Over the last several years, a major new philanthropic institution has emerged in New Hanover County. Geographically, New Hanover is the second smallest county in North Carolina — but in population and median income, it's in the top ten. The densely populated and relatively affluent county is poised for significant transformation as the $1.25 billion foundation comes online — but not without challenges.
The New Hanover Community Endowment — or, to many people in southeastern NC, just ‘the Endowment’ — was born from the sale proceeds of the county-owned New Hanover Regional Medical Center, a major hospital serving much of southeastern North Carolina. The contentious sale process lasted over a year, with opponents accusing county leaders of lacking transparency — and having already made up their minds before the “sale exploration” took place. County and hospital officials vehemently denied these allegations at the time — but years later, many still have qualms about the process.
But, in the end, the New Hanover County sold its public hospital to Novant Health, a nonprofit healthcare system. County commissioners voted to take $1.25 billion from the sale and create the Endowment. In effect, they took a publicly-owned asset, sold it, took the proceeds, which belonged to the taxpayers, and put them in a private foundation, shielding it from direct public oversight and, in theory, protecting it from political interference.
The Endowment promised transformational change — an unprecedented level of philanthropic giving in the region, with four focus areas chosen by commissioners: education, social and health equity, community safety, and community development (a.k.a. economic development and opportunity). For many who had mixed or negative feelings about the hospital sale, the Endowment was a silver lining and then some.
The Endowment was entrusted to an 11-member board of directors — six appointed by Novant, and five appointed by the county — who took their seats in late 2020. As part of the sale approval process, the state’s Attorney General later required two additional members to help bring diversity to a board that initially had six White men and two people of color; those members are appointed by the Endowment's board itself. The full 13-member board featured members of the region’s business, finance, and healthcare communities.
The sale was finalized in early 2021 and, by the middle of 2022, there was pressure to start making grants. That pressure was both self-imposed by board members who wanted to get the ball rolling and test the community’s ‘capacity’ (that is, to see how the region’s nonprofit community would respond to an unprecedented level of funding), and from the community in general, where many wanted to see the hospital sale literally pay dividends.
CEO William Buster told WHQR that just a few months after he was hired in January 2022 the board told him they wanted money out by the end of the year. Nine months may not seem last a quick turnaround, but for a brand-new organization still working to gauge the community’s needs and capacity — it was fairly fast.
Despite the desire to get money into the community, the Endowment did not put out as much money as its bylaws would allow for its first ‘grant cycle,’ the inaugural round of applications and disbursements.
The Endowment has about five years before it fully ramps up its grantmaking, when IRS rules will require it to transition to a private foundation with a mandate to distribute at least 5% of its assets, around $60 million.
According to Buster, the deliberative approach is partly because of concerns about whether that much money, poured exclusively into New Hanover County, can be handled by the nonprofits here.
According to Cause IQ, a web-based company that analyzes data about nonprofits, there are over 1,000 nonprofits in the greater Wilmington metro area (although not all are in New Hanover County) — but many, over 500, have annual revenue under $1 million, which means smaller staff and a more limited capacity to handle big grant-funded projects. Buster said that, at least for the time being, it would be “damn near impossible” for New Hanover County nonprofits to handle $60 million. That is, after all, an order of magnitude local governments provides (in their most recent budgets, the City of Wilmington and New Hanover County provided, collectively, around $3 million annually for nonprofits and over $5 million for affordable housing). The question of how more — a lot more — funding would be managed is still very much germane for the Endowment’s second grant cycle, currently underway.
The first cycle, which put over $9 million into over 100 non-profits, was chaotic according to many of the grantees who spoke to WHQR. From conversations with Endowment leaders, that seems to be in large part because the Endowment had just a few people on staff, including Buster, and no strategic plan to guide giving.
“I do think given where the organization started with the board, and the selection of them, and the selection of me, and them telling me on March 1, they wanted to get money out this year — from that perspective, I think we did well, but we have a long way to go. A long way to go,” Buster told WHQR earlier this year, shortly after the first round of grantees had been announced.
Several of those grants, totaling around $390,000, went to the University of North Carolina Wilmington, which offered some insight into the process — and challenges — of that first cycle.
