement builder whose work has always been rooted in the belief that story is strategy and narrative is infrastructure.
Through my work with, I’ve been committed to building a narrative ecosystem that honors cultural memory, shifts public imagination, connects lived experience to structural analysis, and nurtures pathways to collective action.
Ignite the South offers a powerful space to deepen that work, expand partnerships, and experiment with new ways of creating liberatory cultural and political narratives across the region.
What I Hope to Explore and Build
During my fellowship year, I’ll be exploring questions that have been sitting at the center of my work for a long time:
- How do communities with long histories of harm also hold deep reservoirs of meaning, care, and possibility?
- What does narrative power look like when it’s built from the ground up, not parachuted in?
- How do we equip organizers, artists, storytellers, and community institutions with narrative tools that honor place, lived experience, and cultural memory?
- How can Southern narrative infrastructure expand in ways that support movements, legal strategies, cultural work, and everyday life?
I’m especially excited about the opportunity to collaborate with leaders across the South who are organizing at the intersections of race, gender, democracy, and culture, people who understand that building power is both a structural project and a cultural one.
A Commitment to the South That Raised Me
Everything I do is rooted in the belief that the South is sacred ground. Our people have always been architects of democracy, creators of culture, and keepers of possibility.
This fellowship is not an individual achievement, it’s a continuation of the collective work my ancestors, mentors, collaborators, partnerships, and community members have poured into me. Their wisdom sits at the foundation of every narrative framework, campaign, and story I help shape.
What’s Next
Over the coming months, I’ll be sharing reflections from the fellowship experience, the questions we’re wrestling with, the lessons emerging from collective dialogue, and the ideas that are shaping my own practice as a narrative strategist and cultural worker.
To the Ignite the South team: thank you for believing in Southern leaders and for investing in our visions for a more just, imaginative, liberated region.
To my community: thank you for trusting me with your stories and allowing me to do this work with care, integrity, and purpose.
The South has always been more than the narratives imposed upon it.
This fellowship is one more step in rewriting the story, together.
About the Author
Anneshia Hardy is a narrative strategist, scholar-activist, and social impact entrepreneur committed to leveraging storytelling and messaging for transformative social change. As Executive Director of grassroots communications and media advocacy organizations, Alabama Values and Alabama Values Progress, she leads efforts to strengthen the pro-democracy movement in Alabama and across the South through strategic messaging and digital strategies.
Co-founder of Blackyard LLC, Anneshia equips changemakers to amplify their impact in marginalized communities. With over a decade of experience, she has conducted narrative and messaging trainings for organizations like the NAACP and the Obama Foundation. Anneshia has also shaped strategies for landmark voting rights cases, including Allen v. Milligan and Louisiana v. Callais Rooted in the belief that culturally relevant narratives can drive equity and inspire action, she bridges academic insight and real-world advocacy to create lasting change.