Nina Waters is president of The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida Inc., the state’s oldest and largest community foundation.
The agency, which began in 1964, serves residents of Baker, Clay, Duval, Nassau and St. Johns counties. It has assets of more than $310 million.
Waters, 56, joined the foundation in 2001 after serving 12 years as executive director for the Pace Center for Girls Jacksonville.
She was promoted to president of The Community Foundation 10 years ago after serving as executive vice president for three years.
A Pittsburgh native, Waters moved to Jacksonville in 1976 to attend Jacksonville University. She started in marine biology but changed to sociology.
How did The Community Foundation come about?
The community foundation movement started 100 years ago in Cleveland, Ohio, when the Rockefellers decided to move to New York City and take their money with them. The business people in Cleveland in 1914 got together and said individually, we cannot replace the largess of the Rockefeller family, but collectively we can.
That started the first community foundation, so it’s the community’s foundation.
Four businessmen in Jacksonville got together in 1963 and ’64 and said we need one of those here. We became the first in Florida and our founders were Tom McGehee Jr., J.J. Daniel, Robert Feagin and Laurence Lee Jr.
Our mission has changed somewhat, moving from being a vehicle for individual people’s philanthropy to being more of a community change agent. All in all, of the 50 years that we’ve served folks, we keep the donors in the center of our work.
Tom McGehee established the foundation as a “depository for the people of Jacksonville, both the large and small, the wealthy and the moderate, to be able to give for the betterment of their fellow man, not just today, but in a continuing way, through the principles of a foundation, for years to come.”
A lot of prominent people are involved in the foundation today?
We’ve had what has been termed “a gold standard board.” It’s a small board of 15 people, but people that have a history and a tradition of giving in Northeast Florida. They understand the importance of giving in perpetuity and why it’s important to endow this community and the work in this community forever.
Could you provide an example of an endowment?
We have endowments that are very, very specific and then we have endowments that are very, very broad.
One was set up by a gentleman who lost a child and he wanted to make sure that a light he donated to a local church was always lit 24 hours a day. He established an endowment to pay the electric bill in perpetuity.
Then we have donors that establish endowments that are called unrestricted and they say in perpetuity they want The Community Foundation to respond to emerging community issues.
What are your responsibilities as president?
My responsibilities are to manage the organization. We have three departments. We have a finance department — we run like a bank, we do statements and we handle a lot of complex investments. And then we have donor services staff that provide customer service to those donors and try to attract new donors to the foundation. And then we have grant-making staff. They’re the ones that actually make the grants in the community.
My job is to make sure that is running smoothly, but most importantly it’s hiring the right people and getting out of the way.
We have 17 people. The average size for our size community foundation is around 25, but I think if you have the right people, you can actually get a lot of things done.
The Community Foundation made more history in 2001 with the Women’s Giving Alliance.
The Women’s Giving Alliance, like The Community Foundation itself, is a giving circle. The giving-circle movement started in the late 1990s. Five women came together as the founders of Women’s Giving Alliance and they were all current or past trustees of The Community Foundation.
The Women’s Giving Alliance is more than 10 years old and they’ve built an endowment of $2.2 million. They serve organizations that really benefit women and girls and they’ve given out more than $4 million. It now has 340 members and has a high retention rate.
The foundation also launched the Quality Education for All initiative 10 years ago. That led to the creation of the Jacksonville Public Education Fund. How did that come about?
On our 40th anniversary, we decided to determine where we’ve made a difference and how we needed to move forward. We did a lot of listening and learning in the community. Out of about 12 focus groups and 50 or so individual interviews, people felt that we needed to get involved in public education reform. We jumped into that arena when few people were there and we built an initiative that is now 10 years old.
Five years into the initiative we learned that other communities like Jacksonville — large, urban districts — had local education funds. We raised nearly $3 million to capitalize the Jacksonville Public Education Fund and it’s now more than 5 years old and has been recapitalized. It was sort of our exit strategy in the public education work and I think it’s been wildly successful.
What is the significance of the LGBT Community Fund for Northeast Florida announced in September?
The LGBT Fund for Northeast Florida represents the very real and tangible result of The Community Foundation helping a donor realize his or her specific philanthropic vision.
In this case, we were approached by a donor who not only wanted to fund existing needs in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, but was eager to do it in a very thoughtful and strategic way in order to have greater impact.
It was decided that the creation of a giving circle — a group of like-minded individuals who give collectively and determine the focus of their philanthropy as a group — would widen the net by encouraging others to join this effort.
These donors embarked on a yearlong process to understand local LGBT issues, set up a process to vet their grant-making, and create a structure for sustainability. The result was $100,000 in grants to local organizations in their first grant-making year.
We hear a lot about philanthropy and how it was affected by the recession, but we also hear Jacksonville and Northeast Florida are really giving communities.
We’re the most giving community in the state as far as the giving amount per capita and also the amount of giving per individual. We have people giving about 3.8 percent of their assets. That makes us the sixth most generous community out of large communities in the country, but the challenge here is that we get more people giving.
People give to people and people invest in people. Because we have such great talent in the nonprofit sector, it has built a reputation for doing good work and quality work.
The challenge is private giving can never replace public giving. As the city and the state have reduced funding for those organizations, the private sector cannot really pick that up.
So what happens?
