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Questions from Public Meeting

December 3, 2024

Earlier this year, the Endowment launched our affordable housing strategy with a pledge to invest $19 million in solutions for affordable housing. So far, we have committed to $23 million with $18 million spent this year. Much of this housing was geared to persons with additional needs who required wrap around services. In 2025, we will publish a comprehensive impact report describing the measurable outcomes of our various grant awards. We will continue to seek and fund innovative solutions for affordable housing, including workforce housing and senior housing, in the upcoming year.

Yes! In 2025, once our new Chief People Officer is hired, we will be announcing plans for an internship program for college undergraduate and graduate students to gain experience with the Endowment. Watch our website Careers page for more details.

We have made significant progress but we are not content to rest on our laurels when there is so much important work to be done. We are just getting started.

The cost of operations of the Endowment are approved by our Board and are aligned with the costs of operation of other private foundations of similar fund size. In 2024, our operating budget was less than 5% of the amount of funds available for award.

We will be rolling out details of the Grants Rainbow in early January with the newest update to our website. Please check www.theendowment.org in January for details.

Yes, please see the quarterly reports on our website. Our latest quarterly report is linked here.

Up to now, the Endowment has described our available grants as either “responsive” or “strategic.” Our hope with segmenting these broad categories into understandable bands of the rainbow will make our grants program easier to understand, relevant to all segments of the community, and allow us to tailor the grant application process per rainbow band to be proportionate to the amount being sought.

Our founding documents require that our strategic plan be aligned with the County’s strategic plan. Both plans are updated on a periodic basis to account for changed circumstances and priorities.

Our founding documents exclude direct benefit to other counties. If we do our job well, there will of course be a reflected glow of benefit to adjacent counties and residents of those counties are welcome to come to New Hanover County to participate in opportunities we create locally.

We have embraced our Community Advisory Council (“CAC”) to reflect a broader community perspective in our work. Our board is appointed in part by a public body and our current Board membership reflects the demographic characteristics of the entire County.

We have not considered or discussed any funding decisions regarding this project. As noted in our recent public meeting, the Endowment has shared guidance for major capital projects to reflect our preference for (1) investing in the final stages of capital projects, rather than awarding early, speculative funds, to ensure the project completion is guaranteed and will benefit the community, (2) participation by other funders, (3) teams with a demonstrated track record of success in developing or overseeing the development of the project as proposed, and (4) projects with a demonstrated need, community support, and measurable outcomes. We also require that projects align with and measurably advance one of the four pillars of our strategic plan to directly benefit the residents of New Hanover County – education, social and health equity, public safety, and community development.

Two ways: first, just shoot us an email at information@nhcendowment.org. Second, if you would like to organize an “idea raiser” gathering of your neighbors, organization or workplace, we’ll be happy to send our CEO or a senior member of our staff to facilitate a public discussion identifying problems and possible solutions that are relevant to you. If you would like to schedule an Idea Raiser, please contact us at information@nhcendowment.org

Diversity is a key value of our organization as we build our talented team, but we recognize that diversity in hiring alone is not sufficient to mitigate bias. We are looking into available training to facilitate staff and organizational development, with the aim of reporting our progress at the next public meeting. We further recognize there is no single solution to issues of bias, and we are dedicated to ongoing growth in this area. We are thankful the concern was called to our attention, which is why these public meetings are critically important to our process of continuous improvement and connection to the community.

We plan to engage in four ways: (1) by our CAC; (2) by direct community outreach and in-person visits by our CEO and senior team members; (3) by participating in idea raisers that we are invited to attend throughout the County; and (4) by better, more transparent website and social media access. Most of our grant decisions will involve direct engagement with and benefit to underrepresented communities who are most in need.

We will be publishing our grant award criteria on our new website early next year. We also plan to create a Grant Approval Matrix so the public and applicants have visibility into our decision process. We will reserve some element of discretion in our decision-making, of course, to avoid an overly rigid approach that may exclude otherwise worthy and innovative applicants.

In 2024, we prioritized affordable housing. We will be making decisions about areas of focus, within the four pillars of our strategic plans, early in 2025.

Thank you for sharing your concern. According to some experts, health systems account for about 20% of health outcomes while the majority of health outcomes are affected by factors such as nutrition, exercise, environment, community engagement, and the like. The Endowment has invested and will continue to invest in the majority of factors that affect health, including investments in health systems that directly benefit persons in poverty. The Endowment has no operational involvement with the Novant hospital and we cannot address your specific suggestion.

Yes, we have. The Endowment principal varies with stock market performance but the Endowment fund has grown from $1.25 billion to nearly $1.6 billion which will increase the amount of awards we can make each year.

We have invested millions of dollars in underserved communities in every corner of the County. Starting in 2025, we are going to require that grant recipients provide public acknowledgement of our support so members of the public will see the impact we have in their community.

Yes. See our response above regarding idea raisers. Additionally, the Endowment plans to launch an “Endowment Fellows” program where we place retirees, stay at home parents and other community members with non-profits who need help from more volunteers.

We are strictly non-partisan and our Board is appointed by a variety of appointing authorities to ensure that no particular political or corporate point of view has a majority vote.

