Here’s a fun thought experiment. Let’s say you’re put in charge of a brand-new, place-based foundation with assets of over $1 billion. What would be your first order of business? Second? Sixth?
It isn’t very often that a leader is presented with those questions, but that’s exactly what William Buster faced when he was tapped to be president and CEO of the New Hanover Community Endowment (NHCE), based in Wilmington, North Carolina.
The endowment was established in 2020 with $1.25 billion in proceeds from New Hanover County’s sale of the New Hanover Regional Medical Center to healthcare provider Novant Health. When he started the job in March of 2022, Buster presided over what was instantly the second-largest philanthropic organization in North Carolina after the Duke Endowment. But while Duke serves North and South Carolina, the Assembly’s Kevin Maurer reported that NHCE “must use up to 4% of its total market value for annual philanthropic giving within New Hanover County limits. That means about $52 million per year will soon be flowing into one of North Carolina’s tiniest counties.”
Buster hit the ground running. “I met everybody,” he told me with a laugh. “I haven’t talked to so many people in my life.” Residents were optimistic about NHCE, but “there was also concern among some people that we wouldn’t come to their side of town and listen,” he said. “What I heard was, in general, the voices of those most impacted by the issues have not been heard, so why is this going to be different?”
Those fears underscored the need to build trust and change residents’ preconceptions about philanthropy — that it’s elite, inaccessible and unapproachable. On Buster’s watch, NHCE has ramped up outreach to historically under-engaged grassroots organizations, instituted quarterly breakfast chats with community leaders and hired a staffer focused on helping grantees build capacity. For those of us attuned to cross currents in philanthropy, the endowment represents a high-stakes case study of a place-based funder with prodigious resources trying to galvanize what Buster calls “generational transformative change.”
“I tell my team and I’ve told the board, I don’t view my role as denying grants. I view my role as figuring out how to give every grant that we can give in every opportunity that we have,” he said. “I think any fear is rooted in the reality of how people have normally done things, but our response is going to make the difference.”
“Know who you’re representing”
A native of North Carolina, Buster attended North Carolina Agricultural & Technical University, where he majored in history and led an effort to save a local Black farm after developing an interest in the African American land loss movement. It was a deeply personal experience for Buster (he comes from a family of farmers) that also presaged a post-graduation role at the Winston-Salem-based Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, where, as a program manager, he focused on land-related issues across the South.
Buster then worked at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation before serving as the executive vice president of community investments at St. David’s Health Foundation. Prior to joining the NHCE, he was senior vice president of impact at the Asheville, North Carolina-based Dogwood Health Trust. Following a wide-ranging executive search spanning hundreds of possible candidates, NHCE named as Buster its president and CEO in January of 2022.
When I asked him how his extensive CV prepared him for building the endowment from the ground up, he cited distinct lessons from each stop along the way.
“At Babcock, I had two outstanding mentors, Gladys Washington and Gayle Williams,” he said. “From Gladys, I learned that I was going to be in rooms making decisions on behalf of people who never get to be in those rooms, so know who you’re representing.” Williams taught him the importance of trusting his intuition. “Sometimes, you won’t have a metric,” he said. “Sometimes, that metric may be your heart and how you feel, and it’s OK to say, ‘I’m being led by this because it is something that I care deeply about.’”
At Kellogg, “everyone was smart,” Buster said. “Oran B. Hesterman, Chris Kwak, Barbara Sabol, Caroline Carpenter — these folks were giants. Through them, I learned how to apply a level of rigor to make the work even sharper.” At St. David’s, Buster came to appreciate the power of networking. “The CEO at the time, Earl Maxwell, taught me how to navigate relationships for the good,” Buster said. “The lesson was, become respected and you can have conversations that other people sometimes can’t have.” That lesson would serve Buster well at his new job.
Levers to access
Upon assuming the top role at the NHCE in March 2022, Buster juggled multiple balls simultaneously, working with the board to develop an investment and grantmaking strategy, hiring staff — he was the endowment’s second hire — and meeting with community members across the county.
