With a new $55 million pledge, the St. Louis-based Enterprise Holdings Foundation joins business and philanthropic organizations around the nation in responding to calls for racial and social equity in the wake of the widely viewed killing of George Floyd.
Last month the Foundation, the philanthropic arm of car rental giant Enterprise, announced the five-year, $55 million commitment that, beginning in January, will help fund organizations that support youth of color in underserved communities.
At the same time, the Foundation said it will add $65 million to a separate program, launched in 2016 called Enterprise Fill Your Tank, that’s already spent more than $50 million to address food insecurity globally.
The $120 million total comes against the backdrop of growing cries for racial justice and shrinking funding for some charities due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In the new initiative, over the next five years, Enterprise Holdings’ “ROAD Forward” program plans to donate $5 million each to four nationally-known nonprofits that work primarily in communities of color — The Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, UNCF, Girls Inc., and Parents as Teachers.
It was not immediately clear how much of the $55 million in “ROAD Forward” funds would be spent in St. Louis’ Black community. At Girls Inc., national leadership credited the St. Louis Girls Inc. affiliate with forging the relationship with Enterprise that yielded the donation. The St. Louis Girls Inc. will get 10% of the $5 million, according to Stephanie Hull, CEO of the New York-based organization.
Beyond the $20 million destined for the non-profits, $35 million from the “ROAD Forward” program will be channeled by workers at more than 70 Enterprise global operating locations over the next five years, to support work in three focus areas — early childhood development, youth health and wellness, and career and college preparation. Selection of local organizations in that part of the program will be made in the spring, according to the Foundation.
Improving prospects
The new initiative, using an acronym for Respect, Opportunity, Achievement and Diversity, aims to provide resources to improve long-term prospects for success for children and youth of color.
In a news release in June — weeks after Floyd’s death under the knee of a then-Minneapolis police officer — Enterprise CEO Chrissy Taylor said “we must do more, and we will.”
The announcement builds on that sentiment.
“Obviously the events of this summer, it was just heartbreaking,” Carolyn Kindle Betz, Enterprise Holdings Foundation president, said in an interview with The American. “We knew we had to do something bigger and better than we had in the past.”
After meeting with staff members and community leaders, the Foundation put its focus on the three youth-related themes.
“These are key junctures in individuals’ lives, particularly children,” Kindle Betz said. “We wanted to make sure we were providing them tools and access to resources to make sure that they are starting out on the right foot.”
To strengthen early childhood development, the St. Louis-based Parents as Teachers program plans to retool its curriculum to be more relevant to diverse audiences, create professional development sessions, subsidize cultural adaptations of existing programs, translate program materials into Spanish and other languages, and underwrite new research, according to the Foundation and Constance Gully, the organization’s president and CEO. Parents as Teachers helps families increase their pre-school children’s school readiness and address challenges such as food insecurity.
“This gift from Enterprise, for us is an affirmation of what we’ve been doing, but also an amazing opportunity for us to leverage and strengthen that work in communities that have been hit the hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic,” Gully told The American.
The My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, which works to build safe and supportive communities for boys and young men of color, plans to use its Enterprise donationin 19 communities selected as “Impact and Seed” locations in 2018. The funds will be used to share information on best practices, lessons learned, and stories of inspiration and hope from youth and community leaders. The Alliance also plans to work with MBK Communities to “define, document and increase their impact,” according to the Foundation.
Girls Inc.
At Girls Inc., “We really always work with the girls on the things that matter most to them, and it never fails that social justice is on the top of their list,” Hull said.
“They recognize that the number one issue that they face, if they are going to make use of their full potential… that they need to get past the systemic racism, and the invisible barriers that really are just put up against them,” she said.
Support for Girls Inc. will be used to refine the organization’s existing tools to focus on racial injustice and inequities and update the program’s education, training and mentorships.
Through the United Negro College Fund, Enterprise will support more than 70 scholarships for first-generation, Black college students to cover non-tuition-related student needs such as emergency expenses, stipends to support extracurricular professional development and educational loan repayment, the Foundation said.
“HBCUs have been important engines of development, [and] of social and racial justice in the country,” said Larry Griffith, senior vice president of programs and student services with the UNCF.
“This significant investment in these 72 students, and these resources coming with them to HBCUs, we believe are our signature advancement of those causes,” he said.
As part of a separate effort to address food insecurity, which also affects people of color, the Foundation announced plans to more than double the amount already spent through the Enterprise Fill Your Tank program.
During the first four years of the program, donations have included: $10 million to Feeding America to help fight hunger among seniors and children; $6 million to Food Banks Canada; and $20 million to local food banks and pantries in North American communities served by Enterprise.
Launched in 1982 by Enterprise founder Jack Taylor, the Foundation and the Taylor family have contributed more than $1.4 billion to thousands of nonprofits, with a special emphasis on community improvement, education and environmental stewardship.