Our Board has approved our strategic plan (in alignment with the County’s strategic plan) that focuses our efforts on four pillars in education, health and social equity, public safety, and community development. We will update our strategic plan from time to time in alignment with the County’s strategic plan. There is no shortage of problems and we have resources in time to address most issues that shape the quality of life in New Hanover County. We have the opportunity to effect meaningful, systemic change and to solve long-standing social problems.

Yes, the Endowment is a perpetual private foundation and is designed to provide grants of 5% of our fund value to the community. Forever.

We have not researched this issue but common sense would point to the cause and effect of these consequences. We plan to address the root cause of problems, with the benefit of research, analytics, and data driven decision making, so this could be a good example where improvement in one issue also leads to improvement in other issues. The fact that city, County, state and federal governments might get involved with an issue does not preclude the Endowment from involvement.

During the course of Q1 2025, as we add more staff capacity, we will be tailoring our grant application process to align with the Grants Rainbow. For larger grants, our Programs & Grants team will be meeting in person or via Zoom with applicants to help walk them through the process, so even smaller organizations have a level playing field for consideration. We also recognize the need to create capacity for smaller or emerging non-profit organizations, so we will be engaging consulting capabilities that we can deploy as a condition of our grants to assist recipients with best practices regarding governance, operations, and board oversight.

Our Board has engaged Blackrock as our investment manager, along with a local expert investment advisor, which has yielded significant earnings to grow our endowment fund to nearly $1.6 billion. We award up to 4% of the value of the endowment fund in grants each year. Starting in 2028, when the Endowment officially attains “private foundation” status, we will award no less than 5% of our fund value each year to be reinvested into the community and (we hope) magnified in positive impact. We will be posting our operational policies on our website in Q1 2025.

Our founding documents require that the Endowment’s strategic plan aligns with the County’s strategic plan. Moreover, our Board membership is periodically assessed and refreshed by three appointing authorities: the County Commissioners, the Novant Regional Board, and by the Board itself in the appointment of two directors.

We have committed $23 million to date (more than our $19 million goal) for affordable or workforce housing, as well as housing for underserved persons who require wraparound services. The initial flurry of activity is now being followed by the hard work of building these dwellings. We plan to publish a comprehensive impact report in 2025 that describes our work in this (and other) areas. We are not done. Affordable housing solutions continue to be an area of focus in our work and we plan to have more progress on this topic in the coming year.

We have made clear to our government and non-profit partners that they must do their jobs. The Endowment will not step in to supplant the responsibility of government to provide core services. We do (and have) added resources to gaps in core services to work to decrease educational disparity. We are considering further solutions to narrow or eliminate the gap in educational disparity and to improve school learning, teaching, and safety.

See above. We have a rubric that we apply and improve periodically which will be posted on our updated website.

See above responses regarding our implicit bias programs and grant award criteria.

We post all awarded grants on our website. We do not share information about pending or rejected grants, partly because grant applicants often apply to multiple funders and we do not wish to undercut any applicant who has shared proprietary data with us or hurt their chances to receive support from other funders.

As stated in our website, our vision is to transform New Hanover County so all will thrive. We intend to accomplish this by “Philanthropy Plus”, which is conventional philanthropy that provides responsive funding to grant applicants as well as by being a catalyst for transformational change in our community by harnessing the power of the best ideas to solve problems and to implement those ideas as social innovation in New Hanover County.

We will assist in the symptoms of these problems while developing solutions to the root causes of social challenges. Our plan is to leverage tap into the best thinking in America, whether by think tanks, universities, experts and other sectors, to research and propose solutions. The Endowment will then seek proposals to implement these ideas in our County. For ideas that work, we’ll invest and do more. For ideas that we test and fail, we’ll learn from those failures, pivot and improve.

Non-profit organizations fill a critical gap between the government and private sectors. We will use some of our resources to add to the capabilities of non-profit organizations that have proven themselves to provide needed services or programs in our community and to invite new solutions from emerging non-profit organizations as part of our work to build capacity in the sector.

In 2025, we will launch the Impact team in our new Research & Impact department. As part of that work, we will release a comprehensive Impact Report that details and evaluates the impact of the funds awarded to date.

These decisions were made and implemented in our founding documents, which we are obliged to follow. We will operate the Endowment with transparency about our criteria, processes, outcomes, and impacts. We will not reveal our internal, deliberative processes or disclose any information regarding applicants who failed to receive funding.

The process for soliciting research for solutions will work as follows: (1) We will issue a “Requests for Abstracts” (RFA) from our mailing list of universities, scholars, think tanks, experts, and anyone who has asked to be on our social innovation mailing list inviting brief (3-5 pages or so) summaries of ideas to solve a stated problem, describing the scope of the study, the qualifications of the authors, a summary of the proposed solution, and the cost and timeline to complete the study; (2) our Research & Innovation staff will review the submitted abstracts and make their recommendation to our management and Board for grant award to commission the proposed study; (3) We will publish the study and consider whether the solution proposed can be implemented in New Hanover County; (4) We will issue a public “Request for Proposals” (RFP) and send it to our mailing list inviting proposals to implement the solution identified in the study, the plan and cost for implementation, and metrics for success; and (5) we will select one RFP for recommendation by our staff for grant award. In making these decisions, we will be looking for the best possible solutions to problems, recognizing that old ways of doing things that have not worked in the past should yield to new thinking and new solutions. We will publish more about this process as we further develop our plans to be a catalyst for transformational change.

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