Investing in Leaders of Color, a leadership and capacity-building initiative, took shape in 2021. The one-year fellowship supports 12 leaders of color who oversee nonprofit organizations serving communities that have been marginalized. The new program emerged from months of discussions between Endowment President Rhett Mabry and leaders from other major foundations in North Carolina and South Carolina. Participating nonprofit leaders helped design it.

Fellows receive mentoring, peer consultancies, networking opportunities and responsive programming. They will also receive general operating support of up to $25,000 for their organizations and a stipend of up to $10,000. Those completing the fellowship may be eligible to receive annual organizational support as well.

The program aims to fund annual cohorts for the next five years, reaching 60 nonprofit leaders of color. Mabry said he hopes the initiative helps bring strong leaders to the forefront and boosts the capacity and impact of organizations serving communities of color. The project is facilitated by MDC, a nonprofit that helps Southern leaders, institutions and communities advance equity and economic mobility.

The Endowment provided a major gift to Johnson C. Smith University as part of Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles’ $250 million Racial Equity Initiative. The community-wide effort aims to promote racial equity, social justice, economic opportunity and upward mobility in Charlotte through an array of coordinated projects.

Major corporations announced commitments to various pieces of the plan; the Endowment provided a gift of $40 million to the university as part of an $80 million plan to help make it one of the nation’s leading historically Black universities.

Photo Credit: Jon Strayhorn

The Endowment’s program areas culminated an intensive review and refreshing of their grantmaking strategies by designing new internal dashboards to measure progress toward their goals. The strategic refresh, launched in 2017, is intended to achieve greater clarity — for ourselves and our grantees — about what each program area seeks to accomplish, as well as the philanthropic approaches and grantmaking strategies they will employ to reach those goals. The new strategies, outlined on the Endowment’s website, will undergo periodic review as we learn and adapt.

The Health Care program area’s vision to accelerate innovation and reform in North Carolina and South Carolina has spurred the creation of CaroNova, a resource center serving both states. In 2018, the program area began working with leaders from the South Carolina and North Carolina hospital associations to create such a resource center. In 2021, the Carolinas Health Innovation Institute re-formed as CaroNova, and began hiring a diverse and highly qualified staff. CaroNova also secured an advisory board that includes key health care leaders from both states.

The resource center’s work will focus on two areas: systems change and accelerator programs, which include smaller, time-limited efforts to convene partners to develop and share best practices and to align efforts behind needed policy changes.

The oral health care landscape shifted in favor of access and equity in 2021, with many changes at the state and national level directly influenced by the North Carolina Oral Health Collaborative. The Endowment and other coalition partners support the work.

In July 2021, Governor Roy Cooper signed Senate Bill 146 recognizing tele-dentistry as a mode of care delivery. This bill also removed regulatory barriers for hygienists providing care in community-based settings, such as schools, to make it easier for vulnerable populations to access care. North Carolina’s Medicaid program also removed age restrictions for silver diamine fluoride (SDF), a low-cost method of preventing cavities from spreading. Delta Dental, North Carolina’s largest private dental insurance provider, also added SDF as a covered benefit for the first time.

Another significant improvement came when North Carolina’s 2021 state budget expanded the Medicaid for Pregnant Women program, extending postpartum health care coverage — including dental — until 12 months after birth.

After advocating to center racial equity in the Endowment’s COVID-19 grantmaking, an ad hoc grantmaking committee wound down its work in 2021. The committee formed after the Board of Trustees in March 2020 earmarked $35 million to support coronavirus relief efforts.

Starting in November 2020, the COVID-19 Equity Lens Task Force (CELT) delivered grant recommendations to Trustees across nine funding cycles. The multi-racial, cross-departmental group of 13 staffers established guiding principles that included: targeting resources to populations most impacted by the pandemic, optimizing interventions for target populations, funding organizations most proximate to target populations, and minimizing application and reporting burdens on potential grantees. Target populations included people of color and communities that had been marginalized.

Subsequent analysis of the Endowment’s COVID-19 relief grantmaking found that a larger share of the funding went to target populations after application of the equity criteria. While the work of the panel revealed areas for internal improvement, the effort largely achieved its goals, according to an Endowment-commissioned study released in December 2021. Lessons learned will inform future grantmaking.

Photo Credit: Feeding America

A native of Durham, North Carolina, Duncan served as a judge on the 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from 2003 until her retirement in 2019. She was the first African American and first woman from North Carolina to serve on the 4^th Circuit. Her involvement within the legal and judicial communities includes serving as president of the North American/Asian Group of the International Association of Judges and past president of both the Federal Judges Association and the North Carolina Bar Association. She earned her J.D. from Duke University School of Law and was a member of the Duke University Board of Trustees.

Photo Credit: North Carolina Bar Association

Two longtime Endowment staffers retired in 2021. Accounting Specialist Melinda Hardin (left) retired after 39 years of service. She worked with expense reports, issuing checks and other critical accounting functions in the Finance department.

Communications Associate Director Jeri Krentz (right) retired after 14 years of service during which she chronicled the stories of Endowment grantees across the Carolinas. Krentz developed the Endowment’s quarterly e-newsletter, wrote annual reports and edited key internal documents. She also oversaw the Endowment’s Fellowship program.