Six Questions for Molly Talbot-Metz, President and CEO of the Mary Black Foundation

Molly Talbot-Metz is the president and CEO of the Mary Black Foundation, a health legacy foundation working to improve health and wellness in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. In 2001, Talbot-Metz joined the foundation as its first program officer and went on to serve in a number of roles before becoming president and CEO in 2018.

In November 2022, the foundation received an unexpected $8 million gift from MacKenzie Scott. In May of the following year, it announced it would use the entirety of Scott’s support to boost behavioral health outcomes and awarded $855,000 in funding to 11 organizations “that are effectively integrating behavioral healthcare into their missions in ways that make it accessible, affordable and culturally relevant.”’

“We have committed to spending out those resources within a five- to seven-year period,” Talbot-Metz told me. “We could have just taken them and added them to our corpus and went about our business, but it was a real special gift to us, so we want to do something special with it, and we’ve decided to focus on behavioral health, which is something that's kind of new and outside of our traditional work.”

I recently caught up with Talbot-Metz to discuss her career trajectory, what advice she’d give her 20-year-old self and how it felt to channel her inner MacKenzie Scott when she rang up leaders at those 11 organizations. Here are some excerpts from that discussion, which have been edited for clarity.

Did you ever envision working in the nonprofit sector?

I had no idea that philanthropy was a career option for me in high school and college. I was planning to be a health teacher and did my student teaching my senior year of college and realized that being in the classroom wasn’t for me (laughs). I decided to look at a master’s in public health programs knowing that community health was something I was interested in.

I was accepted to a number of graduate programs, including one at University of South Carolina, where they offered me a graduate assistantship with a nonprofit, the South Carolina Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy — they've recently changed their name to Fact Forward. I accepted it, and that experience was transformative. I learned about coalition building, advocacy, policy work, grant writing and grants management. Working in the sector prior to joining the foundation gave me the perspectives that have shaped my approach in philanthropy over all these years.

What advice would you give to your 20-year-old self?

To be open to opportunities and take risks. I’ve always been a planner, even as a young person. But I’ve learned over the years that I can’t always control and plan for everything, and I think knowing that sooner would have been a gift over the years.

What’s been the most challenging part about running a foundation? The most rewarding?

Philanthropy as a sector has many big, audacious goals, and the hardest part about leading a place-based foundation is prioritizing where in our community we invest our resources.

We’re a $70 million foundation and grant about $2 million annually. Our vision is to create a community where all residents can achieve health and wellbeing regardless of who they are or where they live. That’s our vision, but that is not what is reality in our community and in many communities. There are many disparities in health outcomes and oftentimes, they are dictated by race or ethnicity, zip codes, census tracts, neighborhoods and income.

We strive to understand those disparities and where our resources are needed the most, but the most challenging part is seeing so many needs and feeling like our resources are never going to be enough.

As for what’s been so rewarding, it’s actually tied to this idea. We can’t do this work alone, but fortunately, we can partner with others. The community engagement, convenings and collaborations that lead to tangible outcomes for people in our community — that is the most rewarding part of my job.

How do you spend your downtime?

My husband and I go bass fishing at a small lake here in Spartanburg. I just started doing Pilates, which has always been something I’ve wanted to do, and I'm really enjoying it. And I love a puzzle, but not traditional puzzles. I’m hooked on this brand of puzzles called Wasgij — jigsaw spelled backwards, and you have to use your imagination. The picture on the box might be a scene, but what you are puzzling is what happens next in the scene. It’s a ton of fun and super challenging.

What’s one book that everyone who reads this should check out?

That’s always a hard question, and I usually default to the last book that I read, which would be “Poverty, by America” by Matthew Desmond. It’s eye-opening in how he explores the ways in which we benefit from keeping people in poverty, which is his assertion in the book. He argues that we can end poverty in this country, but we don't have the will to do it. And on my list to read next is “Of Boys and Men,” by Richard Reeves.

Can you walk me through how you learned about the MacKenzie Scott gift?

In May or June of 2022, I received an email from someone from Bridgespan who wanted to talk some about our work. We had a great conversation and there was an interest in rural health and rural equity, and at the end of the call, they said, “You may never hear about this again, or if you do, you will hear directly from the donor’s team.”

I mentioned it to my board and thought that nothing was going to come from it. Then we received a call in November and the person said, “Are you familiar with MacKenzie Scott?” And I said, “Yes, I don’t know her, but yes, I’m familiar with her.” I was speechless to hear that she was interested in providing us with resources because I had certainly been following her approach to philanthropy and thought of her as a rock star.

Then we heard that she was providing us with $8 million — no restrictions, no timeframes, no requirements for reporting. Just a very generous gift that came with a lot of accolades for the foundation. They liked the work that we were doing and trusted us to use those resources as we see best in our community.

Can you talk about how the foundation is using Scott’s funding to stand up behavioral health work?

Because behavioral health is a new space for us, we are taking some time to research and understand what some of the best practices are, and where some of the gaps are in our community, where we might be able to make an impactful investment. But at the same time, we wanted to get some of those funds out quickly into the community.

We took the spirit of the gift in which it was given, and we selected 11 nonprofit organizations doing work in the behavioral health space, especially among populations that don't have a lot of access to behavioral health services.

And we did the same thing. We picked up the phone and said, “Congratulations, you’ve just received a grant from us through our MacKenzie Scott gift.” That was a lot of fun. I had a little perspective of what her team goes through when you call someone who isn’t expecting anything like that to come their way.

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