Dear Friend of The Belk Foundation,
Welcome to the new website for The Belk Foundation. We hope that you will find this website both helpful and informative.
The Foundation has gone through many changes over the past few years. We hired our first full-time director last fall as an important step towards professionalizing our grantmaking − both elevating the due diligence of our process and becoming more accessible to the community.
With a new director on board, our Foundation was able to make another stride toward improving our grantmaking. After several discussions and a retreat with our Board in January, we are proud to announce a new mission statement for The Belk Foundation:
The Belk Foundation believes that education is a basis for successful society and that a
quality education is the right of all children and youth. Our mission is to invest in schools and
organizations that work aggressively to ensure all students graduate from high school
and continue on an intentional path toward college, career and life.
Supporting education is not new to The Foundation; in fact, over half of grant dollars over the past decade have supported education. We believe that this new mission will provide stronger direction to our charitable investments − guiding us internally and increasing clarity to our nonprofit partners and community.
Equally important to our mission are the outcomes we now seek in our charitable investments. Please find these three outcomes below:
• Increasing the number of children and youth who are at or above grade level in core subjects
• Increasing the number of youth who graduate high school in four years
• Increasing the number of youth who have an intentional path forward after high school:
post-secondary education, training or meaningful employment.
Several of our past partners may find that they are no longer a natural fit with our new mission and outcomes. Please know that as excited as we are about our new mission, we lament that we may now need to turn away requests from organizations supported previously. We encourage you to contact us with your thoughts and ask any questions you might have. Of course, this goes without saying that all pledge commitments, regardless of connection with the new mission, will be fulfilled at the agreed upon schedule.
We are proud of the important work our grantees do to improve our communities and look forward to sharing with you both successes and learning we intend to find moving forward. Please keep our new mission in mind; we want to support organizations that show measurable achievement in our outcome areas and are dedicated to finding what works. This will be a continual learning process. I hope that you will feel free to contact us anytime with your ideas or suggestions.
Sincerely,
Katie B. Morris
Board Chair, The Belk Foundation
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