First time on a bike
Sitting in his office on the University of North Carolina Wilmington campus a few days before the semester started, Vice Chancellor Eddie Stuart reflected on the University’s experience as a grantee in the New Hanover Community Endowment’s first funding cycle.
“It's like when you get on a bike for the first time, and you're all wiggly. And once you get some momentum, things stabilize, and I think that's what's gonna happen, it doesn't look very graceful at first, but then once things stabilize, it gets a little bit more smooth. And my guess is that's probably gonna be the next few years for us and the Endowment,” Stuart said.
Stuart has no doubt that the Endowment will be transformational. He’s excited, for example, about how the Endowment aims to help build a collaborative effort with the New Hanover County Schools district and Cape Fear Community College (CFCC) to establish a training pipeline for nurses and other healthcare professions — addressing a critical shortage that, last summer, nearly crippled New Hanover Regional Medical Center.
But he acknowledged that the Endowment and its partners in the non-profit community are still learning. It’s uncharted territory — dealing with a whole new philanthropic organization, with an unprecedented ability to make grants — that some are more comfortable navigating than others.
“We're learning as we go. You know, if you're evaluating the process, just based on the fundamentals of how a grant cycle should work, that might be a different answer, but I think I think it's probably okay. Although it's probably got a lot of people uneasy,” Stuart said.
Stuart — and many of the other first-round grantees — said the process was confusing, with a lot of “unanswered questions,” but also that Buster and Endowment Vice President Lakesha McDay, who was hired just as the application window was opening, worked overtime to answer questions as best they could — as did some of the Endowment’s board members.
UNCW’s grants
As part of UNCW’s leadership, Stuart saw an added level of confusion — an unexpected wrinkle in the Endowment’s first grant round. A few months before the grant cycle opened, the Endowment decided that UNCW and Cape Fear Community College (CFCC) would be eligible to submit applications from each of their departments.
There wasn’t a lot of time to plan, Stuart said, and there were questions about what “departments” even meant. Departments and on-campus organizations ended up applying directly to the Endowment, and while the University did its best to internally track who was applying, it didn’t really have time to strategize or coordinate. There were 63 proposals totaling roughly $7.3 million — nine were funded, totaling $388,371. (CFCC, had two of its 11 grant applications approved).
UNCW’s grants ranged from under $8,000 — one of the smallest grants in the 2022 cycle, aimed at supporting STEM education — to over $85,000 for the College of Health and Human Services’ mobile community health and resource fairs.
In many ways, UNCW’s grants are representative of the Endowment’s first round of grants: they’re called ‘responsive’ grants — one-year, nonrenewable grants that respond to specific program or project costs as opposed to ‘unrestricted’ or ‘general operating’ grants, which a non-profit can use how it sees fit to pursue its overall mission. According to WHQR’s analysis of grant information provided by the Endowment, about 10% of its first cycle grants included general operating funding; about a dozen included funding for a new vehicle, another dozen for capital expenses like new or upgraded facilities.
The grants are all also relatively modest, given the level of grantmaking the Endowment is expected to achieve. The Endowment’s first cycle of grants ranged between $1,000 and $250,000, with an average of just over $82,000.
And for those two reasons, none of them are really what some experts call ‘strategic giving’ — they aren’t taking big swings at systemic issues.
The more modest approach isn’t uncommon for new foundations, although it’s not ultimately as effective, according to Aaron Dorfman, head of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
“I sometimes see newer foundations make one-year grants for very specific projects,” Dorfman said. “And a more effective philanthropic strategy is actually to give unrestricted general operating support grants in four full years with, you know, a true multi-year commitment. And the data has shown that when foundations do that, those nonprofits get better results over time.”
For example, a $66,500 grant for UNCW’s Mi Casa program was designed to “create sustainable pathways for educational equity for academically talented Latinx high school students who wish to further their education.”
The grant supports outreach efforts to students and covers the cost of exposing them to the benefits of UNCW’s campus. The broader Mi Casa program also supports mentoring, tutoring, and college prep. But the grant doesn’t get at the systemic issues that can hinder Hispanic students, despite their academic process — including economic barriers for their families like lower wages, employment discrimination, and reduced access to loans for small businesses, according to the consulting firm McKinsey.
