A Pragmatic Approach to Connecting Social Innovators and Investors: Moonshot in Baltimore
A Conversation with Dr. John Brothers
John Brothers currently serves as the President of the T. Rowe Price Foundation and President of T. Rowe Price Charitable. Dr. Brothers comes to T. Rowe Price from Quidoo, an international consulting firm he started and led for over a decade. Dr. Brothers served as a management and social policy professor for over a decade at New York University and Rutgers University and served as a Visiting Scholar at the Hauser Center at Harvard University. He currently alternates teaching engagements between the Maryland Correctional Institution at Jessup with the Goucher Prison Education Project and the College of Business at Coppin State University. He also is currently serving as an Honorary Professor of Practice at Queen’s University in Northern Ireland and has worked with the China Global Philanthropy Institute in Beijing. Dr. Brothers has been a writer with Forbes, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Brookings Institution, Nonprofit Quarterly and the Huffington Post and is an author of several books. He received an MPA from New York University, an MBA from American University, and a doctorate from Northeastern University.
Meredith Cass Callanan: John, it was a pleasure to have worked with you at the beginning of your journey at the T. Rowe Price Foundation, and it's exciting to see what is happening now. Let’s start off discussing the Foundation’s approach to philanthropy, and the shift you’ve made from a “citizenship” focus to being more of an operating funder.
John Brothers: Our philanthropy went through a culture shift that closely aligns to the way the firm thinks of itself, culturally. Our citizenship approach to philanthropy included the sprinkling of work across a variety of different programs. But the trustees and the firm wanted to get deeper. They didn't necessarily know what deeper meant, so part of the work was to figure out the how. We're a collaborative culture so we focused on bringing folks around the table to tease out what this meant.
My first week in Baltimore was during the unrest in 2015, related to Freddie Gray’s death. We were starting to develop many of the things that we practice today, and what we now call trust-based philanthropy. This included multi-year general operating support, changing our application process, learning from feedback loops, wearing our shoe leather out in the community, and letting the community lead us – this became the way we did our work. We would often tie back to how the firm did its work.
But it took us a while to develop our bedside manner. It's an ongoing thing that we're always testing. This approach shows up in the very relational and technical ways in which we interact with the community every day, helping them reach their own self-determinations.
Callanan: How did this approach evolve into programmatic development?
Brothers: Because of what had happened in West Baltimore, we created a fund with the goal of having an impact at the ground level. Now we have several funds focused on impact that do a variety of different things.
We kept hearing in the community that they wanted strong leaders and strong not-for-profits. I spent a lot of my career on capacity building, and so we started doing that work, including leadership development. Now over six thousand organizational leaders have participated in our capacity-building programs all throughout the United States, especially during COVID. One of our programs, One Book was an idea from Memphis about getting all young people reading the same books and then creating actions in their community. We have over 20 programs based on what the community has said is important to them. Ultimately the plan is to give those programs back to the community and then either continue to fund them or build support around them.
Callanan: One of your newest programs, Moonshot, has been described as a connection between the T. Rowe Price community of employees, alumni (like me) and partners, with the social innovators and entrepreneurs of color in Baltimore City. This connection was not happening naturally, and as a result, great ideas and solutions have been missed by a network of potential supporters and investors for years. Tell us more about why and how Moonshot was created.
Brothers: The lead-up to Moonshot was a program we co-created with our partner, Baltimore Corps right after the unrest, called the Elevation Awards, designed for folks in disinvested communities who have ideas on how to change their communities.
Externally, we kept hearing from this growing network of social innovators that they were having trouble getting into the room with investors. Their main funders were philanthropy, which was a problem. At the same time, T. Rowe Price senior folks wanted to get involved, and also wanted to give personally. The two sides were trying to find each other.
One of our guiding forces here at the Foundation is shared value, where we try to figure out how to use the infrastructure of a global financial services firm to benefit the communities that we serve. Disinvested communities struggle with infrastructure, and this is an area where T. Rowe Price can help. We tried to figure out how we could bring together these two parties and connect.
Moonshot originally aligned to a pitch fest because of the popularity of things like Shark Tank. As we talked to the community, they were uncomfortable with this. The innovators had been on a number of stages, where they had to do a song and dance and they just didn't feel good about that. We didn't either. Pitch fest work has already been done, and it hasn't created relationships, which is what we're about. So, we looked at several other efforts nationally to learn from them. That's how the real concept of Moonshot was born.
We named it Moonshot because of the intent to help launch folks to the next level.
Callanan: I understand that there were four phases to Moonshot, starting with a well-designed process for selecting these innovators, with input from T. Rowe Price employees and community members. Tell us about the additional phases.
Brothers: Some early learning guided us. A couple of years ago, I was invited to give a keynote at Aspen Institute with 250 philanthropy folks, and I asked if I could bring five social innovators from Baltimore with me. I thought if they were in the room together, the resources would flow. As we were driving home, I asked: Did you get names? Did you get business cards? Who did you speak to? It was a very quiet car. No one had made any relationships. My naivete was assuming that connections would happen just by being in a room together.
The second phase of Moonshot was about capacity building and access – connecting these innovators to technical advisors at T. Rowe Price in a real way – to spend time together. We created a learning plan for them.
The event itself was the third phase. We were very intentional about creating a culminating event that introduced the innovators with T. Rowe Price networks, bringing people together in one room. The event itself also showcased local and Black excellence, like music, art, food, and voices on stage. The goal was that everywhere you turned, you would see Black excellence. We wanted to produce an event where the focus was on the innovators and also highlight great vendors in Baltimore.
And then the fourth phase was making sure that the innovators were meeting folks, that they left with names, that they followed up on those connections. We were clear internally – if you get a ticket for this, this is active participation! We had to curate that. This phase is actually ending right now. Now it's up to the innovators.
