Category Archives: Philanthropy

A Permanent Emergency: Black Homelessness & the Housing Cost Trap

Posted on June 16, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Where you live should not determine whether you live. — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

There is a kind of emergency that does not announce itself with sirens. It settles instead into the permanent infrastructure of a city into shelter intake forms, into eviction court dockets, into the quiet calculus of a family deciding which bill goes unpaid this month so the rent does not. It becomes, over time, not an emergency at all but a condition: expected, budgeted for, managed at the margins, never resolved. Black homelessness in America has become that kind of emergency. It is measured every January, reported every summer, and addressed with the institutional energy of a problem that everyone has agreed, without saying so directly, will not be solved.

On a single night in January 2024, the federally mandated Point-in-Time census counted more than 240,000 people experiencing homelessness who identified as Black, African American, or African. That figure represented 31.6 percent of everyone sleeping in shelters, tents, cars, or on city streets in a country where Black Americans represent 13.7 percent of the population. The disproportionality is not new. What is new is the magnitude: 2024 produced the largest raw count of unhoused Black Americans ever recorded in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s modern Point-in-Time series. The trend line does not suggest an aberration. It suggests a permanent condition whose scale is still expanding.

The arithmetic of the crisis is straightforward. Zillow’s national rental index placed the average advertised lease at approximately $2,100 per month in early 2025. A parallel Apartment List survey, which strips luxury units from its methodology, pegged the median at $1,398. A reasonable blended figure sits near $1,700 per month or $20,400 per year. That is not the price of comfort. It is the price of a mailing address, a bathroom that locks, and a bed that belongs to no one else. Multiply that annual cost by 240,000 unhoused Black individuals and the minimum annual bill for basic housing stability comes to $4.9 billion. Finance professionals design endowments to distribute approximately 5 percent of principal annually without eroding real value. The corpus required to generate $4.9 billion in perpetuity is approximately $98 billion, call it $100 billion. That is the number. It is not an estimate or an aspiration. It is arithmetic.

To understand why that number has never been assembled, it is necessary to understand what produced the crisis it would address. The Census Bureau defines households paying more than 30 percent of income toward housing as cost-burdened. In 2023, 56.2 percent of Black renter households met that definition. The Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances reported median Black household wealth at $44,900, roughly 15 percent of the $285,000 median for white households. The Black homeownership rate sits between 44 and 45 percent, compared to 74 percent for non-Hispanic white households. Home equity is the primary mechanism by which American families absorb life shocks — job loss, illness, family dissolution — without falling into housing instability. A community with a homeownership rate 30 points below the national white average has 30 points less cushion against every emergency that precedes homelessness. This is not a coincidence of individual financial behavior. It is the compounded output of subsidized mortgage programs that excluded Black borrowers, exclusionary zoning that confined Black families to undervalued land, and GI Bill benefits that built the white middle class while systematically denying equivalent access to Black veterans. The policy record is not ambiguous. The consequences are still being counted every January.

The community’s own financial institutions offer the starkest measure of the structural gap. According to HBCU Money’s 2024 African American Owned Bank Directory, African American-owned banks hold $6.4 billion in total assets across 18 institutions. The 2025 African American Owned Credit Union Directory documents 205 active credit unions holding $8.15 billion in assets serving 726,929 members. The entire African American-owned financial institution sector between every bank, every credit union in the country, combined controls approximately $14.5 billion. The endowment required to permanently resolve Black homelessness is seven times that figure. African American households hold $7.1 trillion in total assets according to HBCU Money’s 2024 Annual Wealth Report, and command approximately $1.8 trillion in annual buying power, yet corporate equities and mutual fund shares, the asset class that most reliably converts income into intergenerational capital, represent less than 5 percent of African American holdings and a mere 0.7 percent of total U.S. household equity assets. Consumer credit has climbed to $740 billion, now approaching parity with Black mortgage debt of $780 billion, a near 1:1 ratio that represents a fundamental inversion of healthy household finance (3:1 being seen as the baseline for a health household finance). The topline wealth figures are real. The structural vulnerabilities beneath them are equally real. A community whose financial institutions control $14.5 billion in assets is not positioned to self-capitalize a $100 billion endowment, not now, and not without a generational shift in how African American institutional capital is accumulated, retained, and deployed.

HBCU campuses are not observers of this crisis. They are inside it. A 2020 Hope Center survey of nearly 5,000 students at 14 HBCUs found that 46 percent had experienced food insecurity in the prior 30 days, 55 percent had experienced housing insecurity in the prior year, and 20 percent had been homeless at some point during that academic year. One in five students at institutions whose entire institutional mission is economic mobility trying to complete coursework from a couch, a car, or a shelter. The 2021 Howard University student occupation of the Blackburn Center brought national visibility to conditions that students at dozens of HBCUs navigate without cameras: mold, rodent infestation, deferred maintenance that years of constrained operating budgets cannot absorb. At institutions like Alcorn State University, Coppin State University, and Edward Waters University, the competition between student housing needs and every other institutional priority is not a policy question. It is a weekly budget decision. An HBCU cannot produce the physicians, engineers, and policy architects that African American communities require if the students admitted to those programs cannot secure the stability that sustained academic work demands.

The conventional philanthropic response to a crisis of this scale would invoke a combination of federal investment, corporate giving, and foundation capital. That architecture has not assembled for Black housing, and the current environment offers no evidence that it will. Federal housing policy has moved in the opposite direction from what the scale of Black housing instability requires. Corporate philanthropy directed toward racial equity initiatives contracted sharply following 2023, as major corporations withdrew or quietly defunded commitments made in 2020. Foundation capital, while more durable, has never operated at the scale this problem requires and has shown no institutional appetite to do so. The community has waited across multiple political cycles for external capital to arrive at the necessary scale. It has not arrived. There is no credible reason, given the current political and philanthropic environment, to expect that it will.

What remains, then, is the harder question, the one that the data forces and that no external institution is positioned to answer. African American households hold $7.1 trillion in assets. African American consumers generate $1.8 trillion in annual spending, $64 billion of which flows into higher education, much of it leaving the Black institutional ecosystem entirely. The financial infrastructure of 205 credit unions and 18 banks exists, undercapitalized but functional, as a potential deployment mechanism for any capital that could be directed toward it. The institutional networks of HBCUs, Black nonprofits, and community land trusts represent governance capacity that has been demonstrated across generations. None of this adds up, in its current configuration, to $100 billion. But it raises the question that Black institutional leadership has not yet had to answer at this scale: what would it take to get there from within, and what is the cost, measured in bodies counted each January, of not trying.

That question does not have a comfortable answer. The honest answer may be that the problem is larger than what any single generation of institutional actors can resolve, that the structural deficit created by four centuries of policy violence cannot be closed by the institutions those policies were designed to prevent from forming. That possibility deserves to be named plainly rather than papered over with funding architectures that do not exist. What can be said with equal plainness is this: the external path has been tried across multiple administrations, multiple philanthropic cycles, and multiple corporate giving moments. The count goes up every January. Whatever the solution is, if one exists at this scale, it will have to be generated from within the African American community and our institutions whose members are being counted. There is no other honest conclusion available from the data.