That’s not a critique of the grant, it just wasn’t the philosophy behind the Endowment’s first cycle — which hadn’t yet embraced a more strategic approach.
It’s worth noting that the Mi Casa grant, like the rest of the UNCW grants, is a public record. Details on how the grant is used, the University’s six-month report on its effectiveness, and other conversations about it are public because UNCW is a public university and falls under North Carolina’s public records law (the same goes for CFCC). That provides a level of transparency that’s not guaranteed with most of the Endowment’s grant partners; what the Endowment has made public for most of its grants amounts to a few general sentences — and applications it rejected aren’t public at all.
The Mi Casa grant also provides a bit of a potential elegant workaround to the Endowment’s exclusive focus on grantmaking in New Hanover County. While the grant-funded programming all takes place on UNCW’s campus and serves “primarily” students from New Hanover County, it also serves students from three other surrounding counties. Given the socioeconomic demographics of those more rural, less affluent counties, they’re likely to be home to Hispanic students whose families are struggling more economically — and who most need the kind of help Mi Casa aims to deliver. More on the issue of the county boundary later in this report.
Round one: The good, the bad, and the confusing
On December 9, 2022, the Endowment announced its first round of grant awards. The press conference was live-streamed by the county (although it was initially hampered by A/V issues). After brief remarks by then-Board Chair Spence Broadhurst, Buster took the podium and read a list of over 100 grant recipients (the amounts of the awards were released later).
It was, for the grantees who heard their names called, a celebratory event. But for those who didn't receive grants — and for the general public — the event offered little actual information: how much money was being granted, and for what, and why?
WHQR spoke to dozens of nonprofits about their experience during the first grant cycle — mostly positive, but confusing, and in some cases daunting. Many said they’d never been in a community with a grantmaking institution with the financial horsepower of the Endowment. WHQR has also received hundreds of calls, emails, and other messages about the process. Most are grateful and optimistic, and more than a few are impatient for the Endowment to ramp up to its full financial potential. But many also had questions and concerns about the endowment.
The questions and concerns fall largely into three categories. First: how and who at the Endowment chose which grants to fund — and why. Second: what the public can know about the Endowment’s work. And third: where the Endowment’s funding will go in the long-term — a story with its own complicated backstory. (More on the second two, below).
When the Endowment decided to push out money by the end of 2022, it pretty much had one employee: CEO William Buster. Vice President Lakesha McDay wasn’t brought on until the grant application cycle was open — although Buster says she’s since been instrumental.
Phil Buchanan, a longtime leader in the nonprofit field and president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, said staffing up was key — and Dorfman noted that foundations sometimes underinvest in staff because they’re concerned about being seen spending money internally instead of putting money into the community.
The lack of staff meant much of the granular work of the first grant cycle was left to the board itself — and while board members could draw on a range of backgrounds, few if any of them had any real experience in strategic philanthropic giving as they went through 291 applications one by one and picked 110 to approve.
While final approval for grants will always be up to the board, this was a level of granular involvement — including holding office hours for potential grantees — that some experts would advise against in a major philanthropic foundation, saying boards should provide higher-level strategic planning, and leave the details to staff with more working experience in philanthropy.
“We're very aware of that,” said Bill Cameron, the current board chair and former co-chair of the advisory committee that ultimately recommended the sale of NHRMC to Novant Health.
“I think we've done a very good job of building the structure so that we do not do that,” Cameron said of the Endowment’s efforts since the first round. “Now let me just say this organization started with a board with zero staff, and this board started as an operational board. We are transitioning into more of a governance board. And we're well along the way of that transition.”
In addition to limited staff, the Endowment’s Community Advisory Council (CAC), representatives of the region’s nonprofits, community organizations, and health and educational experts, also didn’t get to play much of a role in the first grant round — or even really understand what that role was.
While the Endowment announced in Spring 2022 that the CAC would be an “integral part of helping the Endowment better understand the needs of New Hanover,” several members told WHQR the first cycle was done more or less without their input in an effort to get money out. The CAC’s initial 18 members were appointed at the end of June 2022, just a few months before the initial grant application window.
“I wasn’t sure in the beginning where it was headed and what our role was,” CAC member Dawn Ferrer told WHQR this summer.