What happens is really building advocacy agendas. How do we explain the importance of the nonprofit sector, the cost-effectiveness of the sector and what would happen? How do we paint a picture about what would happen if these organizations went out of business and the government had to pick up the ball and take care of them?
You said people really give to people. How does that motivation come about?
We’re really about helping donors get connected with what they care about, whether they work out at the Y or whether they had a family member in hospice, so that personal experience is critically important. Secondly, they get involved personally, so they don’t necessarily give money first. But once they get connected, once they get involved, then generous giving follows.
The last thing that’s really important is they have to be asked. A donor recently said, ‘I meet with this development person on a regular basis and we have the greatest lunches and we enjoy each other but they never ask me for money and I don’t know if they expect me to just say I really like you, I’m going to give you a check.’
Nationally what we know is that people give because they’re asked, and I think that it’s important that nonprofits do a good job of that.
Why are they not asking?
The first problem is that they’re kind of running around with their hair on fire a lot. They’re understaffed. When we have tough economic times, the first person to get fired or laid off is the development director.
The other thing is we have a real crisis in the community with a bench of development directors. We have good development directors; we don’t have enough of them.
Nationally, it’s an issue too. People are not going into that field. It may be because we’ve had so many recessions, it may be because of the pay.
It’s a lot for executive directors to run an organization and do all the extra things that they need to do too. We are looking at strategies in this community about how do we build that strength.
How does a nonprofit receive funding through The Community Foundation?
Go to our website (jaxcf.org) and look at the fields of interest that we have. The timing is good right now because our competitive grant-making cycle opened in January. The areas are aging adults; young children; and the arts, individual artists and small arts organizations. We also try to connect donors to causes they care about.
You grew up in Pittsburgh. You spoke to the Girl Scouts of Gateway Council when you were named a Woman of Distinction in 2008. You talked about your childhood and how it influenced your career.
I was brought up in an Italian Catholic family, a very extended family, and my family had a grocery business. My grandparents came over in the 1900s and started by selling fruit in a cart and then got a truck and then built a store in a wonderful little town called Aspinwall. I began working at the store when I was 8.
My father, grandparents and uncle all worked there and I did it to be closer to my father — I’m pretty much a daddy’s girl. I worked throughout high school and when I came back during college. I had a lot of responsibility at a young age.
We catered to a very wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh and I learned a lot from interacting with the customers. I learned about how to be kind and why kindness matters. I learned what is important in customer service and the customer is always right, which isn’t an easy thing when you’re a teenager and you want to argue with people. But I learned a lot about how to serve people and do it well.
How would you describe your leadership style?
I would describe it as democratic. I get input from others and we share ideas and I work hard to give credit where credit is due. The staff was asked recently by a donor what was one word that they would use to describe me and the staff said thoughtful, which I thought was really nice. You’re at work more hours than you’re at home and so you need to care about people and be kind to people, and I hope that’s the environment that we’ve built at The Community Foundation.
Talk about your family.
I come from a very large family and they’re all in Pittsburgh, so I’m the only one that moved away. I have been married for 35 years and we have one son. My husband, Lex, is a retired teacher from the Duval County Public Schools. Our son is 31 and lives and works in Atlanta. He’s a financial analyst for Home Depot’s dot.com division and doing really well.
When you move away from your family, you develop a family here, so I am lucky to have some really good friends who are my support network.
What is your advice to Jacksonville’s leaders?
If I look at where we were 40 years ago and where we are today, we’ve come a long way. I would look at Jacksonville in sort of like a glass-half-full view. (Late community leader) Fred Schultz told me years ago we ought not to call our own child ugly so much. I really have a positive view of the community.
I was in a room with a bunch of young people and they were asked why they came to Jacksonville. The ones that chose to move here said, ‘because I would never be in this room in another city.
I wouldn’t be in a room with community leaders in another city, Atlanta or New York or Chicago. I have access here and that’s why I came here.’ You see that with One Spark and other initiatives.
I think leaders need to listen more and we need to get out of the way some. It’s not that young people aren’t willing to seize the moment. I think it’s that some of us in our 50s, 60s and 70s aren’t willing to get out of the way. We need to find opportunities for younger people to lead — have them on boards, create opportunities for their voices to be heard and not be afraid to hire them for key positions.
The last thing is sometimes the nonprofit sector is discounted by the corporate sector and the public sector. Sometimes when I’m at City Hall, things are said that I think are a little uninformed about the nonprofit sector and what it is people do. We need to understand that for a community to be thriving and successful, all three sectors need to work together and that there’s a place for all three and no one is more important than the other.
What do you do for fun?
I work for fun. I’ve been blessed to have two jobs that I really love at Pace Center for Girls and at the foundation. I’ll work for a long time. My grandparents worked till they were 100, so I’ll do that.
What else would you like to share?
I’m really lucky to be mentored by people like Andy Bell and Delores Weaver. It’s really important in whatever you do to find those people that can really teach you. It’s great to understand who is your kitchen cabinet. Find that and make sure you listen to
them.
First Coast Success: Nina Waters
The Daily Record interviewed Waters for “First Coast Success,” a regular segment on the award-winning 89.9 FM flagship First Coast Connect program, hosted by Melissa Ross.
The interview is scheduled for broadcast this morning and will replay at 8 p.m. on the WJCT Arts Channel and online at wjctondemand.org
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