The Sliding Scale: 10 Infrastructure Categories

1. African American Emergency Shelter Networks
The Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and Gospel Mission dominate this space almost entirely. There is no Black-led national shelter network equivalent. Individual Black churches operate shelter programs locally but with no coordination, no shared data, and no pooled capital. This is the most visible absence and arguably the easiest to begin at city level — a single congregation with property can open beds. The barrier is operating capital, not concept.

2. African American Eviction Prevention Funds
Eviction is the primary on-ramp to homelessness for Black renters who are not chronically unhoused. Right-to-counsel programs — where they exist — reduce eviction rates 50–80 percent. African American-owned credit unions are the logical vehicle for rapid emergency rental assistance lending because they already have underwriting relationships in these communities. This is financial infrastructure, not charity: a revolving loan fund capitalized through credit unions and HBCU alumni networks could catch families before they hit shelters.

3. African American Tenant Legal Defense Organizations
The eviction court system is structurally adversarial. Landlords routinely appear with counsel; tenants routinely appear alone. Black bar associations in major cities — the Cook County Bar Association, the Wiley Branton Inn of Court in D.C., the Charles Houston Bar Association — have the professional infrastructure to organize pro bono tenant defense clinics. What they lack is a coordinated national framework and stable funding to make this a standing operation rather than an episodic volunteer effort.

4. African American Community Land Trusts
This is the one category with genuine Black institutional roots. The community land trust model traces directly to the Civil Rights Movement — New Communities Inc., founded in 1969 in Albany, Georgia, is credited as the original CLT model in the U.S., created specifically to prevent displacement of Black communities through community-owned land. The Africatown Community Land Trust in Seattle has established mixed-use spaces supporting Black-owned businesses and over 100 affordable rental units. The Crescent City Community Land Trust in New Orleans has focused on racial equity, permanently affordable housing, and restoring Black businesses in the Seventh Ward. The model works. It is undercapitalized and geographically fragmented. A national network of Black-led CLTs with pooled acquisition capital would be the most durable long-term housing infrastructure available.

5. African American-Owned Property Management Companies
This is an underexamined gap. Affordable housing units exist in Black communities. Who manages them determines where operating revenues go — and currently, most flows to firms with no institutional relationship to those communities. Black-owned property management companies operating within affordable housing portfolios would retain fees inside the ecosystem while also setting service standards in buildings that disproportionately house Black tenants.

6. African American Transitional Housing Organizations
Between emergency shelter and permanent housing is a gap that kills stability: transitional housing with wrap-around services for 6–24 months. This is where formerly incarcerated individuals, domestic violence survivors, and people exiting addiction treatment fall through. Black churches collectively hold the physical assets — underutilized buildings, parking lots, adjacent parcels — to host transitional housing at scale. The barrier is the operational and clinical infrastructure to run such programs, which requires coordination beyond what individual congregations can typically sustain.

7. HBCU Student Emergency Housing Funds
This is the most institutionally natural starting point for the network. HBCUs already have the administrative infrastructure, the student relationships, and the moral authority. A national HBCU Student Housing Emergency Fund — capitalized through alumni associations and administered through financial aid offices — would address the 20 percent homelessness rate the Hope Center documented without requiring new institutions. It requires only that existing institutions add a function.

8. African American Credit Counseling and Housing Stability Organizations
The path back from housing instability runs through credit repair, budgeting support, and landlord negotiation — skills that cost nothing to teach but require trusted institutional relationships to deliver. African American-owned credit unions already have member financial counseling as part of their charter obligations. Expanding and formalizing that function specifically around housing stability would leverage existing infrastructure at minimal additional cost.

9. African American Mental Health and Addiction Recovery Housing
Chronic homelessness — the population that does not resolve with a voucher or a loan — is disproportionately driven by untreated mental illness and addiction. This is the hardest category and the one where the African American institutional ecosystem has the least current capacity. Black-led behavioral health organizations exist in most major cities but are chronically underfunded and have no residential housing component. Sober living homes, recovery residences, and mental health step-down housing operated by Black-led organizations would address the population that no other category reaches.

10. African American Housing Data and Advocacy Infrastructure
None of the above can be built, funded, or defended without data. The Point-in-Time count is federal data collected by local Continuums of Care that are rarely Black-led. There is currently no African American-owned institution systematically tracking Black housing instability, eviction rates, credit denial rates, and shelter utilization at national scale and publishing it as a public resource. HBCU Money’s Annual Wealth Report is the closest thing. A dedicated African American Housing Data Collaborative — potentially housed within an HBCU research center — would give every other institution on this list the evidence base to make its case.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by Claude AI.

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One Year, $241 Million: What Three African American Athlete Families Could Do for Black Nonprofit Infrastructure

Posted on May 24, 2026 by | Leave a comment

We put too much burden on a few to carry the many, but it does not remove the responsibility of the few to provide the accelerant that the many often cannot. – William A. Foster, IV

There is an old story, told in many forms across many communities, about a village built beside a river. The river flooded every generation, and every generation the village rebuilt — hauling timber, patching roofs, burying the dead, and beginning again. The village produced, across its history, a number of its sons and daughters who left, distinguished themselves in distant cities, and returned at flood time with wagons of supplies and tears in their eyes. The village received them gratefully. It rebuilt again. What the village never did and what no returning son or daughter, however generous, ever proposed was to move the village to higher ground, dig the drainage channels, or build the levee that would make the next flood a manageable inconvenience rather than a recurring devastation. The supplies were real. The grief was genuine. But the wagon that arrives after the flood is not the same thing as the engineering that prevents it. One is charity. The other is infrastructure. African American institutional life has lived, for too long, beside the river.

The question is not hypothetical in the way that thought experiments usually are. The money exists. The institutions that need it exist. The gap between them is not a mystery it is documented in publicly filed IRS Form 990s, in university endowment reports, in the annual financial statements of African American nonprofits that are, in many cases, running on budgets that would embarrass a mid-sized dental practice. What has not existed, at least not yet, is the architecture of intention that would connect the two. It is worth stating plainly that this architecture is not novel, not radical, and not exclusionary, it is what every other community with durable institutional power has built and continues to build without apology, and it is built most reliably through the household. When a Jewish couple endows a chair at Brandeis, establishes a donor-advised fund through the Jewish Communal Fund, or makes a lead gift to their local Jewish federation, no one questions the cultural logic of the decision. It is understood as the natural expression of a family whose identity, community, and institutional loyalty are aligned. When an Indian American couple directs philanthropic capital toward an IIT alumni endowment, an Indian American arts institution, or a diaspora investment vehicle, it is celebrated as community cohesion in action. When an Irish American family in Boston gives generously to Boston College or the local Catholic Charities chapter, the giving is read as heritage and pride. These couples and families are not accused of exclusion. They are not asked to justify why their philanthropy reflects their identity. They are not told that their giving should serve a broader, more universal constituency before it serves their own. The African American community is held to a different standard, one that is not articulated as a standard so much as assumed as a condition.

