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On Wednesday, The Endowment held its most recent public meeting. As has started to coalesce as tradition, there were youth speakers, highly-produced videos, and a broad recap of The Endowment’s recent and overall work.
Perhaps by necessity, it’s a big-picture presentation: it would be difficult to recap the full depth and scope of The Endowment’s hundreds of grants, with commitments totalling hundreds of millions of dollars.
I heard plenty of buzz about The Endowment’s $116-million grant to help support projects associated with the school bond. There are still lingering questions about the timing and details of the grant, and why it’s conditioned on the bond passing, but in general, the response has been positive.
Less talked about but also a promising development is The Endowment’s new dashboard, which provides some pretty stark data visualizations on issues including health inequality, housing costs, teen and young adult behavioral issues and violence, and racial disparities in literacy levels. There’s a lot of good work that could come out of that data.
There was plenty of praise, some of which felt obsequious, some genuine. For all the excellent work The Endowment has done, its clout and financial power have made many in the nonprofit world extremely tentative to criticize the foundation or its leadership — it's not that everyone is bending the knee, but there’s a lot of deference.
And, to be fair, The Endowment has increasingly become the only game in town, both because governments from the local to federal level have pulled back funding from social programs, and because The Endowment’s impressive footprint has discouraged some other foundations from investing as much money here, especially when it comes to larger grants. That’s something I’ve both heard from numerous local nonprofits and experienced in my own search for grants.
[Full disclosure: WHQR has received several community grants in the $5-15,000 range from The Endowment, including funding through the Arts Council of Wilmington and New Hanover County.]
There were some criticisms, as we reported this week, including questions about the seemingly evolving explanation for The Endowment’s decision to abandon its $6-million grant to support the Northside Food Co-op. We’re working on some follow-up reporting there, so I won’t spend too much time on it here.
There was one thing I did want to touch on from the recent meeting: the use of the word “transparency.”
There were two occasions in particular that caught my ear. One followed some sharp criticism from Suzanne Wertman, director of the recently formed Coastal Journalism Hub, who told The Endowment’s leadership to “do better,” including in its openness with the media.
Wertman was referring, in part, to The Endowment's decision not to conduct media interviews during the meeting.
Board Chair Shannon Winslow responded that “we have been extremely transparent, because those that are not transparent, they do not publicly go out and have the invitation like we did, and also live stream [the meeting]. So again, thank you for your feedback, but I will disagree that we have done a phenomenal job of making sure that we get that out and invite the dialog.”
In past years, The Endowment conducted media interviews after the public meeting or the following day. Original CEO William Buster spent a lot of time in the WHQR studio. His successor, Dan Winslow, proactively invited all the media outlets to his office for 30-minute, one-on-one interviews the day after his second public meeting. But, following his abrupt departure, Endowment leaders offered a scant 15 minutes for all media at their December public meeting.
This year, there was no offer for interviews. And, over the last six months, WHQR has been turned down repeatedly when we’ve requested sit-down conversations.
The Endowment did give an interview to WWAY. And, for what it's worth, happy they’re talking to someone in the press. I wish they would talk to us, but we’re working on that.
My point here is not to grind an axe over access, but to think about the use of the word “transparent.” The public meeting is, after all, a requirement of law, part of then-Attorney General Josh Stein’s agreement to allow the sale of New Hanover Regional Medical Center to Novant Health, which created the original $1.3-billion foundation, née the New Hanover Community Endowment.
Publicly noticing the meeting seems like a legal requirement, and live-streaming strikes me as the bare minimum for an organization with an $8-million operating budget. These things are good, and necessary, but not sufficient to achieve transparency.
Take the second example, where CEO Sophie Dagenais responded to a question about our reporting, which suggested that The Endowment was trying to condition some grants on the participation of the City of Wilmington and New Hanover County.
“I actually took the opportunity of demystifying the myth that you just shared with everyone, and all I will say is we could not be more transparent. Anyone can go on our website, you will see every grant, the dollars, the purpose. You want a copy of the grant agreement. Call us if you can't get it on our website. There is absolutely no truth to what has been said,” Dagenais said.
Our reporting on this was based on numerous reliable sources, including one who went on the record (which, as I’ve said, is rare in the local nonprofit world). We had reached out to The Endowment and were told they wouldn’t discuss the issue. We even called Dagenais directly on her personal phone and left a message. She didn’t respond. We would have welcomed an interview, or even a written statement and, if we’d been wrong, we might never have run the story in the first place.
Listening back to the meeting, and hearing “we could not be more transparent,” I wondered what exactly she meant by that word. (A particular line from The Princess Bride sprang to mind.)
Transparency is one of those buzzwords that sometimes gets repeated to the point of meaninglessness. And there are, to be fair, a number of different ways you could conceptualize the word. When journalists say it, they tend to mean two things. First, compliance with sunshine laws, such as the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) at the federal level, and public records and open meetings laws at the state and local levels. And second, the willingness of public officials to go on the record and explain their decisions.
Now, in some ways, The Endomwent is simply not built for this kind of transparency. It was deliberately designed to thwart sunshine laws that would have required the board to hold public meetings and allowed the public to review internal communications like emails, memos, and even board members’ communications about Endowment business.
Back in 2020, as the county was finalizing the hospital-sale decision, it hired a consultant to help shape The Endowment’s founding documents: one-term state representative Don Munford. He offered an openly cynical view of public records law, based on his experience of legislators subverting transparency by working out key details of bills in private before voting in public. Munford also argued that a public foundation would become political, to the detriment of its work.
