For the past five years, the Arkansas Black Philanthropy Collaborative has lived up to every aspect of its name.
“We help find Black-led solutions to social change in Arkansas,” says Adena White, ABPC’s communications strategist. “One way to do that is come together. Instead of having six food pantries applying for the same grant, let’s all make a case. Collaboration is key to how we can work together to encourage more funding to the state so we can change systems.”
ABPC’s origins are also grounded in collaboration. The first seeds were planted around a table in 2018. Susan Taylor Batten, president and CEO of A Philanthropic Partnership for Black Communities, spoke at the Clinton School Center on Community Philanthropy about the importance of bringing philanthropists of color together.
“After that meeting, a few folks went to dinner and started thinking, ‘Maybe we should start something like that here,’” ABPC Project Director Kara Wilkins says. “‘Maybe we should be more intentional about thinking collaboratively.’”
Conversations continued for the next two years, but the idea truly took root in 2020.
“After the unfortunate murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, a lot of philanthropic organizations said, ‘We want to make significant investments into underserved communities,’” Wilkins says.
And with that push, the group decided it was time to launch. The collaboration continued as ABPC was created and housed under the Derek Lewis Foundation.
“Derek Lewis Foundation is one of the only Black family foundations in Arkansas. They were willing to say, ‘We will be the clearing house. You guys can work through us,’” Wilkins says.
After establishing their hub, ABPC’s first move was to create a fund under the Arkansas Community Foundation.
“The Give Black Arkansas Fund still lives at the Community Foundation,” Wilkins says. “Anybody can donate to it. Underserved and underrepresented nonprofits in Arkansas can receive a small grant with minimum barriers. It’s donor in, donor out. And 100% of the Give Black Arkansas Fund goes back to communities.”
Just a month after its creation, ABPC was presented with a monumental opportunity. Facebook gave the Arkansas Community Foundation $1 million to specifically support Black communities. The foundation accepted the donation and asked the ABPC team to take the lead on the resulting Building Black Communities Fund. ABPC handled every aspect of the project from hosting webinars about the application process to pulling together the grant review team.
“It was trial by fire,” Wilkins says.
ABPC seeded funds into communities for a year with grants ranging from $25,000 to $50,000, working with the nonprofits for up to another year on capacity building and support services.
This spirit of supporting nonprofit partners defined the next four years of ABPC’s work. In addition to its continued nonprofit training, ABPC has become a crucial connector between philanthropic organizations and nonprofits in need.
“We talked to national funders and regional funders and said, ‘Let us connect you with nonprofits on the ground,’” Wilkins says. “They may give to Arkansas as a whole, they may give some in Little Rock, they may give in Bentonville, but they’re not giving to some of our deepest rural partners who are frankly serving the people who need support most.”
A key way ABPC connects funders with nonprofits is through its annual convening event.
“The nonprofits kept saying, ‘We don’t know any of the philanthropic organizations,’ and the philanthropic organizations would say to us, ‘We don’t know the nonprofits,’ so we decided, ‘Why don’t we have an event where we bring everybody together?’” Wilkins says.
The first convening in 2021 was virtual, bringing connection through panel discussions recapping the work done through the Building Black Communities Fund. The event’s success led to three more annual, in-person events that were free and open to the public.
To celebrate its fifth anniversary, ABPC capped off 2025 with an elevated version of its convening event in December complete with dinner and keynote speaker and New York Times best-selling author Charles Blow. The event was also a chance to honor three philanthropic leaders — Dr. Sherece West-Scantlebury, Dr. Charlotte Lewellen-Williams and Dr. Naccaman Williams — who retired last year:
“[The convening] was an opportunity to tell them thank you for the amazing work, not only that they’ve done to move philanthropy forward in Arkansas, but also to help ABPC become the organization that we are,” Wilkins says.
Looking to 2026 and beyond, ABPC is very intentional about the programs that will shape its mission going forward.
“A lot of decisions about where dollars go are being made by people who do not look like the communities that are applying,” Wilkins says. “We’ve been working on how to help build professional pipelines into philanthropy for Black and brown individuals.”
To help build those pathways, it’s working with local historically Black colleges and universities like Philander Smith College and UAPB to create fellowships and internships to send students into these philanthropic spaces.
In light of the recent widespread federal funding freezes and legal risk for organizations dedicated to specifically supporting minority groups, ABPC and many of its nonprofit partners have had to thoughtfully navigate new hurdles to their work. One creative response is the We Give Too campaign.
“It’s important, now more than ever, that we are encouraging individuals from communities that are underrepresented to give to their own community,” Wilkins says. “One of the things we have seen is that if it was that easy for funds to go away, maybe we should be building a more sustainable model that we control and we house and that we’re able to make sure doesn’t get lost.”
ABPC soft-launched the We Give Too initiative in 2025 with a hard launch planned in 2026.
“We are encouraging people to be more philanthropic and think about themselves as philanthropists, and recognize that as a culture, we’ve always been philanthropists, not just the beneficiaries of philanthropy,” White says.
“We’re still committed to the work,” Wilkins says. “We’re not going to change our mission or change our work. We’re just going to do it strategically, and we invite partners to not be scared and join along with us.”
Learn more at theabpc.org.