African Americans are expected to fight for the big tent, to frame every institutional investment in the language of universal benefit, to justify community-directed giving in terms that no other community is required to provide. Jewish families give to Jewish institutions. Indian couples give to Indian institutions. Cuban American networks build Cuban American power. And the African American family that proposes to do the same is asked, implicitly or explicitly, to explain itself. That asymmetry does not originate in principled universalism. It originates in a philanthropic power structure in which African American institutions have historically depended on external goodwill for their survival, and in which the communities whose goodwill has been most consequential (typically well-meaning white liberals) have developed, consciously or not, a proprietary relationship to the terms on which Black institutional investment is deemed acceptable. Communities that hold the center of gravity in their own institutional infrastructure do not need outside permission to give to themselves. They simply give. The African American community has not yet fully reclaimed that center of gravity and it is precisely that gap, between institutional need and internally generated capital, that creates the opening for a different standard to be applied, and accepted. The question being asked here about African American athlete families and the African American nonprofit ecosystem is not a different kind of question. It is the same question every community of consequence has already answered for itself, on its own terms, without waiting for permission. This analysis proceeds from that premise, asking a precise and answerable question: if the highest-paid African American athlete families those with African American partners or spouses, reflecting a household whose cultural loyalty and community identity are aligned in the way that Jewish couples, Indian American couples, and Irish American families align theirs without apology dedicated one year of their combined earnings to establishing endowments for African American nonprofits, what would that look like? What would change? And what would it mean for the institutions that have been waiting, in some cases for generations, for that question to be asked seriously?

The three families at the center of this analysis were identified based on the 2024 earnings data compiled for the highest-paid African American athletes and the requirement that their household include an African American partner or spouse — a condition that matters because endowment-building at this scale is, or should be, a household decision, not a unilateral one, and because the framework here is explicitly about families whose full economic identity is embedded in the African American community. LeBron and Savannah James reported combined household earnings anchored by LeBron’s $128.2 million in 2024, which includes his NBA salary, his Nike lifetime deal, and the returns from business ventures including SpringHill Co. and his stake in Fenway Sports Group. Stephen and Ayesha Curry contributed $102 million, with Stephen’s Curry Brand partnership with Under Armour structured, as his peers at Under Armour have noted publicly, analogously to Michael Jordan’s Nike arrangement, including equity participation. Simone and Jonathan Owens, with Simone’s $11.2 million derived almost entirely from sponsorships with Athleta, Visa, Core Power, and Uber Eats following her historic Paris Games performance and Jonathan’s NFL career with the Chicago Bears, round out the group. Three families. Combined annual earnings of approximately $241.4 million.

To understand what $241.4 million could accomplish for African American nonprofit infrastructure, it is necessary to first understand what that infrastructure currently looks like and how comprehensively undercapitalized it is across nearly every domain of African American civic life. The problem is not concentrated in a handful of high-profile institutions. It is structural and pervasive. A prior analysis in this publication documented the investment income crisis at the core of Black philanthropy with precision: the gap between annual contributions-dependent revenue and the asset-generated investment income that allows institutions to operate with independence and permanence is, for the vast majority of African American nonprofits, not a gap at all. It is an absence. Institutions that have received contributions for decades that have built recognizable names and genuine community trust often hold investment income figures of zero or near-zero. That means every year of operation restarts from scratch. Every program depends on the next grant cycle. Every staffing decision is made against the backdrop of funding that may or may not be renewed. This is not a description of institutional weakness. It is a description of what happens when an entire sector is financed as though permanence were a luxury rather than a prerequisite for effectiveness.

Consider the Black and Missing Foundation, founded in 2008 and dedicated to raising awareness about missing African Americans, a population that receives demonstrably less media coverage, law enforcement attention, and public concern than missing white individuals. The Foundation has built genuine public visibility, including a documentary series that brought its work to a national audience. Its two co-founders, Derrica and Natalie Wilson, have spent years making the case that the crisis of missing Black Americans is not only a law enforcement failure but a media failure, a resource failure, and an institutional failure. According to its publicly filed Form 990, the Foundation reported $602,887 in total revenue in its fiscal year ending December 2024 with 100 percent of that revenue derived from contributions, zero investment income, and a net deficit of $87,568 on the year. Its total net assets stood at $852,506. This is the complete financial picture of an organization that addresses one of the most acute and chronically underreported crises in African American life. When a Black child goes missing and the Foundation cannot respond with the speed and resources the situation demands when staff capacity is constrained, when outreach budgets are thin, when the organization cannot sustain the surge capacity that a crisis by definition requires the cost is not measured in program metrics. It is measured in outcomes. Time lost in the first hours of a missing person’s case is not recovered. An institution too financially fragile to deploy resources at the moment of maximum urgency is, in the most direct sense, an institution that cannot fully do its job. The Black and Missing Foundation is not exceptional in its financial precarity. It is representative of it.

The data that contextualizes this precarity at scale comes from a joint April 2026 research publication by Candid and ABFE (Association of Black Foundation Executives) titled From Transaction to Transformation: Three Ways Foundations Can Invest in Black-Led Nonprofits for Lasting Change. The findings are worth sitting with. Between 2016 and 2023, only 50 percent of Black-led nonprofits received foundation funding in a given year, compared with 70 percent of other nonprofits. For small Black-led nonprofits, those operating below the threshold of visibility that attracts institutional grantmakers, the figure fell to 30 percent. These organizations were not absent from the funding marketplace by choice: the research found they had the lowest grant success rates of any category studied, meaning they were applying and being rejected at rates their counterparts did not face. The racial justice uprisings of 2020 produced what many organizations hoped was a structural shift; foundation giving to Black-led nonprofits increased, and for a brief window it appeared that the sector’s chronic underfunding was finally being addressed. The data tells a different story. Small Black-led nonprofits saw no significant change in the amount of funding they received during the 2020 surge, the increased dollars flowed predominantly to large organizations already established in foundation portfolios. And by 2023, even those larger organizations were seeing funding retreat, with one nonprofit leader describing the reversal plainly: that window closed in 2023, and resources were already drying up. The funding that arrived as a moral response to a moment of crisis did not become structural. It came and went. The organizations that most needed it barely felt it. And the organizations now relying on new funders — 64 percent of small Black nonprofits’ total grant funding comes from first-time funders rather than sustained relationships — face the perpetual overhead of cultivating those relationships from scratch, year after year, at the cost of the mission time and organizational capacity they cannot afford to spend.

