What's on the Menu at Blue Meridian? More Place-Based, Multisector Partnerships
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Blue Meridian is backing work in San Antonio and Dallas, as well as in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Photo: vivooo/shutterstock
Blue Meridian Partners, a philanthropic collaborative of some pretty major players and one of the nation’s largest funders of antipoverty work, is ramping up its commitment to place-based, multisector partnerships. Last month, the collaborative announced three new grants of $50 million each in three communities: Spartanburg, South Carolina; San Antonio, Texas; and Dallas, Texas. Matching support from local and regional players in the three communities has raised nearly $185 million more. And that’s just so far; Blue Meridian expects each local partnership to continue raising money, unlocking billions more in public and private funding during the next decade or so.
If “place-based, multisector partnerships” sounds familiar, that’s because it is a growing trend in philanthropy, and one we've been covering. The Ballmer Group, for example, one of Blue Meridian’s partners, recently gave $175 million to the national education organization StriveTogether in a separate grant, part of its growing focus on place-based, multisector partnerships to create system-level change. The growing popularity of this approach is a positive development in philanthropy, particularly for thorny problems with many parts. Multisector collaboration allows philanthropy to play to its strengths, including independence and the ability to take risks.
This latest set of grants comes through Blue Meridian’s Place Matters portfolio, one of the group’s five “investment portfolios” dedicated to finding and scaling ways to increase economic and social mobility. Place Matters has funded place-based partnerships in nearly 20 communities since its launch in 2020, committing more than $415 million. This latest investment is a chance to go deeper, channeling what Blue Meridian believes will be a transformative amount of capital to communities poised for change.
In something of an understatement, Jim Shelton, president and chief investment and impact officer of Blue Meridian Partners, (and former Deputy Secretary of Education in the Obama administration, among other illustrious positions), said, “We tend to invest at a different scale than a lot of people do. It takes real resources to do this kind of complicated multisector work.”
Big money for big problems
Blue Meridian Partners was created in 2016 as a project of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, as we’ve written before. Since becoming an independent nonprofit in 2018, it has evolved into a leading antipoverty funder in the U.S., harnessing some of the biggest fortunes in philanthropy.
“General partners” at Blue Meridian are those committing at least $50 million over five years, and include the Ballmer Group, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, MacKenzie Scott and the Duke Endowment, among others. “Impact partners” commit at least $15 million and include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Aviv Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and others. (See a complete list of partners here).
Blue Meridian operates with what it calls an “investor mindset,” viewing a good return on investment as one that has high social impact. Its approach involves pooling resources, focusing on effective, efficient funding strategies, and supporting local partners (or “investees”) with everything from advice and capacity-building support to help marshaling and analyzing evidence to support their work.
One big advantage of philanthropic collaboratives, especially ones as large as Blue Meridian, is that they can back major projects and initiatives on a scale that the individual partners might not be able to do on their own. Take, for instance, Blue Meridian’s $124 million investment in the HBCU Transformation Project last fall.
For its current, big-ticket investment through its Place Matters portfolio, Blue Meridian strategically picked three locations with different characteristics, strengths and challenges. By focusing on communities with a range of characteristics, the group hopes to build a toolkit of sorts for working in these different types of communities around the nation.
Funding in diverse communities to generate replicable knowledge
The city of Spartanburg, South Carolina, for example (population roughly 40,000), sits within a county that ranks in the bottom 10% nationwide for economic mobility. It faces the challenge of improving its profile to attract more business and grow. On the positive side, Spartanburg is a “high trust” community, Shelton said, with a strong backbone and major participation from the school system, mayor and chamber of commerce. The city had already begun collaborating across sectors, with focused neighborhood-level and neighborhood-specific strategies.
San Antonio, on the other hand, has nearly 1.5 million people — and hot tourist attractions that draw visitors each year, including the Alamo, the Riverwalk and the largest Mexican market in the U.S. San Antonio has also become something of an exurb of Austin, drawing young people away from that ever-more-pricey hub. From a community change perspective, San Antonio has a far more distributed leadership model than Spartanburg, Shelton said. “It also has a strong backbone, but a very different model and a multitude of community partners that have signed up for specific outcomes and are accountable for delivering on them. There is a shifting of power from the center to many stakeholders.” Shelton also pointed out that San Antonio does not have the traditional neighborhood geography of Spartanburg.
Dallas, while also in Texas, represents yet a third type of community. It has one of the most robust cradle-to-career backbones in the country, according to Shelton, and a Child Poverty Action Lab that works with neighborhoods to solve specific problems like teen pregnancy. It’s wealthier and more sophisticated than the other two communities in terms of data use, working with large-scale partners and engaging in more extensive policy work.
These three communities have each developed a multi-year “cradle to career” economic and social mobility plan. Local leaders have corralled dozens of partners for planning and funding. The result is that in all three cases, the Blue Meridian grants of $50 million supplement larger tranches of local support and energy.
In Spartanburg, the leading local partner, Spartanburg Academic Movement, raised $100 million for its Movement 2030 plan. The county’s initiative will focus on education, specifically an initiative to ensure that 65% of its children are school ready by 2030 (up from 48% now), and to increase the percentage of high schoolers who enroll in postsecondary education from 59% to 70%.
In San Antonio, the lead partner, UP Partnership, raised $114 million in support of its Future Ready Bexar County Plan. The plan there is to increase the percentage of Bexar County high school graduates who enroll in postsecondary education or a credential program from 50% to 70% by 2030. The Future Ready Bexar County Plan is also working with local young people to scale what it calls “three pillars for success — healing, access and voice.”
In Dallas County, the lead partners, the Commit Partnership and Child Poverty Action Lab, raised $120 million for Opportunity 2040. The plan aims to halve the number of children living in poverty by 2040 and double the number of young adults earning a living wage.
High-dollar support from large funding concerns like Blue Meridian can be key to effective place-based collaboration. But local involvement is, too. “We believe that it’s very important that local funders are in a significant leadership role because they will be there for the long term,” Shelton said. “We’re seeing communities step up in ways that are unprecedented.”
