News

A cornerstone decision of our five-year strategic plan is to converge the totality of our assets — people, relationships, knowledge, voice, and money — to advance impact toward racial, economic, and environmental justice (REEJ).

Here are a couple headlines about how we’re implementing that approach:  

• We launched three, cross-departmental Solution Teams. At its best, impact is about the pursuit of solutions, and in our case it’s about the pursuit of solutions that advance REEJ. That’s why we’ve established three Solution Teams – one for each of the issues within REEJ. Our grants and partnerships, mission investment, communications, and people and culture teams will work collectively and side-by-side with these cross-departmental Solutions Teams to steward the foundation’s investments in ways that maximize impact toward REEJ. The Solutions Teams’ will identify impact goals and how we will make investment decisions to achieve them. Over the next few years, we will align our budgets and resource allocations accordingly.

• We introduced program-related investments to our asset pool. In 2018, we aimed to stretch our financial assets beyond the five percent required from foundations by committing 100 percent of NCF’s endowment to mission–aligned investing. Now, we’ve taken that a step further by carving out $22 million, or five percent, of our endowment for PRIs. We already made some exploratory PRIs last year to incredible organizations, including 1863 Ventures Fund, Southern Bancorp Community Partners, and South Carolina Community Loan Fund, and we are excited to enter new partnerships beginning in 2024. Stay tuned for more information.

Thanks for reading. Look out for more brief bulletins like this in the coming months. 

In partnership,

Rey Ramsey