This is the terrain into which $241.4 million, strategically deployed, could introduce genuine structural change not by replicating what major foundations already do, but by doing what major foundations have demonstrably failed to do. The first and most immediately actionable use of athlete family capital at this scale would be the establishment of matching endowment programs targeted specifically at small and mid-sized Black-led nonprofits. A $50 million matching fund seeded by these families and structured to match community donations to qualifying organizations dollar for dollar up to a defined threshold would accomplish two things simultaneously: it would inject direct capital into organizations that the existing grant marketplace consistently bypasses, and it would create a mechanism for broader community participation in institutional capitalization that does not currently exist at scale. The matching structure matters because it changes the dynamic of community giving from charity to investment: when a donor knows that their contribution will be doubled before it reaches the institution, the incentive calculus shifts. Matching programs have been used for decades in university fundraising precisely because they work. There is no structural reason they cannot be deployed for African American nonprofit infrastructure, and there is no reason that athlete family capital cannot be the seed that makes them possible. A second use of this capital would be the creation of multi-year, unrestricted operating grants for African American nonprofits that meet basic governance and transparency thresholds — grants that do not require program-specific reporting, that do not expire at the end of a fiscal year, and that allow organizations to build the staffing, reserve funds, and institutional capacity that project grants never cover. The Candid/ABFE research is explicit on this point: grant dollars alone are insufficient for transformative change, and the organizations that need sustained support the most are the ones least likely to receive it from existing funders. Unrestricted, multi-year capital is what converts an organization that restarts every year into one that accumulates. A third function of this capital would be institutional stability grants, one-time capitalization awards to organizations like the Black and Missing Foundation, which have demonstrated mission effectiveness and community trust but carry balance sheets too thin to absorb any operational disruption. A stability grant of $2 to $5 million to an organization with under $1 million in net assets does not make that organization wealthy. It gives it a runway. It buys the time and the breathing room that allow leadership to focus on mission rather than survival. And at a 4.5 percent annual return on even a $2 million endowment base, it generates $90,000 per year in perpetual investment income which is not a transformative sum, but the difference between zero and something, between an organization that exists year to year and one that has a permanent financial floor.

There is a dimension of this argument that goes beyond the mechanics of endowment returns, and it requires a frank accounting of where African American nonprofits currently find themselves in the philanthropic ecosystem. A prior HBCU Money analysis documented what that publication called the double-edged sword of external philanthropy: the reality that large gifts from non-African American donors, however genuinely valuable in addressing immediate capital needs, carry structural leverage that internally generated endowments do not. Over 95 percent of HBCUs have endowments below $100 million. The pattern holds across the nonprofit sector more broadly. MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with a net worth estimated at $38.3 billion has now directed more than $1 billion to HBCUs since 2020, part of a $26 billion philanthropic commitment that spans thousands of organizations. Her 2025 gifts alone included $80 million to Howard University, $63 million each to Morgan State and Prairie View A&M, $50 million each to Bowie State, Norfolk State, Virginia State, and Winston-Salem State, and $70 million each to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and the United Negro College Fund. Michael Bloomberg separately directed $100 million to the nation’s four HBCU medical schools. The scale is staggering and the structural question it raises is equally so. A single donor’s philanthropic decisions now shape the financial trajectory of dozens of African American institutions simultaneously, representing a concentration of external philanthropic influence over what is supposed to be the independent infrastructure of African American intellectual and civic life. The harder question the one that institution after institution has been reluctant to ask publicly is what recognition of that kind costs in terms of institutional autonomy. The institution that cannot survive without the gift is not in a position to refuse the influence that follows it. Money that keeps the doors open commands a different kind of deference than money that provides additional capacity. The capital that athlete families could direct toward Black nonprofit infrastructure would not carry that cost. It would be capitalized by people who came from the communities the institutions serve, whose identities are inseparable from the African American community. That is a different kind of money. It is money that strengthens the institution’s voice rather than qualifying it.

The household dimension of this framework is not incidental. It is, in fact, the mechanism through which this kind of capital commitment becomes plausible. LeBron James’s individual philanthropy is well-documented; his I PROMISE School has become a national model for community-anchored public education. But the I PROMISE School is a program investment, not an endowment. It is an annual commitment that requires continued capital to sustain. The distinction matters because a program can be discontinued when priorities shift or resources contract. An endowment cannot be discontinued, its principal persists and generates income regardless of whether the founding family remains engaged. Savannah James has become a sophisticated philanthropic voice on questions of Black women’s health and family economic stability. A household endowment initiative would represent the institutionalization of both of those philanthropic identities into something permanent. The same logic applies to Ayesha Curry, whose Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation has deployed significant resources in Oakland and beyond but operates as a program-driven organization requiring annual capital commitments rather than as a perpetual institution with asset-driven income. And it applies to Simone Biles’s philanthropic work on behalf of abuse survivors and mental health infrastructure, causes that require the kind of sustained, multi-year institutional commitment that annual giving cannot reliably provide.

This analysis acknowledges the objection that will immediately arise: $241.4 million is the combined annual earnings of three families, and asking families to commit one year of income to endowment capitalization is not a trivial request. It is, however, not an unprecedented one. John D. Rockefeller gave away approximately $350 million during his lifetime, roughly $6 billion in today’s dollars, and the institutions that received those gifts are still operating, still growing, still deploying capital into the world, more than a century after he died. Andrew Carnegie gave away approximately the same amount. Both men demonstrated that the conversion of personal wealth into institutional endowments produces returns measured not in investment income but in institutional permanence and civilizational influence that no other deployment of capital can match. The Rockefeller Foundation today holds $6.23 billion in total assets and disbursed $440 million in charitable grants in 2023 while leaving the principal largely intact. These are the compounding returns on gifts made by men who died in the early 20th century. The three families in this analysis have the opportunity to create the same kind of compounding institutional legacy and unlike Rockefeller and Carnegie, they would be directing that capital toward institutions that serve the communities from which they came.

The structural argument for endowment over annual giving is ultimately an argument about time horizons. Annual giving asks: what is the most effective thing I can do with this capital right now? Endowment building asks: what is the most effective thing I can do with this capital across the next hundred years? The two questions produce different answers. Annual giving at scale sustains real programming and real operations. But it does not accumulate. It does not compound. It does not transform an institution’s relationship to financial risk. An endowment does all three. It changes the Black and Missing Foundation or any of the hundreds of small African American nonprofits running below the foundation funding threshold from an organization that must survive year to year into one that has a permanent financial floor from which it can actually build.