In August 2022, he posted a piece on the endowment’s website reflecting on his first 150 days, with an emphasis on his many meetings with community members and leaders. He wrote that he was struck by “the genuine excitement about the impact the endowment can make.” Yet he also sensed “fear that the endowment will listen to what a small number of people want, and not what many people need.”
Buster told me he walked away from this exercise with the belief that the foundation had to engage with grassroots organizations whose leaders “don’t know our board members and have only heard about the endowment in the newspaper.” At the same time, he told his board to expect phone calls from “somebody who’s had traditional power in the community” making the case for specific nonprofits. Makes sense, since word had gone out that the endowment has over $1 billion in the bank.
Lobbying from connected individuals “is going to happen,” Buster said. “It happened to me at Kellogg, it happened at St. David’s, and the question is how you respond. It’s human nature to use the levers that you have to get access, but what if you’ve never had the lever to pull?” Buster sees his job as providing nonprofit leaders with the requisite levers to access the endowment and its staff.
Building capacity
When the endowment was first established, board members grappled with what was, in the grand scheme of things, a “good” problem to have — how to ensure they didn’t inundate nonprofits that lacked the absorptive capacity to handle a huge grant. The board ultimately decided that the endowment’s inaugural grants would not exceed 25% of an organization’s operational budget.
After receiving over 300 applications throughout September 2022, in December, the endowment announced 109 recipients that collectively received a total of $9 million. A look at the list reveals a healthy cross section of the county’s civic tapestry, with funding flowing to organizations focused on healthcare, literacy, education, housing and the arts, along with churches, UNC-Wilmington and the city of Wilmington’s fire department. Note that at the time, the endowment had yet to formally adopt its strategic plan, which dials in on four general focus areas — more on that below.
Buster said the board’s decision to cap grants wasn’t an attempt to deny organizations access to resources as much as to “assess people’s capacity for managing resources” at a time when the endowment was still staffing up. “There’s a way in which organizations have to move to build their own internal capacity, and that usually means another level of communication capacity, leadership capacity and a programmatic strategy development that sometimes small organizations don’t have,” he said.
The endowment has since grown its staff roster. In fact, it’s about to announce its new director of learning and capacity-building, whose purview will be to help grantees grow in a strategic and intentional way. “We in philanthropy should not be in the business of trying to keep organizations at a certain level,” Buster said. “If they have an idea, and it’s sound, then we should support it.”
Breakfasts with Buster
In March 2023, the endowment published its three-year strategic plan, providing more specificity around its focus areas. That same month, it launched the first of its quarterly “Breakfast with Buster” sessions. The breakfasts give leaders and residents a chance for face-to-face time with Buster and have been organized around each of the priority areas the NHCE identified in its strategic plan. The inaugural breakfast focused on social and health equity. The second, which took place on June 27, centered on education. Breakfasts during the third and fourth quarters of 2023 will explore community development and community safety, respectively.
Buster hopes the breakfasts can “demystify” the endowment for attendees. “Even though many of them may have read about the endowment, people have created narratives that are actually not accurate,” he said. He also envisions the breakfasts as a platform where participants can discuss topics and challenges of mutual interest.
If the first breakfast was any indication, he’s on the right track. Buster got the ball rolling and the conversation took on a life of its own. “I became the facilitator,” he said. “It was fascinating to hear people say, ‘Wait, you’re working on this issue too? Can I call you after the breakfast?’ That probably happened 10 times.” After the first meeting, Buster said he got emails from participants saying, “We’ve never had conversations like this in New Hanover County. No one’s ever allowed us that space, and we really appreciate it.”
Looking ahead, expect the endowment to announce details for its next grant cycle and make a big push in early childhood education. “This is an area of deep interest for me,” Buster said. “There are 10 things we can do, but we can’t do them all at the same time, so we’re at a place now where we’re determining what our focus will be to change the trajectory for the region.”
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