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This week, the New Hanover Community Endowment held a public meeting, ostensibly to introduce the broader public to CEO Dan Winslow (who did a media meet and greet earlier this year, but is now fully on a charm offensive), hear feedback from the community, and unveil some changes slated for 2025.
More on those changes in a minute, but first, it’s worth saying a few things about the Endowment’s public meetings.
Legally, they’re a requirement of then-Attorney General Josh Stein’s 2021 ‘non-objection’ to the sale of the New Hanover Regional Medical Center to Novant, which created the Endowment and seeded it with $1.25 billion dollars of the public’s money.
But over the years, they’ve evolved considerably, from a slap-dash and pro-forma affair to the Endowment’s marquee public event: combining testimonials from funding recipients, the ‘unveiling’ of new strategies and grants, and Q&A sessions. Whether stilted or raucous, they’re a good gauge of the public’s relationship with the Endowment.
The first meeting I covered, back in December of 2022, was kind of a disaster, with A/V issues, a scattershot Q&A, and then-CEO William Buster reading through an alphabetical list of grant recipients for over ten minutes. A year later, the A/V issues were under control, but the crowd wasn’t. Buster and Chairman Bill Cameron got shellacked over poor communication, a lack of transparency, and the perceived failure to address affordable housing.
Since then, the Endowment has brought on Raleigh-based PR firm Eckel & Vaughan, and the public meetings have taken on a more polished feel. For some, they’re too polished — as we saw with public pushback on this spring’s meeting. That event was criticized for blocking attendees from directly asking questions and for lacking details in the ‘reveal’ of the Endowment’s affordable housing strategy. It also struck more than a few in the Black community as condescending and pandering (as I discussed with Derrick Anderson on The Newsroom last year).
Tuesday’s event showed the Endowment was willing to tweak the formula. The grant-recipient testimonials – including one from NourishNC’s charismatic director Steve McCrossan – were stronger. A cheesy PR video that had elicited groans and eye-rolls in the spring didn’t return. And there were microphone stands in the crowd, letting attendees directly address Endowment leaders during the Q&A.
That’s not to say there wasn’t still a little public-engagement theater.
For example, the opening act: a group of students from DREAMS performing “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World. Yes, I heard a few people call it out as a distraction from the serious issues on the table – but it’s also pretty innocuous. Plus, DREAMS, which received roughly $800,000 from the Endowment recently, is a good organization — and the kids are adorable, and pretty talented (especially the drummer, in my opinion).
Winslow, who was greeting attendees as they arrived, even joked with me briefly that the band might be too good and upstage him. “It’s all downhill after them,” Winslow said.
But, in all honestly, warming up the room wasn’t a bad idea (and not just because the temperature outside had dropped precipitously). The Endowment has managed to lose a lot of public goodwill despite committing over $100 million to the community.
Think about that — that takes some doing, mostly through poor communication and a lack of transparency (the Endowment is, by design, transitioning into a private foundation unbeholden to public records and meetings law — despite being the caretaker of over a billion public dollars).
Over the last year, the Endowment has seen the abrupt departure of Buster and some of his team, disappointment with the roll-out of its affordable housing strategy, and public pushback on the hiring of Winslow — who, despite his many strengths, lacked any real experience in running a philanthropic foundation. Winslow’s sales pitch — that he would be a “quick study” — didn’t immediately shore up confidence.
Even the scheduling of this week’s meeting had irked some people, including state NAACP president Deborah Dicks Maxwell, who scolded Winslow for holding the meeting on the same night as the New Hanover County school board and Wilmington city council. (Winslow promised to check before scheduling the next meeting.)
All of that to say, it was a tough crowd when Winslow took the stage.
Now, I won’t retread Winslow’s whole speech (you can watch it here) but I want to share a couple of specific takeaways, beyond his general promise to be more engaged, communicative, and transparent with the community than the Endowment has been in the past.
First, Winslow was refreshingly direct about the Endowment’s finances. Earlier in its history, the Endowment was pointlessly coy about exactly when IRS regulations would kick in, requiring 5% of the Endowment's assets to be put into the community (it was chartered with a 4% cap, a bylaw they're currently working on updating). Leaders also sometimes downplayed what that investment would look like, even based on conservative estimates of the Endowment’s projected growth.
