NEW HANOVER COUNTY — In the latest update from the New Hanover Community Endowment, CEO and President Dan Winslow outlined a new roadmap for grant-making strategies and previewed upcoming grant announcements. He also offered his view on the endowment’s relationship with local governments in wake of community suggestions the organization should take on.
READ MORE: New grant-making tiers, staff and transparency part of endowment CEO’s focus
The Endowment held a meeting on Wednesday, May 21, to brief the public on its recent activities, like the segmentation of the Endowment’s work into three departments — Programs and Grants led by Sophie Dagenais, External Affairs led by Tyler Newman and Research and Impact Development led by Emily Page.
Winslow, along with Endowment board chair and vice chair Shannon Winslow (no relation to Dan) and Chris Boney, also answered questions from the audience. A few speakers questioned the Endowment’s role in funding things that might already receive government funding, whether local, state or federal.
“I think that one of the key opportunities for us as the largest philanthropy in the region is to convene other funders to improve our outreach and connectivity to other funders, so that we actually have better collaboration,” Winslow said. Those funders include other foundations, as well as the City of Wilmington and New Hanover County.
Port City Daily spoke with Winslow about this relationship further in an interview Thursday.
“The reality is that, as much of an asset as the endowment has, it pales in comparison to the collective assets of the taxpayers of New Hanover County,” Winslow said to Port City Daily.
Winslow said he would love for the endowment, the City of Wilmington and New Hanover County to “coordinate for the greater good,” as the entities often fund the same nonprofit service providers in the community.
With $1.6 billion allocated to it after the sale of New Hanover Regional Medical Center to Novant, the Endowment makes New Hanover County unlike any other place in the state when it comes to community investment. With that comes questions on how the Endowment will spend those public funds and where the line is between government responsibilities versus Endowment initiatives.
Commissioner Dane Scalise shared his opinion on that divide earlier this week. During a discussion of non-county agency funding, Scalise said he would like to see the Endowment take full responsibility for that funding. Wilmington City Council also recently requested staff provide a rundown of all funding sources going to local service providers to guide its discussions of the city’s human services grants.
Elected leaders have looked to the endowment for other funding needs as well.
With the support of city council, the Wilmington Police Department applied for an Endowment grant in August to provide monthly rental stipends for a total of 100 lower-ranking officers, who often struggle to find housing they can afford in city limits. The funding would reinstate a program the city paid for back in the 1990s.
Though previously covered by New Hanover County Schools (which gets a third of its budget from the county), literacy coaches, 26 in total, were funded via Endowment grant in June 2024.
Nonprofits may also come to rely on the Endowment more pending action at the federal level. Earlier this year, the Trump administration froze grant funding to ensure compliance with its policy goals and it continues to propose cuts to agencies like National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care, and Americorps, all of which distribute funding to smaller nonprofits across the country.
Winslow told PCD the Endowment would consider any grant request based on its merits, whether it stemmed from lost federal funding, for example, or not.
When it was created, the Endowment’s focus was on funding new initiatives, not supplanting operating expenses; that’s slightly shifted with the Endowment’s introduction of the “grants rainbow” last year. The Endowment has capacity grants designed to “enhance the organizational and financial stability of nonprofit entities” by strengthening a grantee’s internal processes.
On Thursday, Winslow said the Endowment is a “catalyst” to produce projects at scale — and then exit.
“Innovation has risk,” Winslow said. “You want to be very careful with tax dollars, about risk. You have always competing demands for dollars, and you want to make sure that the taxpayers’ dollars are invested prudently and wisely and effectively. So we can, here at the Endowment, have a bit more latitude to engage in that social innovation experimentation.”
An area that could perhaps use the most creativity: housing. Last May, the Endowment released its $19 million housing strategy to increase the county’s affordable housing through operating support, the production and rehab of units, and creating a low-cost capital fund for development. Though Terri Burhans, the Endowment’s community development network officer, said last year the housing shortage has to be attacked from all angles.
“We can’t build our way out of this,” Burhans said at a public meeting in June.
Winslow told Port City Daily the Endowment needs “outside the box” ideas, ones like a proposed program in Buncombe County where short-term rental owners would be paid between $12,000 to $20,000 to dedicate their units to affordable housing.
Other than that, Winslow again pointed to government authority and its role as development gatekeeper.
“The good news is that the county and the city have actually more resources than we have, and have been huge leaders, I think, in affordable housing,” Winslow said.
In its first year of the housing strategy, the Endowment distributed $24 million to support the creation of 316 new affordable units, repair 179 units, and addition of 89 transitional beds. Winslow told PCD $15 million has already been committed this year with a progress report on the housing strategy forthcoming.
Comparatively, the City of Wilmington has supported the construction of 622 affordable housing since 2022 and dedicates 2.5 times the value of one cent to affordable housing every year. The New Hanover County Board of Commissioners pledged $15 million over five years to address workforce and affordable housing needs in 2021. The funding has facilitated 497 new units, the repair of 40 existing homes, and rental assistance to 127 households.
