A Letter from Our Executive Director

INTRODUCTION

Founded as an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit in South Florida in 2020, the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences is a virtual space with a global network of scholars and community organizers 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. With an increased demand for the work of our Institute, 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 build out the capacity we need to move forward.

• Ideally, we hope to achieve sufficient funding to hire the tech support we need for the Miami Institute’s Global Index™ (MIGI); offer honorariums to forum writers, speakers, and MIGI contributors; and, secure a physical space here in Miami.

With our own physical space in Miami-Dade County, the Institute—with your help—will have the ability to complement its virtual offerings by also offering a publicly-accessible library of research and writings produced by scholars and writers around the world and to make these collections accessible to all here in South Florida; an invaluable resource for our local community across ages.  

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 global calls to bring greater inclusivity to 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 national and global communities at large) regarding knowledge produced by scholars around the world in the social sciences and neighboring fields. 

Through numerous virtual forums, multi-day workshops, and casual virtual gatherings including our “Café en Casa” series, we have been bringing together 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. 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. Want to learn more about our convenings, collaborations, and learning spaces? Please click here.

Complementing our virtual impact and community-building efforts at the Miami Institute, we also 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 to search and access these rich and vast bodies of work into one single database that can be searched with rich and intentional filters that will bring visibility to the research, work, and writings of knowledge producers in the social sciences and neighboring fields around the world, both past and present. With ease of use, MIGI will help us all to further expand 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 all scholars’ sense of belonging in the social sciences and surrounding fields and, relatedly, increasing all of our communities’ profiles as producers and holders of knowledge. 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, as we continue to build our virtual— and in-person— presence as a community. 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 ||