How the Laughing Gull Foundation Backs Progressive Work in the Deep South
Founded in 2012, the Laughing Gull Foundation in Durham, North Carolina, does not have the long runway of many family foundations which span multiple generations and boast large staffs and boards of directors. It won’t be around forever, either: The foundation leaned into a planned spend-down early in its existence, believing that moving its assets out quickly and effectively is a “moral imperative.” If everything goes according to plan, assets will be completely spent by 2036, a date that matriarch and board chair Midge Coward, 77, says she intends on seeing.
Laughing Gull’s founders also emphasized that the South and its people are not monolithic and that the foundation has been able to carve out a space supporting progressive grassroots organizations in the region. It started by funding LGBTQ+ equality and has since evolved into a foundation that embraces its progressive ethos across additional areas like climate and the environment, racial justice, and higher ed in prisons — all in a part of the country that has long struggled with these issues.
“Laughing Gull” refers to a road on the Sea Islands in South Carolina where many generations of this wealthy family would gather during hot and humid summers during the 1960s through the 1980s. But for Coward, as well as her daughters Meg, 51, Emily, 47, and Sarah, the space and the name now takes on new meaning.
Inside Philanthropy recently caught up with Midge, Meg and foundation Chief Executive LaTonya Penny to find out more about why this family decided to launch a foundation with specific values when they did, how those values evolved as they reframed how they defined family, how they learned to center their organization’s needs and expertise, why they immediately embraced a spend-down model, and how they see the next decade playing out before all assets are spent.
A Berkshire Hathaway investment powers early giving
Raised in Lynchburg, Virginia, Midge Coward is the youngest of three children and graduated from Denison University in Ohio. She remembers her parents making donations to places where they had a personal connection, including the Episcopal church and Washington and Lee University, her father’s alma mater. But things really started to change for the family when her parents’ early bet on Berkshire Hathaway started to pay off.
As the story goes, in the early 1970s, Coward’s stockbroker father flew out to Omaha to have dinner with Warren Buffett and returned to Lynchburg aiming to go all-in on Berkshire Hathaway. It was a bet that paid off, resulting in a substantial increase in the family’s assets. And with this new influx of wealth, they started to ramp up their philanthropy, not under the umbrella of a large family foundation, but rather through individual donations. “I think that probably the donations that they made would’ve been quite a bit more conservative than the ones that excite me and my family [today],” Coward said.
According to Meg Baesmith, LGF’s board president and Coward’s oldest daughter, Coward began engaging in small, anonymous philanthropic projects on her own by the late 1980s, drawing upon the influx of funds coming in from Berkshire stock. These early efforts ended up influencing Baesmith, too. “I remember her talking about a scholarship fund she had set up for kids from my high school to go to a local college,” Baesmith said.
An Oberlin and Harvard Divinity School graduate, Baesmith remembers being influenced by these efforts, but making an intentional decision not to deal with anything related to her wealth until later. “I was aware that there was wealth being accumulated in my family… I kind of knew that this was going to be something I was going to have to deal with. I didn’t really want to,” she said.
Instead, Baesmith started working in the nonprofit sector beginning in the late 1990s, first as an intern at the Boston-area Food Project, where she discovered a love for working with youth, and later working with such organizations as the Farm School and Merck Family Fund.
But eventually, the family started to take more steps into the spotlight, beginning with confronting the implications of their wealth and then engaging in more public philanthropy. When Coward’s parents passed in the early 2000s, she started thinking more deeply about how to align her inherited resources with her values. Coward also wanted to bring her daughters to the fore, as they also were taking on service-oriented careers. “In the South, it’s not polite to talk about three things, and they’re always the most interesting: Money, politics and sex,” Coward said with a laugh.
Pathways of advice, a bequest, and a commitment to spend down
As Coward and Baesmith discussed what happened when they enlisted consultants to talk about their wealth, one thing they both make clear is that they hadn’t had enough of those conversations in the past and needed to have them now. “We’d never really sat down and had direct conversations about money — how much money was in our family and how it felt to us, and what we wanted to do with it,” Baesmith said.
According to Coward, an initial consultant they hired spent the weekend on retreat with the family. The consultant interviewed each family member, including Baesmith’s wife, who was involved with LGF since inception. Baesmith recalls a large chart the consultant filled out with a river image with a long timeline. She then invited Coward, Baesmith and her sister to fill in different plots on the timeline with anything having to do with money. This allowed each family member, Baesmith said, to start being open about the different experiences and stories they had through the decades.
With a better sense of what assets were in play and what they meant to the family, the next step was choosing the right giving vehicle. Ideas like donor-advised funds or individual bank accounts were fielded, but Baesmith said the family coalesced pretty easily around the idea of a family foundation, which would start small and ramp up from there.
Coward was particularly excited about the idea of working with her adult children in this way. “One of the real joys for me… It’s just been such a pleasure to work sort of on a business level with my adult children and to know them in that sense and for them to know me in a collaborative work effort,” Coward said.
Then the family dove in by establishing Laughing Gull Foundation in 2012. The foundation was incorporated two years after Coward’s mother’s 2010 passing. The transfer of wealth from her mother’s estate allowed Coward to ramp up her giving and consider something like starting a foundation. Coward wanted to start giving slowly, focusing initially on higher education grants and supporting LGBTQ organizations in the South. In the foundation’s inaugural year, it held around $1 million in assets. By 2014, just two years later, that number rose to around $12 million, and to $21 million the year after. LGF held some $70 million in assets in the most recent tax year and gave away around $5.7 million.
LGF also stands out as a foundation that committed to a spend-down early on, locking in a 20-year timeline in 2016. Following the path of grantmakers like Kendeda Fund, S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation and Chuck Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies, Laughing Gull Foundation is another case of a foundation that has chosen to spend out its assets rather than existing in perpetuity.