Ferrer is the executive director of A Safe Place, an Endowment grantee that helps victims of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. She said that, despite confusion early on, the CAC’s most recent quarterly meeting was productive.
“I will say the last meeting we had, I felt was that was the best meeting because they had board members sit at our tables,” Ferrer said. “And they asked questions, and they wanted to hear who we were, you know, what's our background? And what do we see as the community.”
The first round, pushed out with minimal staff, no input from the CAC, no strategic plan, and four broad areas of grantmaking — education, social and health equity, community safety, and community development — left it unclear how the board narrowed down its decisions.
In general, several board members told WHQR that the Endowment did want to narrow down grants that would really help the community while resisting the urge to just pump out money into the community because they had it available. Cameron said there were some that obviously were or weren’t right for the Endowment — and that the ones in the middle, where board members had to struggle to decide, “weren’t fun.” But Cameron didn’t elaborate on what made those edge cases tough. And beyond some broad guidelines, and the requirement that the organization be based in New Hanover County and provide services there, there were not any hard and fast criteria.
Buster has said repeatedly that he doesn’t think of the nearly two hundred rejected grants as flat-out “nos.”
“That was a conversation I had with the board early on — just because we can, doesn’t that mean that we should. And some of the proposals, they fell down this way: some were not aligned with anything I wanted to do and it just, it's almost as if some folks didn't read what we said. And then some were just poorly written. And for me those — those are the ones that I really am excited to talk to. It's like, okay, so it's not about 'No,' it's about 'not yet.' So let's talk about how you get this better,” Buster said following the first round of grants.
Because the Endowment’s four categories are so broad, there’s a case to be made for each of the grants it awarded. Take some of the larger grants: $190,000 to provide vehicles for the Wilmington Fire Department or $250,000 to Coastal Horizons for a youth shelter and drug treatment facilities, that’s community safety. Or just over $170,000 for the Cape Fear chapter of the American Red Cross’s Sickle Cell Initiative, that’s health equity. There’s $125,500 to StepUp Wilmington for career development to lift people out of poverty — economic development. And CFCC and UNCW’s numerous grants are all various approaches to supporting education.
It's harder to say anything about the case against an application that was rejected, since there’s little public information about them.
(Disclosure: WHQR’s management applied for a grant to NHCE but was not approved in the first round; the newsroom did not have a role in the application and hasn’t been privy to the details.)
However, because some of the applicants were government bodies whose applications were subject to public records requests — namely UNCW and CFCC — there is some opportunity to contrast what succeeded and what didn’t.
UNCW’s Mi Casa application was approved, but one from CFCC to “help raise the population of Latinx students” was not. While sharing a similar root goal, the grants had several key differences. For one thing, CFCC asked for the maximum amount, $250,000 while UNCW asked for a more modest amount (in fact, CFCC asked for $250,000 on all 11 of its grant requests).
For another, unlike UNCW’s application, the CFCC grant would have involved hiring new employees and, since the Endowment’s first-cycle grants were all non-renewable, that could have created issues. Several of CFCC’s grant requests included new hires — a factor that could have been problematic since the application specifically required grantees to acknowledge the grants were not renewable. CFCC’s requests would have potentially put the college on the hook for funding that position a year later.
Only one of the two Endowment grants received by CFCC involved staffing, a $250,000 plan to upfit and staff a childcare center for students. It’s worth noting that plan also included a $250,000 match from a CFCC donor — and a plan to hire a director and other staff — indicating outside and internal support for the childcare center that might have ameliorated concerns about using one-time funding for staff.
Even with public documents, however, it’s difficult to get a deeper sense of why one grant succeeded and one failed.
Like many non-profits WHQR spoke to, CFCC declined to comment on the process, saying it “would like to maintain a policy of non-interference during the grant evaluation process. We believe that allowing the selection committee to evaluate all applications objectively is in the best interest of the grant process. It is not a reflection of our perspective on the outcome but rather a commitment to the integrity of the process.”
However, this kind of comparison is hard to generalize across the hundreds of other applications, since most are private non-profits, and not subject to public scrutiny at the level of a government institution.