None of that from Winslow. He was clear that the Endowment’s transition to a ‘private foundation’ would happen in 2028, when the IRS will require roughly $85 million in grants — and that the growing principal would increase the level of required giving.
“Shortly after that, [it’ll be] over $100 million a year, every year that we must, by law, must reinvest in this community. That's the opportunity,” he told the crowd.
One detail I didn't hear Winslow mention is that the IRS laws have teeth, starting with a 30% excise tax on undistributed funds. As I understand it, that means if the Endowment fell short of its required giving by $10 million, the feds would take $3 million. If they didn’t catch up, that 30% could increase to 100%. I don’t necessarily fault Winslow for omitting this — it’s a few years out before such a worst-case scenario could even play out. But I have to imagine it’s on the mind of at least a few board members, who are very protective of the Endowment’s money, and would like to avoid such a costly (and humiliating) situation — one that would be a public record.
Second, Winslow addressed the Endowment’s failure to lead the conversation about what to do with all that money. Previously, the Endowment had played a passive role, waiting for local nonprofits to bring them projects to fund. In a community that’s long dealt with a scarcity mindset, and had limited frameworks for collaboration, that strategy yielded a slim harvest of big ideas.
Winslow’s proposed solution is creating something of a think tank, identifying problems, commissioning and funding research on the best way to solve them, and publishing the results. Then, based on those results, the Endowment could find someone to put that solution into action.
“We're going to take that study, we're going to turn it into an RFP, a request for proposals. We're going to put that RFP into the nonprofit and the governmental communities, and say, ‘we are looking for somebody who's willing to operationalize and do the solution to problem x.’ And in that way, this county, unique in the United States, because of this opportunity, can become a social innovation laboratory,” Winslow told the crowd.
For what it’s worth, it was always my sense that, as the Endowment's inaugural CEO, Buster also imagined some version of this approach — making the Endowment a place that fostered conversation and ideas instead of simply spitting out money. But it seemed during his relatively short tenure he never got the board’s backing — or the budget and staff — to do it. For his part, Winslow said he has the complete support of the board, many members of which were sitting in the front row watching as he laid out his plans.
Third, Winslow laid out a new approach to stratifying different levels of giving, which he called the “grants rainbow.” (For the record, I did later ask about why the ‘grants rainbow’ had such a muted, almost Soviet color palette: three bands of grey alongside muted blue, green, and orange. I suggested maybe going with actual rainbow colors. Winslow noted that those are the Endowment’s branded colors. As for why he chose a rainbow in the first place, he noted, “there’s gold at the end of the rainbow.”)
In the past, most notably in the Endowment’s first funding round, the 13-member board was fairly involved in the minutiae of dozens of once-a-year grants. Since then, the Endowment has wisely moved away from a rigid annual cycle — dubbed the ‘Christmas model’ by some because all the grants were announced in December — to a rolling application process. The new approach lets the Endowment’s Community Advisory Council (CAC) handle smaller grants (under $5,000) and essentially put them on a consent agenda for the board to approve.
That’s good, because the CAC had been sidelined in past years, even though it was one of Stein’s requirements. It also lets the Endowment be nimble; for one non-hypothetical example, it could react quickly to the needs of an underfunded, largely volunteer-run warming shelter that’s running out of supplies, without needing an in-depth discussion by the board.
It also separates out ‘capacity grants’ which could pass through a fiscal sponsor (Winslow suggested the Arts Council as an example) to individuals or grassroots organizations that don’t meet the regular requirements for a larger grant.
Then there are ‘project grants’ — what Winslow called “one and done” grants (buying a vehicle or a building, or a one-time project). Moving into larger funding levels, where the board would start to take a more active role, there are 'operations grants' — unrestricted funding for established non-profits aligned with the Endowment’s goals — and the 'strategic grants' the Endowment has been focusing on for the last year or so.
Getting the board out of the day-to-day operations and smaller grant requests is a good thing, both because it’s not what boards are supposed to be doing (according to most experts of philanthropy I’ve spoken to), and because it frees them up to tackle major “social impact investing.” That’s the big-picture level grantmaking — the “hundred-plus million dollar effort for a really big idea,” as Winslow put it — that the Endowment hasn’t quite broken into yet.
