'You get passed over': Black women nonprofit leaders in Fayetteville say funding is a challenge

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect that Fayetteville Women for Good has granted funds to Greater Life of Fayetteville and that Vanessa Daniel is no longer the executive director of the Groundswell Fund.

For more than a decade, Georgeanna Pinckney has led free programs for Fayetteville children with behavioral challenges.

“These kids feel rejected, abandoned and not worthy,” she said. “They’ve had people tell them they would never amount to anything.”

Pinckney, a single mother, said she felt called to help those children just as she had supported her own.

In 2012, she created Greater Life of Fayetteville, a volunteer-run nonprofit that offers afterschool and out-of-school suspension tutoring for children ages 7 to 14, as well as a five-week summer camp and monthly parent workshops.

Operating out of the Orange Street School, a historic education building that also houses a museum, hundreds of students and parents have seen success from the programs, Pinckney said.

The organization’s biggest challenge? Finding funding.

Fundraisers like a semiannual fish fry and an annual gala, as well as monthly donations from faith-based groups, account for most of the organization’s revenue, she said.

While Greater Life has landed some city and county grants, Pinckney said, large, multi-year grants from foundations and corporations are often out of reach.

Many grants require applicants to have years of experience managing large revenues — making it nearly impossible for newer organizations to break the revenue threshold needed to land big grants for the first time, she said.

“That hurts,” she said. “You believe that you're doing the work, you're showing the results, and you get passed over.”

With more funding, local grassroots organizations like Greater Life could grow their efforts and magnify their impact, Pinckney said.

Funders sideline Black women-led organizations with eligibility criteria

Vanessa Daniel, former executive director of Groundswell Fund, a California-based organization that supports grassroots organizing by women and transgender people of color, called out this pattern in a 2019 opinion piece in The New York Times.

“Philanthropy’s eligibility criteria and metrics for impact often reinforce the inequities that are at the core of the very problems it is trying to solve," Daniels wrote in the editorial. "Many of them are ‘facially neutral’: never mentioning particular groups and at first glance nondiscriminatory, but producing stark racial and gender disparities in giving.”

Experts say these philanthropic policies could explain the nonprofit revenue differences along racial lines.

Black-led organizations, on average, have revenues that are 24% less than those of their white-led counterparts, according to a 2020 report by Echoing Green, a group that funds social impact startups. Organizations led by Black women consistently receive less funding than those led by Black men or white women, the study found.

Fayetteville group seeks to fund women-led nonprofits

At least one Fayetteville group is working to close the funding gap for minority and women-led organizations.

Fayetteville Women for Good, a giving circle that started last summer, pools members’ quarterly donations to write checks to women-led and women-founded nonprofits, president Zenaida Cranford said.

“Most of our donations have gone to minorities and women of color,” she said.

The group, which has about 50 members, has given thousands to nonprofits like Greater Life of Fayetteville.

Like most grants, the money is only available to tax-exempt nonprofits, Cranford said.

Work and breastfeed as a new mom? Fayetteville advocates, employers take action

Costly paperwork bars nonprofits from grant eligibility

Receiving the tax-exempt status poses a financial barrier for many community organizations in Fayetteville led by Black women.

Filing for the designation directly with the IRS costs $600, according to Forbes, but working with an attorney or accountant can cost thousands of dollars.

“You’re trying to figure out how to keep your household running and give back to the community,” Demetria Murphy, founder of Youth Diverse Intervention Group in Fayetteville said. “You don’t have hundreds to get these pieces of paper.”

Murphy, who founded YDIG in 2017, said she and a close circle of friends funded the organization’s afterschool programs for at-risk youth, including transportation and meals.

“It was coming out of my pocket and my friends who were supporting what we were doing,” she said.

Similarly, Fayetteville cosmetologist Saneequa Barlow runs her Jr Artist Program For Girls in part with profits from her Breezewood Avenue hair salon; Fayetteville woman Mary Freeman provides free meals and community other support through her Jasper Street charity shop.

'They feel that love': How 4 people are creating change by investing in Fayetteville youth

Murphy said it’s not unusual for Black women to fund their nonprofits with their own money and profits from their businesses.

Research backs this idea. Black Americans give a larger share of their wealth to charities than any other racial group in America, according to a 2012 study by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Black households, on average, give away 25% more of their income per year than white households, the study found.

Despite financial barriers, leaders get to work

In some cases, operating without tax-exempt status means finding creative solutions to get the work done anyway, Book Black Women founder Ayana Washington said.

Washington created the organization, which provides performance opportunities for Black women in the arts, in January 2022.

In the absence of tax exemption, Washington partnered with the Fayetteville-based nonprofit Culture and Heritage Alliance to receive a $10,000 grant from The Arts Council of Fayetteville to put on a four-part event series.

When she hosts events, Washington said, she works with vendors that don’t require payment upfront so that she can pay out of revenue from ticket sales.

Besides the cost to get a tax exemption, a lack of knowledge can also be a barrier to building a nonprofit, she said.

“I would have loved a mentor or even just a guide sheet,” she said.

While the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits offers assistance with legal and accounting topics among its other programs, one local organization also plans to offer expertise.

Local real estate broker and wine bar owner Santina Thomas, who leads Sisters With A Purpose alongside Octavia Carr and Shanna Moore, said the women are developing seminars to learn how to build a successful nonprofit.

Moving forward requires funders to 'change the rules'

Pinckney said the only way for Black women to elevate their programming and serve a bigger population is for funders to trust grassroots organizations with large grants.

“They can change the rules,” she said.

Multi-year funding with monitoring and oversight could be transformational for many nonprofits, she said. With more money, she said, nonprofits can make a bigger impact.

“If they are about the community, I guarantee you they will excel,” Pinckney said.

Reporter Taylor Shook can be reached at tshook@gannett.com.  

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Black women nonprofit leaders in Fayetteville face funding barriers