Major Commitment for HBCU Gap Scholarships a Rare Funding Bright Spot

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Last January, I floated the idea that historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) had transitioned to an encouraging post-2020 fundraising landscape, as advancement teams were raising money in a way that mirrored their peers at wealthier schools. Developments over the past three months corroborate this. 

In mid-October, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, the longtime HBCU supporter established by the Home Depot cofounder, announced a $50 million, 10-year scholarship commitment to support students at four Atlanta HBCUs. Around the same time, Morgan State University announced its second mega-gift from MacKenzie Scott ($63 million), while the previous month, the United Negro College Fund received its first gift from Scott ($70 million). Also in September, Huston-Tillotson University announced a $150 million gift from the Moody Foundation — the single largest donation ever made to an HBCU. And just before this piece went to print, we learned that Scott gave two gifts totaling $80 million to Howard University.

“I think HBCUs have been underfunded when you look at the funding that goes to all kinds of universities in this country,” said Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation President and Director Fay Twersky. “But I do think there is more funding going to HBCUs than there was pre-2020, and there is still more room to grow.”

The Blank Family Foundation hopes to galvanize that growth. Its tranche of funding will provide gap scholarships primarily for junior and senior students in good academic standing who have exhausted all other financial resources at Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College and Spelman College. Beginning in 2026, the program is projected to support nearly 10,000 students over the next decade, helping to raise graduation rates while serving as a model for other funders committed to student success.

“We learned that sometimes it’s the difference of a few thousand dollars — and even a few hundred dollars — that makes the difference between graduating or not,” Twersky said. “The financial hardships begin to set in in years three and four, and we thought that if we could help alleviate that, it would make a material difference in graduation rates, which, as we know, makes a material difference in the lives of these young people.”

An overview of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation’s previous HBCU giving

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation was established in 1995. The foundation runs grantmaking programs for five main areas of focus: Atlanta’s Westside, Democracy, Environment, Mental Health and Well-Being and Youth Development. The new funding for HBCU scholarships came from the foundation’s Founder Initiatives, which are grants that represent Arthur M. Blank’s passions and interests. 

Last March, my colleague Ade Adeniji connected with Blank to discuss his philanthropy and plans for the family’s next generation of giving. “I’ve said publicly that at least 95% of our family estate will end up in our family foundation in one form or another,” Blank said. “Philanthropy, for me, my children and our staff, has always been important. So as these values have continued to grow, our ability to increase our philanthropy has, as well.”

The foundation’s HBCU giving history affirms the philanthropic truism that large gifts are usually preceded by a series of smaller ones. Examples of previous gifts that flowed to the four HBCUs receiving gap scholarship funding include $10 million for Spelman College’s Arthur M. Blank Innovation Lab and $3 million to Morris Brown College to digitize a one-year hospitality credential.

A common theme underlying the foundation’s HBCU giving is the fact that the 83-year-old Blank, who owns the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and the soccer club Atlanta United FC, is an avid sports fan. The foundation previously provided Morehouse College with $400,000 in partnership with PGA TOUR Superstore, which Blank owns, to support its golf program. It also provided new football helmets for Morehouse and Clark Atlanta University student athletes.

“We’ve supported other HBCUs in the country, but most of our support has been to these four HBCUs in our backyard in Atlanta,” Twersky said.

How the foundation’s gap scholarship gifts came together

The seeds of what became the Blank Family Foundation’s $50 million in funding were planted about a year ago when Twersky and her colleagues spent a day visiting the four HBCUs that subsequently received gap scholarship support. “We met the presidents, some faculty and students,” Twersky recalled. “We got oriented to what was happening at the schools, and what the students’ needs were.” 

About 10 weeks later, Arthur Blank, Twersky and foundation staff convened with stakeholders attuned to the HBCU field, including Andrew Young, former Georgia Congressman, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and HBCU graduate; and Interim Spelman College President Rosalind Brewer, who, in addition to earning her bachelor’s degree from the school, sits on the Blank Family Foundation board.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Rather than do something bespoke for these schools, is there something we can do together for all of them?’” Twersky said. After reflecting on their conversations with students and digging into the data around graduation rates, “the idea of doing scholarships began to crystallize as something that would be meaningful to all of the schools.”

I mentioned to Twersky that before 2020, we often heard that non-alumni givers attuned to the principles of strategic philanthropy would pass on supporting HBCUs, citing the institutions’ proportionately lower graduation rates. Of course, I also recognized that no statistic exists in a vacuum. These figures are traceable to a litany of causal factors, including a dearth of college prep opportunities and, as the Blank Family Foundation’s announcement underscores, targeted inventions like gap scholarships to increase a student’s chances of graduating. 

As someone who’s worked with data throughout her career, Twersky didn’t dispute the premise that HBCU graduation rates may have deterred some donors from reaching for their checkbook. But “for every person who concludes that it’s not worth making that investment,” she said, “someone else can say, ‘We need to invest in making those numbers go up.’ Data don’t make decisions. People do.”

Signs of durable philanthropic support for HBCUs

Looking ahead, the foundation will be rolling out a new Mental Health and Well-Being strategy with a focus on what Twersky called “scaling what works in terms of prevention.” 

The strategy will zero in on intervention points across three states in a young person’s life — establishing parent/child connections around the time of birth, cultivating a sense of belonging and an ability to regulate one’s nervous system during the school-age years, and engendering a healthy and balanced relationship with technology during the teenage and young adult years. “The strategy will be a 10-year outlook for how to really make a dent in these areas,” Twersky said. “The work is just getting underway.”

As far as HBCU giving is concerned, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this is one of the few segments of the philanthrosphere where donors aren’t being asked to plug revenue gaps caused by terminated federal grants. 

In September, the Department of Education redirected $435 million of previous discretionary funding to HBCUs. “When added to the existing appropriations approved by Congress for HBCUs,” read an United Negro College Fund press release, “the total award now stands at $1.38 billion for fiscal year 2025, a 48% increase over the previous amount.” (I encourage readers to check out this piece in which CNN’s Nicquel Terry Ellis asks experts why the administration, which cut federal grants for Hispanic Serving Institutions, is showering HBCUs with support.)

As far as the foundation’s HBCU giving is concerned, its $50 million in support of gap scholarships corroborates the thesis that the field is shedding the vestiges of pre-2020 scarcity. 

For starters, these were follow-on mega-gifts, which are a hallmark of what I called the “virtuous cycle” that has been the domain of advancement teams from affluent, predominantly white institutions. The gifts are also historically large. The $16.5 million Clark Atlanta University received for gap scholarships represents the largest private donation in the school’s history. 

The Blank Family Foundation’s commitment refutes the idea that affluent alumni must be the engines of universities’ fundraising machinery. The foundation’s board includes Spelman alumnus Brewer, but Blank himself attended Massachusetts’ Babson College. The new tranche of funding is another example of how non-HBCU graduates like Scott, Reed Hastings and Rhonda Stryker are awarding the kinds of mega-gifts that are core components of the predominantly white institution (PWI) fundraising model.

Lastly, any “virtuous cycle” usually requires other actors to provide momentum so the gears don’t grind to a halt. Twersky was bullish on this point, citing Scott’s September gift to the United Negro College Fund and Blue Meridian Partners’ robust HBCU giving as evidence of the field’s fundraising maturity. She was also struck by how the Blank Family Foundation’s peers have responded to its $50 million commitment for gap scholarships.

“We’re getting calls from other funders and sports team owners asking, ‘How can we do something like this?’” Twersky said. “So to my earlier point of, ‘Is there enough funding?’ No, there still isn’t. But is there the promise of more? I hope there is.”