In the growing world of place-based, multisector partnerships, a new entry comes from the South. Truist Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Charlotte, North Carolina-based Truist Financial Corporation (TFC), recently announced a $22 million, multi-year, multisector initiative to support small businesses and create career opportunities in underserved communities.
TFC evolved in 2019 from the merger of two banks, SunTrust Bank and Branch Banking and Trust Company (BB&T). The foundation formed the next year from the merger of the philanthropies previously run by these companies and currently has an endowment of about $600 million. As with other financial-services-funded foundations we’ve covered, Truist Foundation focuses on financial empowerment in the geographic areas in which it works. TFC, a top 10 U.S. commercial bank, is in 17 states along the East Coast and Washington, D.C., and has branches as far west as Texas. This new initiative, along with other grants the foundation has been making during its four years of existence, aims to address the factors that stymie economic mobility.
For this new initiative, called Where It Starts, Truist Foundation is partnering with three existing organizations, giving a six-year, $15.7 million grant to the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), and a five-year joint grant of $6.3 million to Living Cities and Main Street America. These are all long-established nonprofits with track records of success, each of which brings specific experience and expertise. This particular approach of partnering with existing experts reminds me of multisector maven Ballmer Group, which, as I’ve written, has quickly emerged as a leading antipoverty funder by not only investing heavily in its key geographic areas but also tapping the knowledge and connections of deeply embedded, local nonprofit professionals.
Lynette Bell, president of Truist Foundation, said that the newly formed big bank decided to be a “purpose-driven financial institution, with a mission and value around inspiring and building better lives and communities.” Aligned with this pivot, the foundation was given the charge to reinvent its grantmaking approach. Armed with data used to inform the bank’s investment platform, two main focus areas emerged: the need for laborers and other adults in underserved communities to gain new skills to land the evolving, high-demand and (sometimes) high-paid jobs of the 21st century, and the need for businesses to be more resilient in the face of unexpected changes like COVID.
Economic mobility is a layered and complex issue, a key reason that funders and nonprofits in this area are turning to place-based, multisector partnerships, and part of the impetus for Where It Starts. “We’ve been talking about access to capital for small businesses for over 20 years, so the question becomes, ‘Are there some additional components of the ecosystem that need to be addressed?’” said Bell. “In the south and southeast, select cities that are high urban areas, which you would think would have high opportunities, still have some of the same demographic and economic threads of high poverty, high unemployment and obsolete jobs going away.” Small businesses in these areas, meanwhile, face a continued lack of access to capital and a deficit of plans for resiliency, such as an ability to pivot to virtual offerings during COVID, or succession plans — even in otherwise-booming, innovative cities like Miami and Atlanta. “We wanted to really address some of those systemic things that were happening.”
As with other multisector initiatives we’ve covered, Where It Starts has local government support. “The mayors of all five cities are involved and have stressed their commitment to this,” said Bell. “Having the mayors bring in the public sector was really important for us.”
Multisector mojo comes to five cities in the Southeast
The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, a national membership organization established in 1974, focuses on education-to-career pathways and collaborates with workforce and economic developers, schools, employers, industry groups, foundations and nonprofits. CAEL will use the grant money to fund a career-focused initiative linking BIPOC and underserved communities in Charlotte, Memphis and Miami to professional opportunities in industries that have historically been too hard to get into without good connections — such as, say, financial services.
Living Cities is a member collaborative of financial institutions and some heavy-hitting foundations — including Annie E. Casey, Ewing Marion Kauffman, MacArthur, Kresge, MetLife and Robert Wood Johnson — that partners with city governments to close racial income and wealth gaps. Main Street America, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has helped revitalize more than 2,000 downtowns and commercial centers. Together, these two organizations will use the Truist Foundation money to spur community-led economic development in underdeveloped potential commercial corridors in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Nashville and Miami.
A major strength of this philanthropic investment is its power to bring people together, said Joe Scantlebury, president and CEO of Living Cities. “Our approach is to think through, who are the stakeholders and the civic leaders and public leaders who should know each other, who should be coming together? And then, how do we create the space and the place for them to have a conversation around their actual data and the conditions in their city? We’re able to really talk through dynamics, listen and learn and share what other cities are doing.”
Coming in from the outside is an advantage because it provides a buffer that allows leaders to talk to each other without being derailed by entrenched power dynamics or mistrust built up over the years. The partnership between Living Cities and Main Street America can “lower the temperature,” as Scantlebury put it, and work toward solutions. “We try to create safe spaces for people to have real conversations around the conditions that are there.”
Each city has its own needs and opportunities. In Miami, for example, the team is working on supporting small businesses in the under-served Dominican community around the eight-block-long Little Santo Domingo district in the historic Allapattah area, a neighborhood “that capital left behind,” said Scantlebury. “You have people who have struggling businesses, trying to grow their businesses, trying to sustain their businesses, and really no access to loans, insurance, the level of services they needed.”
As real estate competition heats up in Miami, plenty of people with deeper pockets are eyeing Little Santo Domingo. The partnership is currently working on ways to help existing businesses compete and stay put. “At this stage, we’ve given a grant to the Allapattah Community Development Corp to enable them to do the planning and landscaping to actually make the commercial real estate investment argument that they need, to be able to make the pitch to get co-investors to come in and help them preserve their businesses in their community,” said Scantlebury.
“The way Truist took this on, in effect, says, ‘There are no throw-away people. There are no left-behind communities.’ There are communities that deserve the intention of their city leaders, their investment community, the knowledge capital, the social capital, and the financial capital to actually build what should already exist,” he said. “We all share the same vision that everyone in an American city should be able to live an economically sustainable, thriving, abundant and connected life. We all believe that. This is not about a start with no finish. This is about a start with an intention for a long-term relationship with communities.”