Public transparency from a purposely private foundation
While experts like Buchanan say openness and transparency are key values for any philanthropic institution — concerns about the Endowment’s transparency are acute, because it is essentially the private guardian of public taxpayer money.
The creation of the Endowment was tangled up in the contentious sale process of NHRMC. At the time, the proposed future home of $1.25 billion was referred to as the Community Foundation. Commissioners clashed over whether it should fall directly under the county, with commissioners appointing all members to a foundation board, or if appointment authority should be split between the county and the regional hospital board, which proponents argued would increase the potential funding level — and help shield the future foundation from politicization.
Raleigh-based attorney Don Munford was contracted by the county to lay out the foundational documents for the Endowment, and put heavy emphasis on the need to shield the Endowment from public meeting and records laws.
“When you apply the Open Meetings law, the body becomes political,” Munford told commissioners during the fall of 2020, as the hospital sale process was wrapping up.
Munford had an openly cynical view of sunshine laws, telling commissioners that based on his brief time in the North Carolina General Assembly — Munford was a representative for Wake County for one term from 2003 to 2004 — he saw legislators routinely subvert public scrutiny laws by making decisions in private before voting in public.
Below: Munford addresses the Board of Commissioners, his remarks begin around the 14-minute mark.
While not all commissioners agreed with Munford’s approach, the county ultimately chose to craft the Endowment as a private entity — albeit one that is in charge of over a billion dollars in public money.
“It’s a private foundation with one-and-a-quarter-billion dollars of public money that’s in it. So to me, there’s nothing private about it,” Commissioner Rob Zapple said at the time.
(Disclosure: Zapple is a member of WHQR’s board of directors, which has no say in editorial newsroom decisions.)
As part of his legally mandated review of the sale, Attorney General Josh Stein did ultimately require the Endowment to hold annual public meetings, but most of the board’s business can be conducted in private. The fact that Novant, not the county, appoints the largest block of board members, distances the Endowment from its public origins, as does the Endowment's transition from its current status as a public charity to a private foundation.
So, while in its first foundational months a legal case could have been made to, for example, compel the production of internal emails under North Carolina’s public records law, as the Endowment evolves it is likely well insulated from any public scrutiny.
That means that transparency is up to the Endowment itself. As CEO, Buster has been a strong proponent of being as open as possible. After the first grant round, he committed to quarterly “Breakfast with Buster” meetings with public stakeholders, one for each of the Endowment’s four areas of concern. (The 'Breakfast' conversations are held under Chatham House rules. WHQR can confirm they are lively and candid, but the details of those meetings aren't reportable.)
Shortly after the first grant round, Buster said he’d hoped to get more details, including the amount and purposes of grants, online — and the Endowment has done that, but only to some extent. It has not made the actual grant applications or six-month reports from grantees public. And while that’s not uncommon for a private foundation, it’s not the level of transparency that would come with the use of taxpayer money.
For example, New Hanover County provides annual funding for local nonprofits based on the recommendations of a funding committee, which holds public meetings, and all of the applications, grants, reporting from grantees, and so on are a matter of public record. The Golden LEAF Foundation, which currently manages over a billion dollars, originally from the state's settlement with cigarette manufacturers, also offers a higher level of transparency, publishing meeting minutes and other documents.
In the case of the Endowment, documents like the actual grant applications and six-month reports contain far more detailed information, including breakdowns of how grant money would be spent and key milestones and benchmarks for evaluating their success.
For example, information provided by the Endowment to the public indicates one of CFCC’s two $250,000 grants will support “capital improvements to establish a childcare center,” but grant application, obtained through a public records record request to the college, lists $143,280 for staff compensation, $68,700 for office expenses, and just $38,000 for “capital expenditures.” And while it’s completely possible that those numbers evolved between the application and the grant, to the public, the details are opaque.
The Endowment also hasn’t shared information about rejected grants or who submitted them. Few organizations were willing to talk on the record about their unsuccessful grants because they were concerned about hurting their chances of getting a revamped application approved in the next cycle — and some simply didn’t want to discuss a setback for their organization.
Most of the Endowment’s key decisions happen in private. That includes which grants it approves and which investment strategy it pursues (the Endowment chose Blackrock, one of the world’s largest financial management firms, and also the target of criticism by State Treasurer Dale Folwell over its progressive environmental stance).