Before concluding, it is necessary to name plainly what this analysis does not argue, because the misreading would be consequential. It is not the job of three African American athlete families to underwrite the entire architecture of Black nonprofit infrastructure. The impulse to look at high-earning African American athletes and assign them collective responsibility for community institutional development is a reflex that deserves scrutiny rather than endorsement. It conflates income with wealth, celebrity with capital, and individual obligation with structural solution. The problems facing African American nonprofits are measured not in hundreds of millions but in the tens and potentially hundreds of billions, a gap that no collection of athlete earnings was ever going to close. The thought experiment offered here is illustrative, not prescriptive. The further assumption that even the highest-paid African American athletes represent a deep and stable philanthropic reservoir collapses under basic scrutiny. Athletic careers are short. The median NFL career lasts approximately three years. The wealth that survives even significant earnings depends entirely on financial decisions made during a compressed window of peak income, and a substantial number of professional athletes face serious financial stress within years of retirement. LeBron James and Stephen Curry are extraordinary outliers, not a generalizable class. It is also worth noting that professional athletes despite their prominence in popular culture and their genuine compensation occupy a position at the bottom of the organizational chart of the industries that employ them. They are well-paid labor. The team owner, the league investor, the media conglomerate executive who controls broadcast rights: those are the economic principals. A 23-year-old making seven figures is still, in the structural sense, the cashier. Understanding the economics of the institution you work for is not a skill that compensation alone confers. The deeper structural point is this: the class that actually generates transformative philanthropic capacity is not the labor class at any pay grade it is the ownership class. The Rockefeller and Carnegie legacies that shadow this entire analysis were not built on salaries. They were built on equity stakes in oil and steel on the compounding returns of assets that appreciated and generated income regardless of whether their owners continued working. The families whose philanthropy has reshaped American institutional life across generations — the Waltons, the Johnsons, the Pritzkers — built their capacity through business ownership, real estate, investment portfolios, and family asset structures that accumulate across decades and pass wealth forward rather than dissipating it at career’s end. That is the class whose analog is largely missing from African American institutional life. It is not missing because African Americans cannot build businesses or accumulate assets. It is missing because systematic exclusion from capital markets, property ownership, business credit, and institutional investment has compressed the timeline and scale at which African American family wealth has been permitted to compound. The consequence for Black nonprofits and HBCUs is direct: the families who write the transformative endowment checks at Harvard and Yale and the University of Chicago are families whose wealth has been compounding, in many cases, since the industrial era. African American families have been building from a much more recent and more disrupted starting point. Athletes earn. Owners accumulate. Until the African American community develops the ownership infrastructure — the family-held businesses, the real estate portfolios, the investment compounders across generations — that generates the asset-based wealth on which transformative institutional philanthropy depends, the question of who funds Black nonprofit endowments will continue to be answered, as it has been answered historically, by people outside the community whose generosity arrives with strings attached. The thought experiment posed here is worth conducting. But the honest conclusion of this analysis is not that three athlete families should give more. It is that the community needs to build the ownership infrastructure that makes the question of athlete philanthropy feel like what it should always have been: a supplement to community wealth, not a substitute for it.

None of this, however, exempts the broader community from its own share of the responsibility. The argument that athlete families cannot and should not bear the full weight of Black nonprofit capitalization is correct. The argument that the ownership class whose asset-based wealth could transform these institutions is largely absent from African American life is also correct. But neither observation releases the 40 million members of the African American community from what they can do right now, at whatever income level they occupy. The data from prior HBCU Money analysis is instructive: nearly a third of Black-led nonprofits operate on annual budgets of just $30,000. Forty-three and a half percent have no full-time paid employees. These are not institutions that require a philanthropist or an endowment to become functional they require the community whose interests they serve to treat consistent, recurring giving as a non-negotiable line item rather than an occasional gesture. Ten dollars per paycheck. Twenty dollars per paycheck. Directed not as a one-time response to a crisis or a viral campaign but as a standing commitment to an organization the giver has vetted and chosen to sustain. Across a community of 40 million people, the aggregate of those modest recurring commitments is not modest at all. The philanthropy club model where small groups of family members, friends, or HBCU alumni pooling monthly contributions, rotating responsibility for identifying and presenting organizations, building institutional knowledge alongside financial commitment is precisely the infrastructure through which that aggregate gets organized. It converts individual giving from an isolated act into a collective practice, and it creates the kind of sustained, recurring revenue that the Candid and ABFE research identifies as the resource most critically absent from small Black nonprofits: not grant windfalls, but continuing funder relationships. An organization that knows it will receive $500 per month from a philanthropy club of fifteen members for the next three years can plan around that. It can hire. It can retain staff. It can make the multi-year programmatic commitments that one-time donations cannot support. The athlete family endowment and the $20 paycheck deduction are not competing strategies. They are the same strategy operating at different scales, and the community needs both.

The $241.4 million scenario described here is a thought experiment. No announcement has been made, no commitment recorded. But the arithmetic is real and the institutional need is real; documented not in the finances of a handful of celebrated civil rights organizations but in the 990s of hundreds of African American nonprofits that address genuine crises with revenues measured in the hundreds of thousands, investment income of zero, and staffing levels that cannot absorb a bad quarter let alone a structural funding retreat. The capital to begin closing that gap exists. What has not yet materialized is the architecture of intention that would direct it. The institutions that three athlete families could help build through matching programs, stability grants, and unrestricted multi-year capital would still be filing 990s long after all of us have gone. But the full distance will only be closed when the African American community stops looking to its athletes to do what only owners can do and what the community as a whole must become responsible in building.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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The Seven (Internal) Barriers to Building Sustainable African American Philanthropic Infrastructure

Posted on March 10, 2026 by | Leave a comment

Philanthropy is not about the money. It’s about using whatever resources you have at your fingertips and applying them to improving the world. — Melinda Gates

The conversation about African American philanthropy often focuses on external barriers: systemic racism, wealth gaps, and institutional discrimination. While these factors are undeniably significant, there exists an equally important yet frequently overlooked challenge—the internal dynamics within the African American community that impede the development of sustainable philanthropic infrastructure. Understanding these challenges requires an honest examination of seven distinct groups whose attitudes and behaviors collectively create obstacles to building the financial institutions necessary for long-term community empowerment.

Before exploring these seven groups, it’s essential to understand what’s at stake. African American philanthropic institutions from educational endowments to community foundations, from cultural preservation organizations to economic development funds face a perpetual funding crisis. While individual acts of giving within the Black community are robust, the institutional infrastructure that could amplify, sustain, and strategically deploy these resources remains underdeveloped compared to other communities. This infrastructure gap isn’t merely about money; it’s about the systems, organizations, and endowments that create generational impact and community resilience.

Group One: The Self-Rejecting

Perhaps the most painful barrier comes from African Americans who harbor deep-seated negativity toward anything associated with Blackness. This group actively opposes, undermines, or refuses to support Black institutions not from ignorance or indifference, but from internalized anti-Blackness. They may have achieved individual success by distancing themselves from Black community spaces, or they may carry unexamined prejudices absorbed from the broader society.

These individuals often channel their resources toward non-African American institutions while viewing Black-focused organizations with suspicion or contempt. Their influence extends beyond their personal giving decisions; they frequently occupy positions of influence where they can discourage others from supporting Black institutional development. This group represents a fundamental breach in community solidarity that no amount of external fundraising can overcome.

Group Two: The Uncommitted

The second group doesn’t harbor hatred toward Black people or institutions, but they fundamentally don’t understand why Black-specific institutions matter. These are often well-meaning individuals who subscribe to a colorblind ideology, believing that supporting non-African American institutions adequately serves everyone, including African Americans. They ask, “Why do we need a Black college fund when there are already scholarship programs?” or “Why create a Black community foundation when established foundations exist?”