Many spend-down foundations are rooted in or informed by progressive giving philosophies holding that the best way to confront historical inequities in philanthropy is to put power quickly and directly in the hands of organizations on the ground. But Baesmith noted that back in 2012, spend-down foundations were not really in vogue like they are today.
She said she was influenced in part by organizations like Resource Generation, which helps young people of privilege redistribute their money and power, and where her wife was once on staff. “I think a lot of the sort of social justice philanthropy ideals that I learned were through Resource Generation,” she said.
Expanding its giving areas and building grantees’ capacity
Laughing Gull Foundation has since expanded to focus on three core areas: higher education in prisons, climate and environment, and LGBTQ+ equality. Helping steer the ship is LaTonya Penny, chief executive at LGF. She joined the foundation in 2022, having started her own nonprofit, Mary’s Grace Incorporated, in 2013, to assist faith communities and schools with creating inclusive spaces for the differently abled.
Penny said that there’s a great deal of intersection between LGF’s focus areas, and the foundation assesses grantee partners holistically — including whether they work from a racial equity lens. Consider one grantee, Vessel Project, a Louisiana grassroots mutual aid, disaster relief, and environmental justice organization founded in response to several federally declared disasters, including hurricanes Laura and Delta.
Penny was drawn to the foundation in part because of its spend-down ethos, which departed from the attitude of other wealthy families of privilege. “They didn’t want [a] perpetuity model, like most white philanthropic organizations have, because that gives so much power and control to white philanthropic leaders who dangle this carrot in front of you,” she said. “Their focus was on making deep, lasting relationships where, although the funding may go away, we built connections and relationships with people that will be able to help them continue to do the work in different ways.”
Part of Penny’s job is building organizations’ capacity so they’re prepared when the spigot from LGF dries out in about a decade. LGF works across 10 Southern states but also engages in donor organizing to bring in more funders. Penny might connect with a foundation that works in the LGBTQ space, but has not yet planted roots in the South. She then gives them the lay of the land and connects them to grassroots organizations.
“As the South goes, so does the nation,” Penny said. “Think about the fighting against Jim Crow. It started again in the South. And you think about the overall civil rights movement, it started in the South. So I believe that if we focus our work on the South, we can begin to shift the culture of the nation.”
Penny noted some key changes since she joined LGF, including its willingness to fully trust its staff to make connections on the ground and then trust grassroots organizations to best determine what they need most. Right now, the foundation’s board only consists of family members, but Penny said this may change soon. LGF’s board is currently working with a consultant and learning from other foundations as they explore potential shifts in board governance and advance the organization’s racial equity journey.
Penny was also excited to talk about “her baby,” S.O.A.R. Fellowship, a new foundation fellowship that aims to nurture the next generation of diverse leaders in philanthropy and social impact. The fellowship was inspired by Penny’s own experiences coming up in the nonprofit sector and feeling like there weren’t a lot of Black people with whom she could connect. Its inaugural S.O.A.R. cohort kicked off last summer with two fellows: UNC Mexican American graduate Nayeli Gomez and Ryan Odom, a first-generation college graduate and founder of ChangeDurham, which seeks to combat poverty in Odom’s local community.
Backing the Campaign for Southern Equality and looking ahead
One of LGF’s long-running grantees is Campaign for Southern Equality, which aims to accelerate the path to legal equality for LGBTQ people in the South — however difficult that may seem right now. Another leader with a divinity school background, North Carolina native Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, cut her teeth in the nonprofit sector in her 20s before becoming founding executive director of Campaign for Southern Equality in 2011.
From where she sits, there’s a robust and diverse queer community in the South that she hopes to expand and empower. But in the 2010s, she said that less than 5% of all LGBTQ funding nationwide was going to the South. “The analysis that kind of governed at the time was that the South was essentially an unwinnable place, from a political perspective, [and] didn’t have a meaningful role to play and efforts to accelerate or make the case for equality under federal law,” Beach-Ferrara said.
She first connected with the family when she was in divinity school in Boston and continued to share updates when she launched the campaign. “We were honored to be one of a set of early grantees and to have had this sustained relationship with them since then,” she said.
In 2016, on the heels of what she calls “barnstorming the South,” Beach-Ferrara’s organization started the Southern Equality Fund to support Southern LGBTQ+ leaders doing “heroic” organizing in their home regions. And she credits LGF’s initial and steady funding for helping them turn the corner from a “fledgling grassroots startup that was running month to month into having a little bit of sustainability, a little bit of security.”
As a veteran in the space, she admits that figuring out how to make LGBTQ issues part of the broader analysis in the South and not something that stays in the shadows isn’t always easy. But like Laughing Gull, she said that a key is ensuring that rather than operating in silos, like-minded philanthropies and nonprofits continue to build cohorts and collaborate with each other. She speaks of a constellation of family foundations, community foundations and seasonal panels all needing to come together to integrate LGBTQ work into the portfolios of Southern foundations.
Midge Coward, who, like all women in her family, was once told she shouldn’t “worry her pretty little head” about money, is eager to make it to 2036, the year LGF will shutter. A self-described enneagram five, Coward said she doesn’t think much about her legacy. She’s just proud of the evolution of the foundation through the years and mentioned a letter the foundation wrote on the heels of George Floyd’s murder, an inflection point for many progressive foundations.
“It feels really good to step out on what I believed all along,” Coward said. “You know that bible quote about ‘a little child shall lead them?’ I feel like if you’re lucky, you learn from your kids, even if they are all grown up like Meg and Emily are. And then they bring in new ideas and new people.”