All of this, Winslow said, would be accompanied by a new website, launching early next year, that includes more transparency around the grant process, criteria, and diligence checklist. (He would later tell me, excitedly, that they’d scored “theendowment.org,” which he was shocked to learn was up for grabs.)
The last important takeaway from Winslow’s speech was that he’s eager to staff up. For years, the board has been intent on running the Endowment as a fairly lean organization — after several years they had only hired network officers for two of their four ‘pillars’ of investment. When Winslow met with the press this summer, he had seemingly caught the board’s drift, saying he wanted “the least number of staff” necessary to run an “efficient” organization.
But on Tuesday, Winslow announced the Endowment would “be hiring a bunch of people in the new year,” with some positions — handling communications, HR, and VP of programs and grants — already posted. (When I met with Winslow the following day, he added that he would likely start with consultants on “day one,” just to get the ball rolling, and then look for “local talent” from New Hanover County.)
Now, I did not bump my head this week and suddenly become unquestioningly credulous. I understand that everything Winslow laid out is contingent on the board’s support and patience. Some of Winslow’s suggestions can be implemented quickly, but the really big swings will take time — in particular turning the Endowment into a laboratory of ideas that can churn out paradigm-shifting projects with nine-figure budgets.
Watching the crowd that night, and talking to a few non-profit leaders after Winslow’s speech, I could sense some cautious optimism, but also plenty of hard-earned skepticism.
The questions from the audience, which took up the last segment of the meeting, fleshed some of that out. The Endowment’s panel featured Winslow, chair Bill Cameron, and Shannon Winslow (no relation to Dan, but the odds-on favorite for Cameron’s successor as chair).
Several questions got at the Endowment’s exclusive focus on New Hanover County — something Stein has been critical of (though stopping short of any legal action). Some attendees were prodding for workarounds, while an online question asked why the surrounding counties were “overlooked.”
“They were not overlooked. They were excluded on purpose by the founding documents,” Winslow said — the bluntest formulation of the Endowment’s go-to answer to the question.
Winslow acknowledged that residents of the surrounding counties may have put a lot of healthcare dollars into the New Hanover Regional Medical Center (in fact, in the year prior to the sale, then-CEO John Gizdic told the Wilmington Business Journal over half of their patients, and “the most growth” had come from outside New Hanover). But, Winslow argued, only New Hanover County residents were “on the hook for the balance sheet,” adding, “if the county hospital needed to raise taxes to support its operations, who would pay? It would only be the residents of New Hanover County.”
That’s true — but hypothetical. The county didn't raise taxes to support the hospital as it grew into a multi-billion-dollar institution, and for many years prior to the sale, hospital officials were fond of saying they got no financial assistance from the county.
In Winslow’s defense, that was long before his time here, and he is likely reiterating what the board has told him. To the point, Cameron returned to one of his key refrains, saying the board was “given a set of founding documents” and has to live by them. He compared the Endowment’s charter to the Constitution of the United States (although he also acknowledged it was “probably a poor analogy,” perhaps sensing that it begged the question of the many important and consequential constitutional amendments).
Another pointed question, from Sonya Bettetone Patrick, chair of the New Hanover County chapter of the National Black Leadership Caucus, asked what the Endowment would do to promote “healing the disparities as a result of the 1898 massacre” and noting the recent demolition of the building housing the Wilmington Journal, which took up the mantle of the Black press from The Daily Record, which was burnt to the ground in 1898.
Winslow said he fully supported a renaissance of the Black middle class and wanted to empower Black residents. When Patrick pushed him on helping the Wilmington Journal, however, he said only, “we’ll consider every application on its merits” — the default answer to questions about specific potential grants, lacking the proactive spirit Winslow had espoused earlier in the evening.
Former CAC member LeShonda Wallace had an extended back-and-forth with Winslow. Her initial question was about eliminating bias in the grant process – and Winslow had a fairly detailed answer, mostly focusing on the new and clearer information about the process that would be online soon. Wallace sharpened her question to focus on the individual board members. She didn't raise the issue explicitly, but appointees to the board have been less diverse and more ideologically conservative over the last year, leading to criticism from some, including Stein's office (others, I should say, have told me they've seen the trend as a necessary corrective).
“The buck stops with the board,” Wallace said, “what are the processes to mitigate bias? Bias is on the individual, not the checklist.”
