. But the colleges also have been pitching themselves, emphasizing their ability to deliver returns on the investment in student mobility.At the beverage company Diageo North America, the employee resource group for African Americans shaped a program that has provided almost $12 million to HBCUs, said Danielle Robinson, head of community engagement and partnerships for Diageo.
Foundations have been more receptive when the school reaches out, said Vita Pickrum, the school’s vice president of institutional advancement. She said she would like to see foundations shape giving in partnership with HBCUS. Gifts to HBCUs typically are more restricted than those given to predominantly white schools, she said, which she would like to see change.
Those small institutions often operate as engines of economic mobility that lift students from poverty to the middle class, Lomax said. Many have near open-enrollment policies, educating nearly any student that wishes to pursue higher education. “I would really applaud my fellow African Americans for really pushing things within corporate America to make certain that the George Floyd incident was a movement, a long-term movement, just not just a one-off,” Coles said.
Whether corporations will stick with funding HBCUs for the long term is still a question for Shawnta Friday-Stroud, vice president of advancement at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. Donations from corporate and philanthropic foundations have almost doubled from last year, when they’d received $2.4 million at this time compared with $5.3 million so far this year.