Still, an updated housing needs assessment presented to New Hanover County commissioners earlier this month showed the county’s housing gap to be 21,864 units — 12,864 for ownership and 8,317 for rental — per data presented by Mollie Fitzpatrick of Root Policy Research. Over the next 20 years, the total rises to 38,697 units. Data shows the most need arises from households making lower than $79,000.
Winslow, speaking in his personal capacity informed by his former work in government, said regulation often slows the construction process and brought up the idea of pre-permitting, where the governing body offers a fast-tracked permitting process for certain developments, such as affordable housing, it wants to see more of.
However, de-regulating the development process is a decision that ultimately can only be made by governing bodies. Port City Daily asked Winslow if he sees the Endowment’s role as funneling funds toward certain housing strategies or types of development; he said it was too early to know, though the Endowment could study different ideas, going back to the organization’s ability to spur innovation.
It’s also important to note Winslow isn’t the sole decision maker; he answers to a 13-member board appointed by Novant Health and New Hanover County Commissioners (two members are chosen by the Endowment itself).
The housing strategy is only a year old, and as Winslow said at Wednesday’s public meeting, bigger issues require five to 10 years to study the effectiveness of solutions. As for the future of the strategy, along with the Endowment’s food security strategy, both will be folded in as “basic needs” to the Endowment’s new “roadmap” unveiled Wednesday.
The roadmap breaks down the Endowment’s four pillars — education, social and health equity, community safety and community development — into five age groups and various components to focus on in those groups. It breaks down as follows:
- Prebirth and infancy: Maternal and infant health, mental health, preventative care
- Birth to 5 years old: Early childhood education, Kindergarten readiness
- Ages 6 to 15: K-12 achievement gaps, teacher effectiveness, culture of high expectations
- Ages 16-24: Youth development, reduce youth violence, increase high school graduation rates, employment opportunities
- Ages 24+: Vibrant adulthood and quality of life, innovative entrepreneurial development, high wage jobs, world-class recreational enhancements
The roadmap is part of the Endowment’s “strategic refresh” of its 2023-2025 strategic plan; the goal, Winslow said, is to create a sense of direction and focus to concentrate the Endowment’s resources. It is the latest concept in the Endowment’s arsenal following the introduction of the “grants rainbow” in December 2024 to triage grant requests.
“We wanted to establish this vision of, really from pre-birth to adulthood, of how we can make life better for people in New Hanover County,” Winslow said.
At Wednesday’s public meeting, a resident advocating for more support for elder services, pointed out the majority of the roadmap is focused on youth. Port City Daily asked Winslow to touch on this during Thursday’s interview.
“It doesn’t show it in this chart, because we just had to structure the chart a certain way, but I said in my remarks: mental health, preventative care, those are lifetime values — I put it with the pre-birth and infancy,” Winslow said. “World class, recreational enhancements: that’s not just for adults, kids benefit from that too.”
From 2026 to 2036, all grant requests will be seen through the lens of the roadmap. Winslow said there will still be some flexibility for opportunities that can’t be passed up.
The goal is for the Endowment — which will be required to dole out 5% of its funds, or $80 million annually, starting in 2028 — is to be more proactive in its grants, compared to the awards distributed so far, which Winslow said were more “reactionary.”
He used early childhood education as an example of proactively building up the county’s services step-by-step: “We don’t have enough licensed childcare workers in this county, so we’ve got to solve that problem. We don’t have enough facilities in this county, and then how would they be designed? We’ve got to solve that problem before we can launch the program.”
As part of the refresh, Winslow said the Endowment has already determined the answers to two questions: Where are we now? Where do we want to be? It will spend the rest of the year developing the answer to “how do we get there?”
For example, Winslow said the county has an “unacceptably” high level of infant mortality, a problem that’s worse for Black children.
According to North Carolina statistics, New Hanover County’s 2023 infant mortality rate was 5.2 per 1,000 infants, compared to the state’s average of 6.9 per 1,000. Racial disparity in NHC is 3.9 White infants to 10.6 Black infants; in North Carolina, the disparity is 4.7 White infants to 12.9 Black infants, per 2019-2023 data.
The 2025 year isn’t just a set-up for next year; at Wednesday’s meeting, Dagenais said the Endowment has a budget of $55 million and $20 million. She reported the Endowment has 313 pending applications with grant announcements coming next week.
“And I believe it is reasonable to project that we will start to announce grants in July, August and September,” Dagenais said.
Not only that, but the Endowment is working on a way to measure the impact of the grants it provides. Winslow said his team is exploring how to create a data dashboard where members of the public can track progress.
He mentioned the City of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which launched the organization Chattanooga 2.0 in 2016 to leverage funding for several goals, which it tracks with an online dashboard. Winslow said he would like to see the Endowment use artificial intelligence to collate data without burdening current staff.
“We’ve done a lot more to share information and put a lot more information out there, and we’re going to continue to continue to do that,” Winslow said.
Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.
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