How Giving to Historically Black Colleges and Universities Finally Went Mainstream
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Founders Library at Howard University. Derek E. Morton, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Last June, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and his wife Patty Quillin made a $120 million commitment split equally among two HBCUs, Spelman and Morehouse colleges, and the United Negro College Fund (UNCF). Hastings, who was deeply affected by the pandemic’s toll on Black communities and the death of George Floyd, implored fellow funders to give these institutions a second look.
A couple of weeks later, the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis made a $40 million gift to HBCU LeMoyne-Owen College. “We were so inspired by the recent gifts to Spelman and Morehouse—and that they each received $40 million—and we looked at that and said, ‘Well, we can do that, too, we have the resources to do that,’” foundation President Bob Fockler told Diverse.
In late July, MacKenzie Scott, citing inequities in our systems, announced that she had given $100 million to six HBCUs as part of a $1.7 billion round of grantmaking.
Over the following five months, Morgan Stanley, IBM, AT&T, Dominion Energy, TikTok, Southern Company, Michael Bloomberg, Seth and Beth Klarman, and longtime champion Robert F. Smith all announced major HBCU commitments. February brought new pledges from Goldman Sachs, Home Depot, FedEx, Intel, and the North American business of Diageo, a global beverage company. Toward the end of the month, Calvin E. Tyler Jr. and his wife, Tina, made a $15 million gift to Calvin’s alma mater, Morgan State University. The Baltimore Sun reported that the gift is believed to be the largest alumnus contribution to any HBCU.
This astonishing surge in giving underscores how a formerly niche funding area can go mainstream “gradually, then suddenly,” to borrow a phrase from Ernest Hemingway.
It goes something like this: For years, devoted advocates feel like voices in the wilderness. Over time, their message takes root thanks to perseverance, small-but-steady funder support, and political and social developments that steer public attitudes. Eventually, a high-profile billionaire whose giving dwarfs institutional funding to date steps up with a transformative mega-gift. Others see the example and join the fray until donations that were once outliers become commonplace.
HBCUs still have a long way to go before they reach philanthropic parity, but eight months after Hastings and Quillin’s announcement, the ecosystem is flush with new backers who view these institutions as critical partners in their efforts to advance equity, economic opportunity and social justice. Most encouragingly, it appears they’re in it for the long haul.
“The world has changed, and many corporations are looking to include all segments of our society, especially our HBCUs, because they are the foundation of the Black community and one of the key components in leveling the playing field,” Dr. Danielle Robinson, head of corporate responsibility at Diageo North America told me. “I do see the ‘HBCU effect’ continuing and becoming more sustainable.”
Pre-2020 momentum
Just six years ago, HBCU giving was still a niche funding area. IP’s L.S. Hall listed some of the field’s most important institutional grantmakers, like the Kresge Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and corporations like Walmart, Apple and Toyota. “Despite this support,” Hall wrote, “many HBCUs struggle financially.”
In 2017, funders made 462 gifts of $1 million or more to higher education. HBCUs received two of them. At that time, the largest gift ever made to an HBCU was Bill Cosby’s $20 million gift to Spelman—in 1998!
The tide began to turn in 2018, when Ronda Stryker and William Johnston made a $30 million donation to Spelman. HBCUs started to secure the kinds of gifts normally received by predominantly white institutions (PWIs) as funders began to respond to changing social, political and economic conditions.
In assessing this upsurge in support, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Eric Stirgus cited “national conversations about racially charged issues such as deadly police encounters with African Americans.” The Movement for Black Lives was on the rise, the Trump era was serving as a reminder to mainstream Americans of the prevalence of racism, and donors were looking to HBCUs as a versatile way to advance equity.
For example, Robert F. Smith’s high-profile gift to Morehouse College called attention to the student debt crisis that disproportionately affects students of color. The Karsh Family Foundation’s $10 million gift to Howard addressed racial inequities in the STEM field.
And just as Greta Thunberg’s climate advocacy shaped public opinion around the former niche funding area of climate change, cultural forces were elevating these institutions. Beyonce’s 2018 Coachella performance paying tribute to HBCUs probably did more to educate the American public about these schools than any philanthropic gift.
The end of 2019 found Lodriguez Murray, UNCF’s senior vice president of public policy and government affairs, in a bullish mood. Speaking to Education Dive’s Natalie Schwartz, he said, “You’re starting to see just the precipice of the… renaissance that these institutions can undergo so that students who need this type of investment are receiving it and getting the proper outcomes they deserve.”
Enter the mega-donors
The twin shocks of the pandemic and the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans, which prompted nationwide demands for racial justice, were the pivotal events that led Hastings, Quillin and Scott to make their headline-grabbing HBCU gifts.
Hastings, who has known UNCF President Michael L. Lomax for close to a decade, had initially planned to give Spelman, Morehouse and the UNCF $1 million each (Lomax had introduced the couple to Spelman and Morehouse). Then the pandemic hit. The gift from Hastings and Quillin swelled from $3 million to $120 million.
Speaking to the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin last June, Lomax said the gift will help his organization raise $1 billion to address the effects of COVID-19. “That’s the scale of the need,” he said. “So we’re at about $60 million today; $40 million of that is from Patti and Reed. We need not 10 times that amount. We need almost 20 times that amount.”
Hastings told Sorkin that the death of George Floyd was “the straw that broke the camel’s back, I think, for the size of the donation.”
Scott, writing in Medium last July, said she “watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror. Life will never stop finding fresh ways to expose inequities in our systems; or waking us up to the fact that a civilization this imbalanced is not only unjust, but also unstable.” In mid-December, the Washington Post’s Nick Anderson and Lauren Lumpkin pegged Scott’s total 2020 HBCU giving at $560 million.
