Announcing Blue Meridian Partners and More
January 29, 2016
By Nancy Roob
President and Chief Executive Officer of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and the CEO of Blue Meridian Partners.

…Today, I’m pleased to announce that the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF) and nine other donors are joining together to raise the collaborative-funding model to a level more in keeping with the scale of the challenges we face. Together we are launching Blue Meridian Partners to invest at least $1 billion in high-performance nonprofits that are poised to have truly national impact for economically disadvantaged children and youth.

Private funders have worked together to marshal resources of this scale in areas such as global health and land conservation. But this level of concentration has rarely been attempted or achieved to help nonprofits in the dramatically undercapitalized field serving disadvantaged children and youth in the U.S.

In this column, I will describe this new venture in greater detail and explain how it complements the work we’re doing at EMCF…

… Blue Meridian Partners has secured $750 million toward our goal of investing at least $1 billion to help high-performance nonprofits achieve much greater scale.

Six General Partners, listed in alphabetical order, have committed $50 million or more:
:: The Ballmer Group, Philanthropy
:: The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation
:: Stanley and Fiona Druckenmiller
:: The Duke Endowment (with a focus on North Carolina and South Carolina)
:: George Kaiser Family Foundation (with a focus on Tulsa, Oklahoma)
:: The Samberg Family Foundation.

Four Limited Partners intend to commit $10 million or more:
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The JPB Foundation
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation…

…Blue Meridian’s investments will be big bets. They will be flexible, unrestricted, long-term (5-10 years), tied to performance, and total up to $200 million for each grantee. They will help grantees to expand their impact directly, by allowing them to strengthen their work, grow and serve greater numbers of youth, as well as indirectly, by helping them increase their influence on the child welfare, educational, judicial, and other systems that affect children’s lives.

In addition to its size, what differentiates Blue Meridian Partners from EMCF’s previous ventures is its decision-making structure. All six of the General Partners will share decision-making authority. This includes deciding where and how to invest, and overseeing and monitoring performance. EMCF’s board will cast one among six votes…

Blue Meridian Partners is a new capital aggregation collaboration that plans to invest at least $1 billion in high-performance nonprofits that are poised to have truly national impact for economically disadvantaged children and youth.
http://www.emcf.org/capital-aggregation/blue-meridian-partners/