When veteran educator Dr. N. Joyce Payne handed the reins of the organization she founded, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, to entertainment lawyer and board member Johnny Taylor, Taylor began pursuing a remake of the prestigious group that has turned it on its head in just a matter of months.
Today, with just more than a year of leading the organization under his belt, the changes put in place by Taylor have essentially overhauled the fund launched by Payne in 1987.
Out are the big reception staged each fall in Washington in conjunction with the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative weekend, the Marshall Fund fashion show and the Prestige awards reception and flag events honoring Blacks in the military. In are more visits to Capitol Hill for hearings and meetings, making cases for continued support of public HBCUs, more programs aimed at institutional capacity building and efforts to raise more funds to support programs at public HBCUs.
“I’m not knocking the CBC, but those are the kinds of things that pull your already limited resources,” says Taylor, who assumed the title of president and chief executive officer of the fund in the spring of 2010. “We’ve really re-tuned our message, and we’ve been very clear about where we are,” says Taylor.
Before taking the reins at the Marshall Fund, Taylor was with New York City-based IAC Interactive Corp., the Barry Diller firm that owns and operates dozens of widely used retail websites.
Taylor, who earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Miami and law degree at Drake University, acknowledges some supporters are, to varying degrees, bent out of shape over his expansion of the group’s work to include “capacity building” and “advocacy” in addition to scholarship assistance.
Taylor says the organization is not abandoning scholarships (which account for only 20 percent of annual spending). But it also is responding to a growing chorus of donors who are saying they want to try some different strategies, he says. Taylor offers several examples.