This group fails to recognize that non-African American institutions have historically underserved Black communities and that Black-led institutions bring cultural competency, trust, and targeted impact that general-purpose organizations cannot replicate. Critically, they fail to see that what appears “mainstream” or “universal” is often simply another community’s institution presented as neutral. The Evers Institute is clearly perceived as an African American organization, but the Ford Foundation is rarely identified as a European American institution yet both serve their founding communities’ interests and perspectives first. Harvard is seen as an elite university, not as a European American institution, while Howard is marked as a historically Black university. This perceptual gap prevents many African Americans from recognizing that other communities have always built and maintained their own institutional infrastructure, and that supporting Black institutions isn’t separatist it’s simply doing what every thriving community does. Their indifference rooted not in malice but in a failure to understand structural inequality means they direct their philanthropic dollars elsewhere, often to institutions that may never prioritize Black community needs.

Group Three: The Institutionally Unaware

The third group operates in a state of institutional blindness. They don’t actively oppose Black institutions, nor do they question their value—they simply don’t think about institutional development at all. These individuals may support individual causes or give to immediate needs, but they lack awareness of the institutional infrastructure that could sustainably address community challenges.

This group doesn’t realize that African American communities lack equivalents to the well-endowed foundations, think tanks, policy institutes, and cultural institutions that other communities have built over generations. They don’t consider that creating such institutions is even possible or necessary. Their philanthropy, when it exists, tends toward reactive giving—responding to crises rather than investing in the systems that could prevent them. This lack of institutional consciousness represents a failure of vision that keeps the community dependent on external resources and goodwill.

Group Four: The Delegators

The fourth group recognizes the need for African American institutions but believes funding them is someone else’s responsibility. They might think wealthy Black celebrities should handle it, or that government programs should fill the gap, or that white philanthropists should fund Black institutions out of historical obligation. Some in this group pursue alternative approaches to sustainability that avoid the hard work of building financial infrastructure—seeking grants, pursuing partnerships, or relying on in-kind contributions instead of creating independent funding streams.

While these alternative approaches have their place, this group’s fundamental error is abdicating personal responsibility for institutional sustainability. They want the benefits of strong Black institutions without contributing to their financial foundation. This mindset creates institutions that remain perpetually under-resourced and dependent, unable to plan long-term or weather financial storms because their funding base is unreliable and externalized.

Group Five: The Financially Unable

The fifth and largest group encompasses everyone who genuinely cannot afford to support African American institutions financially. The racial wealth gap is real and devastating: the median white family has nearly eight times the wealth of the median Black family. Many African Americans are still recovering from predatory lending, employment discrimination, and the compounding effects of historical wealth extraction. They live paycheck to paycheck, carry substantial debt, and lack disposable income for philanthropic giving.

This group’s inability to give is not a character flaw but a structural reality created by centuries of economic oppression. However, their numerical size means that African American philanthropic infrastructure cannot rely primarily on small donors in the way that some other causes have successfully done. Building sustainable institutions requires cultivating major donors and creating wealth-building strategies within the community that generate philanthropic capacity over time. The challenge lies in building institutional infrastructure while acknowledging that most potential supporters are themselves struggling financially.

Group Six: The Promisers

The sixth group may be the most frustrating for those trying to build sustainable institutions. These are the individuals who express enthusiastic support, make commitments, and promise resources—but then fail to follow through. They attend planning meetings, serve on boards, pledge donations, and create expectations, only to disappear when it’s time to deliver.

Sometimes this happens due to changing circumstances, but often it reflects a lack of serious commitment from the outset. These individuals enjoy the social capital and recognition that comes from appearing philanthropic without making the actual sacrifice of resources. Their broken promises create budgeting nightmares for institutions, forcing organizations to scale back programs, delay initiatives, or scramble for alternative funding. Perhaps worse, they create cynicism and distrust that makes it harder to cultivate genuine supporters in the future.

Group Seven: The Grassroots Purists

The seventh group believes that everything can and should be accomplished through grassroots organizing, volunteer labor, and community sweat equity. They view institutional infrastructure and professional philanthropy with suspicion, seeing it as elitist or as selling out authentic community organizing. While grassroots efforts are vital and have accomplished tremendous things, this group fails to recognize that grassroots approaches alone cannot create the sustained, large-scale infrastructure necessary for generational change.

Building endowments, creating professional organizations, developing real estate holdings, establishing grantmaking foundations—these require capital, expertise, and institutional structures that cannot be crowdsourced or volunteer-run indefinitely. The grassroots purist approach, while rooted in legitimate democratic values and community empowerment principles, inadvertently keeps African American institutions small, informal, and vulnerable. It privileges authenticity over sustainability and fails to recognize that other communities have achieved their institutional strength precisely by moving beyond purely grassroots models.

An African American nonprofit organization’s 990 that highlights the widespread problem where its only revenue is through donations.

The work ahead is challenging, but understanding these seven groups provides a clearer map of the terrain. With that map, those committed to building sustainable African American philanthropic infrastructure can navigate more strategically, building institutions designed to overcome these very human barriers to collective progress.

Recognizing these seven groups is not about assigning blame but about developing strategies that account for these realities. Building sustainable African American philanthropic infrastructure requires addressing each barrier specifically. It means creating cultural interventions that combat internalized anti-Blackness, educational campaigns that explain why Black institutions matter, and consciousness-raising about institutional development. It requires cultivating a culture of personal responsibility for community institutions while simultaneously addressing the structural factors that limit Black wealth.

Most importantly, it means building with the understanding that these barriers exist—creating institutions that can survive and thrive even when significant portions of the potential support base are unavailable, uncommitted, or actively opposed. This isn’t pessimism; it’s realism. And from that realism comes the possibility of building philanthropic infrastructure that can genuinely sustain African American community advancement for generations to come. The path forward demands both clear-eyed acknowledgment of these internal challenges and unwavering commitment to building despite them, creating a foundation strong enough to support not just this generation but those yet to come.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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Teaching the Next Generation: A Guide to Empowering African American Youth Through Strategic Philanthropy

Posted on February 10, 2026 by | Leave a comment

A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong. – Tecumseh

The tradition of giving runs deep in African American communities. From the mutual aid societies formed during enslavement to the church collections that funded the Civil Rights Movement, Black Americans have always understood that our collective survival depends on our willingness to invest in one another. Yet somewhere between necessity and aspiration, we’ve lost the language to teach our children that philanthropy isn’t charity—it’s power.

Teaching African American children ages 5-18 about philanthropy means doing more than dropping coins in a collection plate. It means helping them understand that strategic giving builds the institutions that will protect, educate, and employ them throughout their lives. It means showing them that every dollar they contribute to Black-led organizations is a vote for their own future.

Starting Early: Philanthropy for Elementary Ages (5-10)

Young children understand fairness instinctively. They know when something isn’t right, and they want to help fix it. This natural empathy creates the perfect foundation for introducing philanthropic concepts.

Begin with concrete examples from African American history. Tell them about the Free African Society, founded in 1787 by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, which provided mutual aid to Black Philadelphians. Explain how enslaved people pooled resources to purchase freedom for family members. These aren’t abstract concepts they’re survival strategies that became institutional frameworks.