New entrants in a growing field
The combined 2020 HBCU giving from Hastings, Quillin, Scott, Bloomberg and Smith stands at approximately $830 million. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that HBCU giving has gone mainstream. It simply means a handful of billionaires gave HBCUs a ton of money.
Fortunately, there are ways to gauge the relative strength and depth of the field. One way to do this is to look at whether the funding space is picking up what business analysts might call “new entrants,” or unexpected donors who are recognizing the potential in backing the cause.
Consider American-British billionaire Len Blavatnik. While he’s been a prodigious higher ed giver for some time, his millions typically flowed to elite research universities. Last June, Blavatnik and Warner Music Group launched a $100 million fund supporting “charitable causes related to the music industry, social justice and campaigns against violence and racism.” One of the grantees, Howard University, will receive a five-year, multimillion-dollar grant to launch a new music business center.
So here, we have a donor with a footprint in higher ed giving who, for the first time, has folded HBCUs into his priorities, a pretty encouraging sign. The same could be said for a number of new corporate donors.
In February, beverage company Diageo made a $10 million pledge to fund endowments at 25 HBCUs. “While it is the first time we’ve made such an investment with HBCUs, we’ve had a history of working with these institutions, particularly as part of our recruitment strategy,” Diageo’s Robinson said.
She told me the company worked with some of its African American employees to identify ways it could provide opportunities for future leaders and “make the most meaningful impact in the Black community.” The company landed on endowment gifts for HBCUs as an obvious answer.
In mid-February, Goldman Sachs announced it would provide support for the Deep South Economic Mobility Collaborative, a $130 million partnership of eight HBCUs, seven cities, and nonprofit community development financial institution Hope Enterprise, to support the region’s businesses. Soon after, the bank announced a five-year, $25 million commitment focused on finance training for HBCU students.
Other corporations are building on their past support for HBCUs, like Intel, which announced $5 million over the next five years to North Carolina Central University to create a new center serving diverse professionals in legal and policy fields.
Add it all up, and you’ve got a broad array of corporations—generally some of the least adventurous philanthropic players—entering a space that is mostly new territory for them.
An influx of new donors
Another way to gauge the relative strength of HBCU giving is what’s happening beyond the realm of billionaires. PWI fundraising peers are clearly relying less on “bottom” and “middle-of-the-pyramid” donors, as many university development departments seem to be putting all their eggs in the mega-donor basket. But the benefits of a broader and deeper donor base transcend fundraising returns.
As Yale President Peter Salovey said while lamenting the school’s plunging alumni donation rate, strong participation creates “a sense of psychological commitment by alumni to the university.” Non-billionaire donor support isn’t absolutely critical—but it’s sure nice to have.
At least some HBCUs are seeing a surge in this kind of support. On March 14, Spelman President Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell announced the college had reached 96% of its campaign’s $250 million goal. The campaign, “Spelman Ascends,” is scheduled to end in 2024. As for the UNCF, which has goals and a donor base similar to those of HBCUs, Lomax said that “over the course of 2020, we saw 100,000 new donors come to UNCF. Our fundraising has increased by over 400%.”
Lomax then went on to identify the causes for the fund’s success. “What we saw after COVID, and then particularly after the murder of George Floyd, was an outpouring of public belief that racial inequality, injustice and racism had to end, with a vice president who attended Howard University, with mayors across this country who attended historically Black colleges, civic leaders who are fighting against voter suppression and for civic engagement, like Stacey Abrams, a Spelman alumna.
“I think more people are recognizing that these are incredible institutions worthy of investment and worthy of public support.”
Resetting expectations
All of this illustrates how a cause gets to the next level of philanthropic support, and unfortunately, it seems to take more than just worthy recipients. For years, we’ve been pointing out the outsized potential impact of backing HBCUs, while watching massive checks fall into the lap of Ivy after Ivy.
HBCUs’ astonishing nine-month fundraising haul reminds us that much like political change, it takes a confluence of factors—shifts in public attitudes, tireless relationship-building, relentless advocacy—to propel a funding niche into the philanthropic mainstream.
And as we know, donors like to keep tabs on their peers. Hastings, Quillin and Scott encouraged their fellow funders to support HBCUs in their broader efforts to address racial injustice and inequality. Consciously or otherwise, that’s exactly what these funders did.
Which brings us to an important question: Is this surge of support for HBCUs a momentary blip, or is it more sustainable? I’m inclined to say it’s the latter.
While the pandemic will eventually subside, memories of its disproportionate impact on communities of color will remain ingrained in our collective memory, and HBCUs have become an important part of the conversation on racial equity. As long as funders are committed to equity, inclusion and economic mobility, we can expect HBCU giving to be part of the grantmaking mix.
In addition, recall Lomax’s point that the UNCF needs $1 billion just to offset the pandemic’s impact. By laying out a long runway, Lomax is taking this unique moment in history to reset expectations. Advocates are making it clear that funders’ newfound HBCU support can’t be seen as a short-term response or an aberration. A lot of ground must be covered before reaching any sort of equity in higher ed funding.
Lomax picked up on this theme in his must-read February 21 piece in The Atlantic. As welcome as the recent record gifts are, “they still are far more modest than those made to many PWIs in the past decade,” he wrote. “Not far from Howard, the University of Maryland at College Park received a $219 million gift. Nearby Georgetown University received a donation of $100 million.”
Such gifts should be the norm for HBCUs, Lomax wrote. “Instead, it’s an exception, because of unspoken and unrecognized bias against HBCUs among philanthropic donors.”
