THAT YOU’VE HAD A NUMBER OF SESSIONS THIS WEEK RELATED TO THAT. ARE THE SCHOOLS GOING BACK, IMPLEMENTING THE THINGS THAT THEY’VE LEARNED, AND SHARING THE LOCAL-LEVEL RESULTS WITH YOU? DR. LOMAX: They’re not only going back and implementing the things that they’re learning about, but they’re also co-doing it with UNCF. So, the big initiative that we’re involved in and that we really are putting a lot of expectation into is creating a pooled endowment program. One of the things I said I wanted to do before I leave UNCF is that each of our institutions have a financial stake in a perpetual endowment at UNCF, and our pooled endowment calls for each of our institutions to have a $10 million beginning stake in that pooled endowment. That means we have to raise $370 million to ensure that each of them has the same amount. When that happens every 10-year period, that number will double. That’s what happens with endowments that are invested in vested wealth. So, within 10 years that $370 million will be $740 million, and then it will double again. HBCU TIMES: THAT IS TRULY REMARKABLE. HOW LONG HAS THE POOLED ENDOWMENT BEEN IN EFFECT? DR. LOMAX: We’ve been doing this capital campaign to raise this for the last three years. Last year, we got the first major gift that we can use toward that endowment. We now have 27% of that $370 million being invested from a $100 million gift from the Lilly Endowment; and next year, when we send out checks to everybody, it will also include 4% earnings or a little over $100,000 next year. Our expectation is that we will raise some additional amounts toward that $370 million this year, so it’s going to keep growing. I just signed on for another three years
are businesses, and they must have strong financial operations; and that requires a strategic plan. You’ve got to have great employees, and you’ve got to invest in them, and you’ve got to develop them, and you’ve got to retain them. You’ve got to have a plan that is contemporary. You’ve got to keep investing in and improving your facilities. We’ve got to ensure that the presidents have the kind of preparation for the executive leadership role that they’re going to play. We’ve got to make sure that our boards of trustees
DR. LOMAX: The first kind of results that they have seen is that we’ve had a robust fundraising initiative. UNCF’s core competency, the competency that Frederick Douglass Patterson
HBCU TIMES: THE KIND OF MINDSET SHIFT YOU FORCED THE LEADERSHIP WITHIN BOTH UNCF AND AT THE TOP OF THE HBCU ACADEMIC LEVELS TO EMBRACE HAS BEEN RADICAL, SEISMIC EVEN. DR. LOMAX: I brought to my presidents, and to UNCF, the understanding that we’ve got to be engaged in continuous innovation and improvement. And that’s another reason why you’re interviewing me at UNITE, because this is a continuous improvement opportunity for our presidents, their leadership teams and others to see what’s happening within industry and with other institutions. To get that spark that you know we’re never complacent, we’re never satisfied with what we’re doing. We’re always trying to be better. A lot of the work that we did was met with resistance; but 20 years later, I’ve worn them down, and they’re sticking with it. HBCU TIMES: WHAT HAVE BEEN SOME OF THE RESULTS OF THE WORK?
was trying to build, was the ability to raise more money
effectively. In the last four years alone, during a global pandemic, UNCF has raised more money in that four-year period than in any other four-year period in its history. We’ve raised over $1.1 billion in four annual campaign years—over a quarter of a billion dollars a year. That’s three times what we were doing prior to the pandemic. It’s taken a while to really build this machine to be the effective fundraising juggernaut that it is, but there’s nobody in higher education pound for pound doing more than we’re doing in terms of raising money, and certainly no organization is doing that on behalf of historically Black colleges and universities more effectively and in bigger numbers than UNCF.
understand the difference between governance and
micromanagement, and so we work with them and built out this body of work at the Institute for Capacity Building…and they said, “No no no no no no no, that’s invasive, that’s not your job!” Yet, 16 years later, we’re at UNITE [summit] and I have my college presidents here, board chairs here, students here, and we all understand that the work of the Institute for Capacity Building is core to the effectiveness of the institutions.
HBCU TIMES: RELATED TO THE FUNDRAISING COMPONENT, I KNOW
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