In this episode of Forever Forward, community stewards Gregory Owens and Cleve Warren sat down with TCF’s Vice President of Civic Leadership, Wanda Willis to discuss the Eartha M.M. White Legacy Fund. The endowed fund was created by the sale of Eartha M.M. White’s nursing home, and is celebrating its 20th anniversary here at The Community Foundation. Both Owens and Warren have led grantmaking from the fund from the very beginning, and in this podcast, they share their stories about Eartha White and what they’re proudest of, looking back on 20 years of grants.
You both have been in the community for many years, doing good work. What are some things that Ms. White did that align with your interests?
Cleve: Ms. White was all about that, doing the good work. When you read or hear about Ms. White, you hear her as a teacher, as a performer, close friends of the Johnson brothers, a member of Bethel Church. She was all over the place. What is now Clara White Kitchen, which was named after her mom, was serving the community in ways that are being delivered still today, in locations around our community that are there to support the indigent people in need. That was Ms. White’s constant work, and the nursing home was just an extension of that work in a larger way.
Gregory: She was about advocacy. She was involved in civil rights and desegregation here in Jacksonville, nationally, as a member of the NAACP. She was an entrepreneur. Those things were the foundation for her charitable work and works of compassion in the community.
Tell us about you and how you got involved with the Eartha M.M. White Fund.
Gregory: I recruited Cleve and others for the board of directors, and we’ve been together ever since, as part of this effort. We were very engaged in the sale of the nursing home and involved in the recruitment of the eventual owner. It was important for us that they be a Black owner, that it stayed in the Black community.
Cleve: It was lots of work. We came to the rationalization that if we were going to preserve Ms. White’s legacy, we needed to put the nursing home in the hands of someone that looked like us, an African American owner who knew the business of nursing homes. We also needed to take the proceeds from the sale of that and to continue Ms. White’s mantra, which was to “do all you can, for as many people as you can, for as long as you can.” We reasoned that if we put those dollars in an endowment, that we’d be able to continue her work indefinitely.
Gregory: The sensible thing was to think about where to put the money so that it works beyond us. That’s when we began to kick around the idea of The Community Foundation. The whole idea of perpetuity was what caught my attention. This could be here forever, and all we need to do is make sure there’s trustees in place to manage this? Oh, we can do that. From there, we entered into that relationship with The Community Foundation. Based on some numbers I saw last night, we’ve granted maybe $1.3 million over 20 years, which comes to about $65,000 a year.
What are some grants that you’re most proud of?
Cleve: We were keen on having no specific area of focus. Ms. White says, “give to as many people as you can, for as long as you can.” If there’s been a particular focus, it’s been in education. True North was our starting point with respect to serving people. We then stretched into what was another love of Ms. White’s, which was education, through the Urban Education Symposium, to capitalizing charter schools, to JPEF, the Jacksonville Public Education Fund, to Tiger Academy, to KIPP, and the public school system. For every major initiative in this community that was to affect African American children or the African American community, we feel that the Black community should have some equity in that endeavor. We couldn’t be a million-dollar donor, but we could certainly be a significant one, nonetheless. What we also discovered is once you have some equity in the game, then you’re no longer a fly on the wall. You have a seat at the table to be a part of the conversation about what happens to people, particularly people that look like us.
Gregory: The Duval County school system was, the kind word would be “upside down” when it came to education in the Black community, males in particular. I think the work we did with True North was the most transformative, impactful project that we probably have done, because it moved the needle. It moved the discussion out of the boardroom, from the school board to the community, and the community was talking about that issue. As you look at the scores today, those scores have been proved tremendously.
What would Eartha M.M. White’s advice be to listeners today, if she were here?
Cleve: I think she would say, enough of that palliative care. She’d focus our attention on curative care, the things that are addressed with the intent of resolving a problem, as opposed to putting salve on a problem. I think her intent was to fix stuff.
Gregory: I think she would be more proactive. She would make a paradigm shift. Not to react to things, but to get ahead of it and be proactive about it, rather than to put a Band-Aid on it and have somebody else deal with it. I think she would see those trends and move ahead with those things and start to address them on the front end, versus addressing it after it’s passed.
Cleve: That’s probably the reason why we had a nursing home to start with. Imagine in her day, there was probably no good place, if you will, for African Americans to go for nursing home care. So, she said, “Let me fix this.”