UNCF, known for its iconic slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” has helped students of color go to college for 80 years. Back in 1944, with most college-eligible men drafted and taxes going to fight World War II, funding for historically Black colleges and universities was in short supply but desperately needed. So, 27 HBCUs decided they could raise more money to support students if they banded together to form the United Negro College Fund.
The organization’s first campaign received support from wealthy Americans like John D. Rockefeller and collectively raised three times more than the colleges had raised separately the previous year. Since it began, UNCF has grown to include 37 member institutions and provides scholarships to students at more than a thousand colleges and universities nationwide.
However, at its heart, the group continues its initial mission of pooling fundraising resources to support education for students of color. The Chronicle spoke with Michael Lomax, who has been UNCF CEO for two decades, about his experience at the organization, fundraising at UNCF, and how the group plans to use its recent $100 million gift from the Lilly Endowment. (The Lilly Endowment is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
This interview has been edited for clarity and space.
You have been at UNCF for 20 years. What are some of the most positive things you’ve seen and accomplished over that time?
The first and most important thing we’ve accomplished is we’ve gotten journalists and philanthropists and everybody who talks to us to stop asking their first two questions: Do we still need HBCUs, and do we still need a UNCF? I used to get that question every time I talked to a prospective donor and absolutely every time I talked to a journalist 20 years ago.
It really was very disconcerting to be doing work that I felt was very important, not just for HBCUs and not just for this organization, but for the country, and that view was not shared.
There’s been a shift — this belief and conviction now that HBCUs are a vital part of the higher education landscape of this country. They are important, their contributions are significant, and that there’s still work for them to do.
Our success in recent years is really related to the foundational work we’ve been doing to make the case for these institutions.
What is the case you make nowadays when you go to a donor?
We’ve learned to do it in ways that aren’t just heartfelt. We make the case, quite frankly, in terms of outcomes and impacts. One of the big key performance indicators that people pay attention to is the role that education plays in economic mobility. That was not a story that we told with data and facts and testimonial in an earlier time. We now know that these institutions are engines of economic mobility. They have built the Black middle class, and they continue to move people at higher rates from the lower quadrants, socioeconomically, to the upper ones.
We’re telling a very strong economic story, and America understands numbers and economics. We still think that there are other elements of this that have gotten to be better understood by the country: that students do better when they have a sense of belonging, when they feel accepted that they’re legitimately at that institution, and that institution is all in for them. We’re learning to articulate our value and values in ways that are better understood by the donor community and the community and the nation writ large.
How important is fundraising to the mission of UNCF?
Our core competency is raising dollars. April 1 of 2020, when we went virtual — that was the beginning of a new fiscal year. Because of the pandemic, we couldn’t do special events; that’s where we get a significant portion of our unrestricted fundraising dollars. We thought that we would be lucky if we could raise half of what we would normally raise. So instead of $80 to $90 million, we were expecting $40 to $45 million. We didn’t let anybody go. We went virtual.
Twelve months later, we had not raised $40 million. We had raised $253 million.
Over the four years from 2020 to this minute, we have raised over $1 billion.
Over the four years from 2020 to this minute, we have raised over $1 billion. This team of people that we have are really good. And I always say that we do fundraising with a little bit of home cooking involved in it. We don’t just do traditional by-the-book fundraising. We have adapted and adopted practices that are consistent with the community that we serve.
Can you give me an example?
Oh, you mean what is culturally relevant? Well, it’s very church. When we do an event where we will raise unrestricted dollars, well it’s time for church. We will call upon people, and people will stand up and they’ll bring their offerings forward into the room. And some people will go in there and say, “I know this, I feel this, I do this every Sunday. I do this in my community.” We really add a very personalized community flavor to everything that we do.
What most people don’t understand is we have a huge base at UNCF, and things that are valued in the African-American community are supported by the community itself. We have over 150,000 donors. When we were really concerned about would we succeed in the period of Covid, our large base of small donors — they started “adding on.” The message we got from small donors is “This Covid stuff is horrible. It is hurting our community the worst. And then there’s a racial reckoning going on. If ever we needed education, if ever we needed HBCUs, if ever we needed to invest in our students, now is the time.”
That was the message we got. We also saw megadonors step up. I really do feel like there’s been a change in the philanthropic landscape.
Is this higher level of funding a trend for HBCUs and UNCF?
There are 102 HBCUs. You’ve got 102 different stories. We don’t have enough time to talk about all 102. Let me say what I know first and foremost and know best: UNCF is seeing consistency in the growth of our giving.
We’ve always done very well with the restricted giving, but we’re also now seeing a real uptick in the unrestricted giving and certainly in the $1 million and above unrestricted gifts. Those are pretty significant for an organization like ours.
This is a reflection of a very strong economy and a great deal of wealth, but I also think it’s reflective of HBCUs and their cause now being in the consciousness and valued among the donor community in ways that it hasn’t been in the past.
With respect to HBCUs, it is not a uniform story. The early gifts have gone to the institutions that have national brands and that are financially strongest: Howard, Morehouse, Spelman, Hampton. But you’re also beginning to see an awareness of a next tier. And there you see Morgan State University is getting more. There is a next group of schools that are just moving on up: Clark Atlanta University, Xavier University, Claflin University. They have begun to produce significant improvements in their fundraising capability.
I would say that that’s the top 20 percent. Eighty percent of the institutions have not received that kind of support. So the real challenge, particularly for us at UNCF, is really to ask the question: How do we jump-start much more significant support for smaller, less-resourced institutions? How do we get them to the point where they’re competing, in their own communities, in their own states, and nationally for philanthropic investment?
And that’s part of what we’re doing with our capital campaign.
Can you talk a little bit about your plans for the capital campaign, and how the recent $100 million Lilly grant UNCF received fits into that?
One of the things we’ve really been thinking about is: How do we get the endowments to a higher level? We know that for all HBCUs combined, they’re at around, let’s say $5 billion today, all 102 of them. Harvard is around $50 billion. We believe that UNCF’s role in this is to create a pooled endowment. Unrestricted funds that are in a lockbox that will be in that box in perpetuity. And each of our 37 members will have an equal share ownership in that lockbox. Our goal is that at the end of this campaign, each of them will have a $10 million share in an unrestricted pooled endowment of $370 million.
That $10 million will be invested robustly, well-managed, and it will grow. That’s going to mean that institutions that have no margin, institutions that have no fund that they can devote to their priorities will have some portion of it coming from UNCF. Right now, we send about $350,000 to $400,000 a year in unrestricted funds that we raise in our annual campaign to the schools. When we have $10 million in that endowment, that will double that amount.
The Lilly gift enables us to actually begin doing that work much sooner. We could have a whole conversation about how incredible it is that they’re saying, “We’re going to make this large gift, and it’s at the discretion of UNCF to decide how it will be used.” We believe that it should be used in this campaign, so we’re placing it there.
To find out Lomax’s thoughts on how the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action might impact scholarships and how donors are responding, subscribe to the Fundraising Update newsletter for an exclusive excerpt.