It also includes which bylaws the Endowment adheres to and which it changes — like a tweak made last year that allowed the Endowment to dip into its $1.25-billion principal in order to facilitate grant-making despite market instability.
"Focusing on New Hanover County"
The same decision-making process that shielded the Endowment from public oversight also made a fateful choice to limit its grantmaking to New Hanover County. The Board's initial governance structure also required its members to be New Hanover County residents.
The county states that Novant paid over $2 billion for the hospital because it offered high-quality care — but its size and success were due to it being a regional healthcare powerhouse, and patients who live in less affluent, more rural counties around New Hanover fueled its growth. According to state data, over half of the patients who received profitable services like surgical care at the hospital came from Bladen, Brunswick, Columbus, Duplin, Onslow, and Pender counties.
Nonprofit leaders from those counties have quietly — and sometimes, less quietly — voiced their frustrations.
In August, at an Endowment meeting with local nonprofit leaders in Wilmington, the director of a Pender County organization put the question to Buster during a Q&A.
“Should we stand at the border and say, ‘No one from New Hanover,’ because we can't get funding out of New Hanover?” the director asked.
“Is that a question or a comment?” Buster responded.
The crowd laughed nervously. Buster kept cool and offered to have a conversation — a promise the Endowment did make good on, although without offering any funding — but held the line.
“We’re focused here in New Hanover County,” he said.
The director, who spoke with WHQR after the meeting, didn’t want their name reported — in fact, over a dozen Pender and Brunswick nonprofits spoke to WHQR, but none wanted to go on the record, for fear of alienating themselves from future grant rounds.
But it’s not just regional nonprofits that believe that Endowment funding should go beyond New Hanover County’s borders.
In early 2021, following his review of the hospital sale, Attorney General Stein told WHQR, “We believe that the endowment should not be limited to the county lines of New Hanover County, to serve the broader region,” although he did not legally impose that as a requirement.
Frank Williams, then chair of the Brunswick County Board of Commissioners, said keeping the funds inside New Hanover County would “simply be wrong.”
The endowment’s board inherited this situation: they're poised to begin pouring tens of millions of dollars into an already affluent community, while surrounding counties, with higher levels of poverty, continue to struggle with tough, systemic issues.
“We don't want this to be the perfect place to live surrounded by nothing but poverty and need — that doesn’t help anybody,” Hannah Gage, then vice-chair of the endowment, told WHQR in 2021.
Buster put it plainly earlier this year: “If I lived in Pender County, I would be mad as hell. If my family ... if my grandmother, and my mom, and all my sisters, and everybody gave birth in that hospital — and I saw the numbers and the number was 68 percent of the revenue came from outside of the county ... It's a sincere question that any rational person would have.”
More recently, Buster told WHQR the Endowment is “focusing on New Hanover County,” but that he hopes their efforts will have “ripple effects,” and might attract other funders to neighboring counties.
It’s not just an issue of perceived fairness — there are legitimate questions about whether or not the non-profits in New Hanover County have the capacity to handle tens of millions of dollars. While the Endowment still has a few years to complete the transformation into a private charity, it will eventually be required by law to disperse at least 5% of its market value — roughly $60 million or more a year.
“So there were a couple of things that I told the board when I took the job. One was: $40 million [sic] in one county of roughly 230,000 people, more or less, yeah, it's probably damn near impossible, just to be honest with you,” Buster told WHQR in early January 2023, just after the first grant round. (Note: Buster was referring to a more conservative estimate of grant-making based on the Endowment’s current bylaws, which set the ceiling for spending at 4% of the Endowment's value; eventually, those bylaws will have to be changed to align with IRS requirements, which set a floor, not a ceiling, at 5%).
Ultimately, the decision on where the Endowment’s money goes isn't Buster’s to make — it's up to the board. Gage and others have said they think there will be an “evolution of thought,” as the years go on.
Asked about this in the run-up to the Endowment’s second grant cycle, Cameron said, “this board was given some organizing documents, and we’re going to honor the organizing documents.”
Asked if the Board could change those by-laws, as they had done to allow dipping into the $1.25 billion principal, and will likely need to do with other issues in the future, Cameron repeated, “we're going to abide by our organizing documents.”
