Strada's $25M HBCU bet started with listening, not a program to fund

Most philanthropy shows up with a program already designed. The funder names the intervention, names the outcomes, and asks the institution to deliver both. When Strada Education Foundation's board committed $25 million over eight years to HBCUs in August 2020, it declined to do that. The money came first. The program came months later, after a listening tour with presidents and chancellors, and the framework that emerged now runs at 47 institutions, with scholars graduating at rates in the mid-nineties.

Daryl Graham, senior vice president of engagement and HBCU initiatives at Strada, leads the effort. His case for that sequencing comes from having sat on both sides of the table: as a Morgan State graduate who experienced what an HBCU provides, and as someone who spent years in global philanthropy at JPMorgan Chase deciding where a large institution's dollars should go. The lesson he took from that second role is blunt.

What the listening tour actually surfaced

The context was the pandemic, economic disruption, and the national reckoning that followed the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, with the passing of John Lewis in July 2020 sharpening the question of who develops the next generation of leaders. Strada sent letters to all 101 accredited HBCUs. Thirty-five responded, and the conversations that followed, held over Zoom in the fall and winter of 2020 into 2021, were deliberately open-ended. Some presidents brought their entire cabinets. Strada came with questions rather than a pitch.

Two things came through clearly. The first was that access to professional opportunity was uneven across campuses. Employers, as Graham put it without blaming them, return to the same schools and the same networks where they have hired before, and the cycle repeats until something disrupts it. "Talent existed everywhere. Opportunity did not." A student at a rural institution and a student at an urban one face very different paths to an internship, and geography alone can decide who gets one. The second was belonging, which campus leaders raised early and often, and which Graham describes not as an abstraction but as a professor knowing your name and calling you out for missing class on Tuesday.

Flexible dollars and the cost of giving up control

The Strada Scholar framework that resulted pairs a $7,000 scholarship per student with $1,200 per student per year that institutions direct case by case toward work-based learning barriers. That might cover rides for a student from Georgia interning in New York without a car, or offset housing costs, or, combined with the institution's 15 percent administrative allowance, make a student whole while taking an unpaid position in their field. Strada set the guardrails; campuses decide how the money meets a specific student's situation. Graham said the impact of that flexibility was larger than the foundation expected going in.

The trade-off is real. Strada gave up standardization, which makes evaluation harder, and it gave up the comfort of a design that looks clean on a spreadsheet. "You gotta give up some control," Graham said, noting that Bowie State is not Virginia State, and Virginia State is not Alabama State. What Strada got in exchange was ownership. Virginia State used the framework to convert an honors program of a couple hundred students into an honors college approaching a thousand, close to 20 percent of its scholar base, and Graham said the campus culture is visibly different three years later. His expectation is that changes like that outlast the funding itself.

That matters for a sector with a stubborn gap between intention and completion. As the host noted, national figures show roughly seven in ten first-year students want a paid internship while fewer than four in ten seniors complete one. Strada's seniors run well ahead of that, and Graham attributes it to treating work-based learning as part of the educational experience from the start, supported by coaching and advising, rather than something students discover on their own in senior year. The hard truth underneath the initiative is the one Strada started from: low completion is a structural problem, not a talent problem, and the structures that fix it are built by the institutions that already know their students, not by the funder holding the check.