Need to catch up on the backstory? Try this deep dive: The New Hanover Community Endowment's uneven path to 'transformational change'
Reasonable people can disagree about Munford’s point of view (I certainly have), but whatever you think, his input had lasting consequences. One was that Novant, not the county, ended up with the most appointees to The Endowment board (because having a minority appointment power distanced the county from the foundation, weakening potential claims that The Endowment itself was public). Another was that The Endowment became private: no meeting minutes, no public records requests, and while the grant amounts are public, there’s little transparency around The Endowment’s salaries, contracting, or other expenses.
For only one example: The Endowment has declined to reveal how much it has paid the consultants currently undertaking the ‘landscape analyses,’ which are intended to guide their future grantmaking. A spokesperson told us this was, “As a practice, out of respect for our vendors and partners, and to protect The Endowment and the community we serve, we don’t share vendor payment details. Doing so could distort future pricing or prompt competitive adjustments from other vendors, which could impact our ability to secure fair and independent bids.”
As I’ve noted before, this is directly opposed to how governments operate their bid processes, which are transparent precisely for the sake of protecting the public and encouraging competitive bids, ensuring the public gets the most benefit from their money.
The Endowment, it bears repeating, is in charge of public money, but it operates in private. Private meetings, private communication, private bids.
Now, Winslow and Dagenais did not make these decisions; they inherited them. And there’s a case to be made for honoring them. And there are reasons besides statutes and founding documents to remain private.
I’ve heard arguments that if The Endowment held open meetings or released internal emails and documents, sensitive discussions of local nonprofits would become public. You can imagine scenarios where the capability or stability of a popular nonprofit was questioned, even disparaged, as part of a difficult but necessarily frank conversation about what that organization could and could not handle. I understand the concern that, at the risk of oversimplifying things, feelings could be hurt in the nonprofit world.
But, not to put too fine a point on it, many of those feelings are already hurt. And, over time, people will be able to read the tea leaves of what The Endowment is doing, and why.
Notably, sometimes the tea leaves are wrong (or, at least, misread). In those cases, The Endowment leadership tends to bristle. I’ve been accused of misrepresenting or lying (or even 'mystifying') about The Endowment, but my defense has always been that I have done my level best to peer inside their black box – and, more to the point, that much of what I’ve said and written about The Endowment would be largely unnecessary if they were more transparent.
But it's not just about the press, which I admit can be hawkish about transparency for its own sake. It's also about the public, whose $1.7 billion is being managed by The Endowment. And it’s about nonprofits that are trying to figure out how to get support from The Endowment. They can, of course, see what The Endowment has funded, but the approval process is unclear. What’s more, they don’t see what doesn’t get funded, which makes it harder to avoid blind alleys and to learn from past grant applications that didn’t work out.
Both Wilmington and New Hanover County have (or had) fairly transparent processes for providing non-profit funding. There’s been some bruised egos and well-earned frustrations there, but at least it’s out in the open. In fact, the city has been working on making its grants program more structured, providing specific goals so that nonprofits essentially know what they're getting into. And there are a lot of other examples of how local governments work with nonprofits in a way that's out in the open.
Which brings me to my larger point. The Endowment is not required to be transparent, which has sometimes been used as an excuse not to be transparent. I’ve never heard any suggestion that they could not, as a compromise, attempt (or at least aspire to) the level of transparency of local government. This, to me, seems like at least worth a discussion, given The Endowment manages public money, is tasked with the public good, and is explicitly guided by the strategic goals of New Hanover County.
To be clear, no government that I am aware of practices total transparency. County commissioners, city council members, and legislators all meet in private. Cynical or not, Munford was right: in the general assembly, decisions are often made, not in committee, or on the floor, but through a series of closed-door meetings, phone calls, and other private communications that are not subject to public records requests.
The same could effectively be said for city council and county commissioners, who, of course, will always have conversations away from the public eye, shaping the essence of ordinances and resolutions that only later see the light of day. There are also legal exceptions to local government transparency — some sensible, some frustrating — for personnel issues, real estate transactions, and economic incentives.
But at the same time, the press and the general public have meaningful tools to learn about local government decisions before they are made. Some work is done proactively by the government itself, like posting agendas and documents ahead of meetings. Even when the turnaround time is just a few days, that’s often plenty of time for the press to get the word out, and for the public to weigh in. Over the last decade, I can think of several unpopular decisions that were significantly tweaked or pulled entirely between the release of a meeting agenda and the meeting itself.
Yeoman’s work is also done by the press and inquisitive members of the public, who request emails and other documents which, in the ways I discussed last week, help explain the how and why of government.
And some of it comes from the public debate of elected officials. Take the budget process, which, even with an all-Democratic city council like Wilmington’s, means negotiations between different perspectives and priorities. You may or may not like the end result of any given debate, but you get to see the people in power make their cases. And when November comes around, you can have your say.
Not so, for The Endowment. Posting information, however comprehensive, about a grant after it’s approved is, again, necessary but insufficient to achieve real transparency. Focus groups and listening sessions are good ways to hear from the public, but if the decisions based on that input are still made in private, it's still a closed-off process. Telling the public what you’ve done is radically different than making the public a meaningful part of that decision.
All of this is to say, The Endowment can point to its founding documents, or the need for discretion and sensitivity, when it comes to doing things privately as opposed to publicly. And I’ll note that, in the end, that's not likely to prevent them from doing tremendous good for the community.
But what they can't do, at least in my editorial opinion, is claim total transparency. Not unless that word no longer means what I think it means.