Cameron stepped in — but also kind of side-stepped the question. He acknowledged that the board should not be as heavily involved in the grant review process as it had in the past.
“The board, for two years, spent [an] unsustainable amount of time reviewing hundreds of grants. And you, all of y’all, this community does not want the board of this endowment doing that, we should not be doing that,” he said.
But instead of addressing the issue of bias on the board – or how it could be ‘mitigated' – Cameron suggested that while the board ultimately makes the decisions, staff would be “the ones that are going through the checklist and the matrixes and those things, you know, in a very fair, even-handed manner.”
Not every question was inherently critical. Pastor Rob Campbell, who develops affordable housing projects, asked about the possibility of low-interest loans from the Endowment, aside from grants. Winslow laughed, asking him if he had been “sitting in on a meeting I had last week,” and said the Endowment is indeed “thinking about things along those lines.”
There were also some open-ended questions from Harper Peterson, former Wilmington mayor and one-term state senator. Peterson was a vocal critic of the hospital sale, and he recently retooled an organization formed to protest that process to focus on the Endowment. Heal Our People’s Endowment, with Peterson at the helm, has been critical of several moves by the Endowment, including hiring Winslow – which Peterson called “a slap in the face.”
And while Peterson got his digs in — criticizing the Endowment’s line in the sand on the county boundary — he also seemed resigned to Winslow’s leadership, pivoting to ask how he would tackle three major issues: youth gun violence, mental health, and water pollution.
Again, there was palpable skepticism — even cynicism — in the crowd that night. But if a dedicated critic like Peterson can try to focus on the good that the Endowment can do over its past missteps, then that’s something.
The day after the event, I went to Winslow’s office on North Third Street. I was one of many 30-minute meetings Winslow had booked that day. It was scheduled as a “one-on-one meeting,” but Chief Marketing Officer Jodi-Tatiana Charles sat with us and, after some off-the-record pleasantries, recorded our chat (perhaps to make sure I didn’t misquote Winslow, maybe just for posterity).
Winslow covered much of the same material as he had the night before — but with more detail. He teased plans for internships, business consulting for newer nonprofits, public engagement, impact reports to measure what effect the Endowment’s work has had so far, and — of course — the new website (chagrined, Winslow acknowledged, “our current website, which is a disaster, as you know.”)
He reiterated the scope of the opportunity, the sheer magnitude of what the Endowment could do, not just with grants but in fostering ideas and leveraging outside investments. Winslow noted that the real scale of what the Endowment can do hasn’t taken hold in the public imagination yet.
“People don’t get it,” he said. And I agree. Some folks think the Endowment is and always will be a glorified ATM. And some are okay with that. But, either way, changing that perception might be one of Winslow’s biggest challenges.
Another bright throughline was transparency, which I was happy to hear, though the proof of that pudding will be in the eating.
On the way out of the office, as the next 30-minute meeting (another reporter) was set to start, Charles told me, “you’re going to see us a lot.”
Lingering by the exit for a moment, we talked a bit about local reporting. Charles worked in Boston-area media for a decade — “as you know, we don’t play around,” she said — and also served as Governor Mitt Romney’s deputy press secretary. So she’s been around the block.
When I mentioned something I’d heard off the record, she laughed.
“Come on now,” she said. “On the record is on the record. Off the record is on the record.”
The joke is, of course, that there are no hard and fast rules, just relationships. If a reporter hears something, they can’t un-hear it — and there are no magic words that cause a journalist to un-learn some new detail.
It was refreshing to hear a candid acknowledgment of this journalistic fact of life from someone working at the Endowment, an institution that has played its cards close to its vest — even when, in my humble opinion, that made their lives much harder.
Now, I don’t expect radical transparency from the Endowment. I don’t, to be honest, expect any radical changes — not right away, at least. But if they do pursue a more open, more engaged, and more proactive approach to philanthropy, that won’t be a bad thing, even if they fail here and there. Especially if they’re allowed to fail here and there without the board recoiling into the safety of old habits.
Winslow calls his approach “philanthropy plus.” I don't know if the name will stick, but even if you’re not one for catchy branding, he’s right about the “plus.” Because the Endowment will need to do more than it has in the past if it wants to engage and win over the public. And it will have to really lean into that "plus" to put $100 million into our relatively small community each year and — barring the total collapse of the stock market — maintain that commitment for generations to come.