Asked if that meant “in perpetuity,” Cameron said, “someone else can change them.”
That’s unlikely to happen anytime soon in the current political climate. When Gage recently came up for reappointment to the Endowment, her words were used against her, despite her insistence that her comments about an ‘evolution’ of thought had been taken out of context and that she was talking about a much more distant future, decades down the line.
Gage was effectively removed, along with the only Black woman (or person) appointed by the county to the Endowment board. The Republican majority on the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners voted instead to appoint Woody White and Pat Kusek, both former Republican commissioners who had been instrumental in the hospital sale process and the Endowment’s foundation.
Because White and Kusek are both Caucasian, this tilted the racial balance of the board, leading Attorney General Stein’s office to voice concerns, saying it was “taking a closer look at these issues” — although, as with the county boundary issue, the Attorney General’s office has taken no legal measures.
County Manager Chris Coudriet, who also took an active part in the sale process and Endowment creation, wrote in an internal email that he was “scared to death” by the prospect of the Endowment straying from its founding documents regarding the county boundary. He said that debating the “mission” so soon after its founding was premature.
Coudriet told WHQR that the county’s two new appointees, having been there at the Endowment’s conception and birth, would take a much more originalist view of its scope and purpose.
Round Two
In September, the Endowment accepted applications in its second grant cycle. This time, the process is taking place with a strategic plan in place, and the Endowment is — cautiously — looking to make larger grants. These could be multi-year grants, in excess of the $250,000 cap from the first cycle. Endowment leaders, like Vice President Lakesha McDay, have said this will likely mean the second cycle will see a higher total amount of grantmaking — and although she said the Endowment “has a number in mind,” it hasn’t been made public.
Buster has said these ‘strategic grants’ should take big swings at issues like workforce development for healthcare, early childhood and K-12 educators, as well as improving healthcare access, preventing youth crime and community violence, and addressing the region’s affordable housing crisis.
He’s also said he wants to see collaborative grant applications — something he admits is a challenge because many nonprofits are working in silos with a scarcity mindset.
“I think some of the barriers are that we don't ask people, 'well, would you like to work with other organizations?' And so that's the first one, just saying that this is something that we care about, we believe that it is crucial to create change. The second is then supporting collaboration. It takes money for organizations to work together, in addition to the work that they do every day, you need resources for convening, you need resources to maybe even hiring additional staff to just work on that one project of collaboration. And so we have to be willing as philanthropy to invest in that,” Buster told WHQR this summer.
Ramping up, financially and conceptually, will take time. McDay told WHQR that most of the second-round grant applications are, like in the first round, ‘responsive grants’ — meaning smaller-scale projects, not big strategic plans aimed at more systemic problems. Still, she said she thinks this year will be markedly different, and that the Endowment had received several “ambitious and exciting” grants (she played her cards close to the vest on details, but an announcement is expected soon).
With considerably more staff, the Endowment has also been able to spend a lot more time meeting with the community. In addition to the ‘Breakfast with Buster’ events, McDay said over 100 community meetings have been held, along with meetings with potential grantees. She said she believes this has helped ease anxiety and confusion over the grantmaking process — and given the Endowment a better sense of where it needs to direct resources. The Endowment, which relied on a PR firm in its first years, has also now hired a communications director, Kevin Maurer, a longtime journalist who has also worked with the nonprofit Cape Fear Collective. Maurer told WHQR he was brought in to help improve the Endowment's ability to communicate with the public during future grant cycles.
One’s a dot, two’s a line, three’s a trend — or so the saying goes. So, the Endowment’s second grant cycle certainly won’t close the book on its trajectory. Ultimately, grant approval, expected to be announced by the end of December, is up to the board. But given the deliberative approach — with more staff, more time, and more intention put into it — McDay and Buster have both said this round will be more indicative of where the Endowment wants to go.
WHQR reporters Kelly Kenoyer, Rachel Keith, and Camille Mojica contributed reporting to this article.
This article was reported through a fellowship supported by the Lilly Endowment and administered by the Chronicle of Philanthropy to expand coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. WHQR Public Media is solely responsible for all content.