Create a family giving jar where children can contribute a portion of their allowance or gift money. Let them research and choose a Black-led organization to support quarterly. This could be a local youth program, a historical preservation society, or an HBCU scholarship fund. The key is giving them agency in the decision-making process. When children see their small contributions combine with others to create meaningful impact, they begin to understand collective power.

Use storytelling to illustrate how institutions are built. Talk about how HBCUs were created because white institutions excluded Black students. Explain how Mary McLeod Bethune started a school with $1.50 and turned it into Bethune-Cookman University. Show them that great institutions often begin with small, consistent contributions from people who understood the long game.

Middle School: Understanding Institutional Building (11-13)

By middle school, children can grasp more sophisticated concepts about how money moves and how power is built. This is when we introduce them to the difference between charity and institutional philanthropy.

Charity addresses immediate needs—feeding the hungry, clothing the poor. Institutional philanthropy builds the structures that create long-term change: schools, hospitals, community development corporations, legal defense funds, policy organizations. Both matter, but only institutional philanthropy shifts power dynamics.

Teach them about the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, established in 1940. Explain how sustained philanthropic support allowed lawyers like Thurgood Marshall to develop the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education. This wasn’t a one-time donation it was years of investment that transformed American society.

Introduce the concept of endowments and investment income. Too many African American organizations operate in perpetual crisis mode, chasing donations year after year. Show students the difference between an organization with a $100,000 annual budget that must be fundraised every twelve months and an organization with a $2 million endowment generating $80,000 annually in investment income. The second organization can focus on mission instead of survival.

Start a philanthropy club at school or in your community. Let students identify a need in their community and develop a giving circle to address it. They should practice everything: setting fundraising goals, researching organizations, making collective decisions, tracking impact, and understanding how their contributions grow through consistent giving. This hands-on experience transforms abstract concepts into practical skills.

High School: Strategic Power Building (14-18)

High school students are ready to understand philanthropy as a tool for social, economic, and political empowerment. They can analyze power structures and recognize how institutional support or the lack thereof shapes outcomes in Black communities.

Teach them to read institutional budgets and annual reports. Show them how to evaluate whether an organization has sufficient reserves, how much goes to programs versus overhead, and whether they’re building long-term sustainability. This financial literacy is essential for effective philanthropy.

Explore the concept of investment income in depth. Many students don’t realize that major institutions—universities, museums, hospitals—operate primarily on endowment income, not annual fundraising. Harvard’s endowment generated approximately $2.3 billion in investment income in recent years. Imagine if HBCUs collectively had similar resources. Explain that building Black institutional power requires moving beyond the donation mentality to an investment mindset.

Discuss how philanthropy intersects with political power. Show them how think tanks, policy organizations, and advocacy groups are funded. Explain that when Black communities don’t adequately fund our own policy organizations, others define the agenda affecting our lives. The Tea Party movement and its affiliated organizations received hundreds of millions in philanthropic support that reshaped American politics. What might be possible if African American communities invested similarly in organizations advancing our interests?

Examine collective philanthropy models. Traditional philanthropy often centers wealthy donors making large gifts. But collective giving where many people contribute smaller amounts has always been the African American philanthropic model. From church building funds to contemporary giving circles, we’ve understood that our strength lies in numbers. Today’s technology makes collective philanthropy more powerful than ever. A thousand people giving $100 monthly creates $1.2 million annually enough to endow a scholarship, support a community organization, or launch a new initiative.

Encourage students to start giving now, even if it’s $5 monthly to an organization they believe in. The habit matters more than the amount. A teenager who gives $10 monthly from age 16 to 66 contributes $6,000 in direct donations, but if that money is invested and earns average returns, it represents tens of thousands in institutional support.

Teaching African American youth about philanthropy means helping them understand its components and how they work together to build institutional power.

Educational Institutions: HBCUs, independent schools, scholarship funds, and educational support organizations create pathways to opportunity and preserve cultural knowledge. Sustained philanthropic support allows these institutions to build endowments, improve facilities, and attract top faculty and students.

Economic Development: Community development corporations, Black-owned business incubators, affordable housing organizations, and loan funds build wealth and economic stability. These institutions require patient capital and sustained support to create generational impact.

Legal and Policy Organizations: Civil rights organizations, legal defense funds, policy think tanks, and advocacy groups shape the rules that govern society. Inadequate funding in this sector means Black interests remain underrepresented in policy formation.

Cultural Institutions: Museums, historical societies, arts organizations, and media companies preserve our stories and shape narratives. Control over our cultural narrative requires institutional infrastructure that only sustained philanthropy can build.

Health and Social Services: Community health centers, mental health organizations, and social service providers address immediate needs while building the institutional capacity to serve Black communities long-term.

Each component requires different funding strategies. Some need operating support, others need capital for buildings or technology, many need endowment building. Teaching youth to think strategically about where and how they give helps them maximize impact.

The most important lesson we can teach African American children about philanthropy is that it’s not optional it’s essential. Every community that has built institutional power has done so through sustained, strategic philanthropy. Jewish communities support Jewish institutions. Asian American communities support Asian American institutions. African American communities must do the same.

Start conversations early. Make giving a family practice. Teach children to evaluate organizations critically. Help them understand that building Black institutional power is a marathon, not a sprint. Show them that their contributions, combined with others, create the schools, organizations, and institutions that will serve generations to come.

This isn’t about guilt or obligation. It’s about power, self-determination, and legacy. When we teach our children that philanthropy is institution-building, we give them tools to shape their own future rather than waiting for others to determine it for them.

The question isn’t whether African American communities can afford to invest in our institutions. The question is whether we can afford not to.

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Giving Back to Those Who Give: How HBCU Communities Can Support Their Alumni Teachers

Posted on February 3, 2026 by | Leave a comment

The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth. – Mary McLeod Bethune

Every day, thousands of HBCU alumni stand in front of classrooms across America, shaping young minds and breaking cycles of poverty through education. These teachers carry forward the legacy of their alma maters, often working in the nation’s most underfunded schools with the fewest resources. Yet too often, they do so without the support of the very communities that benefited from similar dedication during their own educational journeys.

The numbers tell a powerful story. As of this writing, 1,690 HBCU alumni are actively seeking support on DonorsChoose, the popular crowdfunding platform for classroom projects. These aren’t outliers. They represent a significant cross-section of HBCU graduates who chose the noble, challenging profession of teaching. What’s more striking is where they teach and the conditions they face: 1,661 of them work in historically underfunded schools. That’s 98% of HBCU alumni teachers on the platform working in institutions starved of adequate resources.

The funding gap these teachers navigate is staggering. Of the 1,690 HBCU alumni teachers, 1,202 have projects with zero donations. They’ve submitted requests for books, supplies, technology, and basic classroom materials, and they’re waiting for someone to care enough to help. Additionally, 182 have never received funding for any project they’ve ever posted. These are educators who have repeatedly asked for support and been met with silence. Perhaps most telling: 1,555 teach in schools where more than half of students come from low-income households, the same communities many HBCUs were founded to serve.