Deepa Krishnamurthy: You’ve used the word “access” to describe what you were able to do with Moonshot. Why do you think access has been a big challenge for the communities that you're serving?
Brothers: There is this common imagery in Baltimore that is described as the Black butterfly and the white L. If you look at any disparity in the city – health, transportation, lead paint, you see the challenges are located in these wings of the butterfly, neighborhoods where the Black community largely lives. White folks largely live in the L. It is real.
What you have in the interaction between these communities is a lot of programs from folks in the L to folks in the butterfly. Our innovators said a lot of these events were mostly about the show and were not about relationship building. It was about giving seed money, producing an event, and then people would pat themselves on the back. The driving force was always event-focused, largely geared towards the network of the folks producing the event, not necessarily on promoting and building up the individuals that were featured.
Having heard that, and because our communities feel comfortable telling us all the challenges, we just kept hearing that they’re not coming to these events anymore. We said enough already. We knew from the get-go that we had to produce something that was not transactional but was relationship-driven.
Krishnamurthy: There's a certain amount of reciprocity when it comes to building trust. What do you believe needs to happen, so it's not seen as patronizing by one set of folks and dismissive by the other?
Brothers: Focus on relationships and connecting. One comment we heard from folks in attendance at Moonshot was they didn't even know Baltimore had these social innovators. They got to spend a lot of time with innovators like Arion Long, who has developed a hi-tech feminine care company called Femly that increases access to eco-friendly and sustainable hygiene products. She is innovative, inspiring, funny. Moonshot was much more about building networks and relationships. Prioritizing resource allocation ahead of relationship-building just looks transactional. We hope that the connections that the innovators made through Moonshot could bode well for them from a resource and strategy perspective. Ideas, technical assistance, and connections can be as or more important to innovators than just funding.
Callanan: Let's build on the topic of trust. What does it take to enable supportive, tough conversations for both sides of these relationships?
Brothers: We had an opening call with the innovators before they got into the next leg of the process. To be honest, that did not go well, because we used pitch language, without even realizing it. One of our attendees stopped us and talked about the challenges of pitches and how it related to structural racism. It was hard for some folks from the firm to hear that.
We talked them through it – about why this is hard. If you're going to work in these spaces in real and meaningful ways, not having a conversation like that would be a problem. I'm glad it happened early in the process, and that our attendees felt comfortable enough to say something.
Callanan: From the moment you got to Baltimore, you've been building coalitions, both within the company and externally, with all sorts of challenges and breakthroughs. Tell us about the lessons that you've learned.
Brothers: I'll talk about the Squeegee Collaborative, a 75-member collaborative of youth, business, nonprofits and government.
Baltimore, for over forty years, has had young Black and brown boys washing people's windshields at corners around the city, hoping to gain a couple dollars per windshield wash. In other cities there are similar dynamics, like Water Boys in Atlanta. Some folks do not see this as an invasion of personal space and privacy and instead look to the systems and structures that are behind why they're out there. But for some, it gets into issues of personal space and liberty. It's a 40-year generational issue in Baltimore that has never been solved despite many attempts.
This past summer, following an incident between a young person who squeegees and a driver, the mayor decided to organize this group, the Squeegee Collaborative, and asked me and another nonprofit leader in the city to co-lead it.
The coalition building involved creating engines that take away the things that are damaging and having lots of one-on-ones. I was a community organizer early in my career and the key to organizing communities is the power of one-on-one meetings, so you can hold people accountable. It's trying to create structures, where we can come together, knock out the things that cause us to be circular, and then try to find common threads. I think the biggest challenge for me is to not get riled up, to stay above the day-to-day and see the threads, especially on this issue.
Building our approach to trust-based philanthropy took a lot of coalition building internally in the firm, as well. Understanding what was important to key leaders, meeting regularly, getting underneath the concerns.
So, I would say that coalition building is all about individual relationships and trying to weave together everybody's interest into a common framework. Having accountability partners is also huge in this kind of building work. This is not new – it’s the way you do it that's really important.
Krishnamurthy: John, talk to us about your roots and how that led you to this work.
Brothers: My work here is a perfect amalgam of all my previous experiences. I grew up in deep poverty. My mom became a homeless activist stemming from her time being homeless. I also served the local community as a case manager and as a community organizer. I found that I loved helping organizations be stronger, so I created a consulting firm and concentrated on how to build strong nonprofits and strong ecosystems.
And that was helpful to where I am now. At T. Rowe Price, I found a kinship that will allow me to balance all of the things that I had done in my past, in a community that I really love.
Krishnamurthy: This was excellent. Very inspiring work, John. Thank you!
About the Authors:
Meredith Callanan was a senior leader at T. Rowe Price Group for many years, focusing on marketing and communications, corporate responsibility, and philanthropy, before participating in the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative as a Fellow in 2019. As a Senior Fellow in 2020 and 2021, she conducted national research on leadership diversity and development in the U.S. early care and education (ECE) sector which culminated in her establishing the Early Years Leadership Diversity Initiative to address barriers to advancement for emerging and rising leaders in ECE.
Deepa Krishnamurthy is a 2021 Fellow of Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI). While at ALI, Deepa focused on understanding private markets, market mechanisms and the unique challenges faced by the private and small business ecosystem in the US. She is currently working on launching a mission driven venture to support small business continuity and succession with a goal to strengthen both local economic resilience and socio-economic cohesion. Prior to ALI, she had a long career in investment real estate. Deepa volunteers her time to support advocacy and programs to eliminate homelessness and initiatives to enhance and promote broad and inclusive market and workforce participation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.