HBCU alumni entering the teaching profession isn’t coincidental; it’s part of a rich tradition. Historically Black Colleges and Universities were established with a mission to educate those who had been systematically excluded from higher education. Many HBCUs began as teacher training institutions, recognizing that education would be the key to Black advancement and self-determination. Schools like Bennett College, Miles College, Tuskegee University, and Wiley University produced generations of teachers who returned to their communities to educate the next generation.

This tradition continues today. HBCU graduates are more likely than their peers from other institutions to teach in high-need schools, to work with predominantly African American student populations, and to stay in the profession despite its challenges. They bring cultural competence, high expectations, and a deep understanding of the systemic barriers their students face. They are, in many ways, continuing the work their institutions started: creating pathways to opportunity through education.

Yet the schools where they teach are chronically underfunded. Decades of inequitable school funding formulas, property tax-based education systems, and discriminatory resource allocation have created a two-tiered education system. HBCU alumni teachers often find themselves purchasing classroom supplies out of pocket, fundraising for basic necessities, and making impossible choices about which students get access to which resources.

There’s a moral imperative for HBCU alumni, families, organizations, and associations to support their fellow graduates who have chosen teaching. These educators are extending the mission of HBCUs into K-12 classrooms. When an HBCU alumna teaching third grade needs books for her classroom library, she’s doing the work of literacy development that HBCUs have championed for over a century. When an HBCU alumnus teaching high school chemistry needs lab equipment, he’s preparing the next generation of STEM professionals, many of whom will attend HBCUs themselves.

Supporting HBCU alumni teachers is also an investment in community wealth-building. Education remains one of the most reliable paths to economic mobility. The students these teachers serve are disproportionately Black and brown children from low-income families. Quality education, with adequate resources, can break cycles of poverty. When we fund a classroom project for an HBCU graduate teaching in Detroit, Atlanta, or rural Mississippi, we’re investing in future engineers, doctors, teachers, and leaders.

Moreover, there’s a pragmatic networking advantage. The HBCU community is uniquely positioned to support its own. Alumni associations already have infrastructure for giving. Fraternities and sororities have national reach and local chapters. HBCU families understand the value of these institutions and want to see their impact multiplied. By channeling even a fraction of philanthropic dollars toward HBCU alumni teachers, these networks can create measurable change in thousands of classrooms.

Supporting HBCU alumni teachers doesn’t require massive institutional change or million-dollar commitments, though those would certainly help. It starts with awareness and intentionality. There are concrete steps HBCU communities can take, starting with funding classroom projects on DonorsChoose. The platform makes it easy to search for HBCU alumni teachers. Alumni associations can create giving campaigns around Homecoming, Founders’ Day, or Giving Tuesday specifically to fund projects by graduates. A $50 donation can purchase books for a classroom library. A $200 donation can buy tablets for student learning. A $500 donation can transform a science lab. Individual alumni can adopt a teacher from their alma mater and commit to funding their projects annually.

Beyond direct funding, HBCU communities can create mentorship and professional development opportunities. Many HBCU alumni teachers work in isolation, without access to the kind of collegial support and professional growth opportunities their non-HBCU peers enjoy. Alumni associations can host virtual meetups, share teaching resources, or create affinity groups for teachers by subject area or grade level. Greek organizations can leverage their networks to connect teachers across cities and states. Experienced educators can mentor early-career teachers, helping them navigate challenges and avoid burnout.

Amplifying voices and celebrating work matters too. Social media campaigns highlighting HBCU alumni teachers, their innovative classroom practices, and their students’ achievements can build awareness and attract support. Alumni magazines can feature teacher profiles. Homecoming events can honor outstanding educators. This recognition matters not just for morale but for retention. Teaching is hard, underpaid work, and feeling seen and valued by one’s community makes a difference.

Perhaps most importantly, HBCU communities should support organizations that support teachers systemically. The Black Teacher Collaborative, an HBCU-founded and led organization, exemplifies this approach. Founded by educators from HBCUs, the Collaborative works to increase the number of Black teachers, improve their working conditions, and elevate their leadership in education policy. Supporting organizations like the Black Teacher Collaborative multiplies impact. They provide professional development, advocacy, research, and community-building that individual donations to classroom projects cannot. They work systemically to address the conditions that force teachers to crowdfund for basic supplies.

The Black Teacher Collaborative’s team brings deep expertise in teacher preparation, retention, and advocacy. They understand the unique challenges HBCU graduates face in the teaching profession and the unique assets they bring. Supporting such organizations isn’t charity; it’s strategic investment in educational equity and teacher empowerment.

While individual and organizational philanthropy is crucial, the root problem is systemic underfunding of public schools, particularly those serving low-income students and African American students. HBCU alumni, with their networks and influence, can advocate for equitable school funding formulas, increased teacher salaries, and policies that support rather than burden classroom teachers. Alumni associations and Greek organizations can engage in collective advocacy, using their political capital to push for the structural changes that would make teacher crowdfunding unnecessary.

Creating sustained support for HBCU alumni teachers requires more than one-off donations or awareness campaigns. It requires building a culture where supporting educators is seen as central to the HBCU mission, not peripheral to it. Alumni associations can integrate teacher support into their annual giving programs. Greek organizations can make teacher appreciation a national initiative. HBCU families can include teachers in their philanthropic planning.

This culture shift starts with storytelling. When alumni share why they support teachers, they inspire others. When teachers share how support has transformed their classrooms, they make the impact tangible. When students whose lives have been changed speak up, they close the loop. These stories, shared widely and often, create momentum. It also requires accountability. Alumni associations and organizations should set goals: How many teacher projects will we fund this year? How many teachers will we mentor? How much will we donate to organizations like the Black Teacher Collaborative? Tracking progress and reporting results keeps teacher support visible and valued.

Supporting HBCU alumni teachers is about more than helping individuals; it’s about sustaining a tradition and building a movement. HBCUs have always been about uplift, not just of individuals but of entire communities. When we support teachers, we honor that legacy. We ensure that the next generation has access to educators who see their brilliance, understand their context, and refuse to let resource scarcity limit their potential.

The 1,690 HBCU alumni on DonorsChoose represent thousands more working in schools across the country. They are the inheritors of a tradition that goes back to the founding of HBCUs themselves. They deserve our support, our celebration, and our partnership. The question is not whether we can afford to support them but whether we can afford not to.

The call to action is clear: HBCU alumni, log onto DonorsChoose and fund a project. HBCU families, talk to your children about the importance of supporting educators. HBCU organizations, make teacher support a strategic priority. Greek letter organizations, mobilize your networks for collective impact. And everyone, support HBCU-founded organizations like the Black Teacher Collaborative that are working for systemic change.

Our alumni teachers are out there every day, doing the work HBCUs prepared them to do. It’s time we showed up for them the way they show up for their students. It’s time we invested in those who are investing in our future. It’s time we gave back to those who give so much.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

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