Lynette Bell On Philanthropy As A Catalyst For Generational Wealth Building And Upskilling Communities

Lynette Bell is a visionary leader and president of Truist Foundation, an organisation deeply committed to empowering communities and creating lasting change.

With a passion for philanthropy and more than three decades of experience in the financial services sector, Bell spearheads strategic philanthropy investments that inspire and build better lives and communities nationwide.

Bell is dedicated to building strong partnerships with a wide variety of innovative nonprofit organisations, with a focus on supporting small businesses and fostering economic mobility. Most recently, she introduced the organisation’s first multi-year signature initiative, Where It Starts, a $22 million collaborative project aimed at creating long-term change for entrepreneurs and job seekers. Bell also pioneered the Truist Foundation Inspire Awards, a celebration of bold technology and big ideas in support of small businesses.

Previously, Bell served as enterprise community reinvestment act officer for Truist predecessor SunTrust, leading the bank’s community development program to support underserved communities. In her more than 30-year career with SunTrust, she held leadership positions in operations, regulatory affairs, bank examinations and compliance.

Bell’s passion for creating positive change has been recognised through various accolades, including earing the Trailblazer Purpose Award from the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals and Spirit of Philanthropy Award from Usher’s New Look, being named a Woman of Influence by the Atlanta Business Chronicle, and receiving the Presidential Award-Unsung Heroine issued by The Coalition of 100 Black Women, Metropolitan Atalanta Chapter.

Lynette discusses the corporate philanthropy ecosystem and how it supports non-profits seeking to address complex systemic issues, and where opportunities exist for entrepreneurs to access support to change lives and help communities thrive.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in inclusion and social impact?

[Lynette Bell] - I've been in the financial services sector for three decades. I’ve been in several jobs, but what I'm most excited about and what gets me going every day is the fact there are systemic barriers that exist in communities across the country, and the work of the Truist Foundation helps to propel change, and so one of the things we get to do is help non-profits, communities, and organisations drive change so people's lives are impacted not just for themselves, but possibly for future generations.

The Truist Foundation was established when two major financial institutions merged in 2020. This created a new pathway for how we can provide grants in our communities, so we wanted to be very strategic about this work. It was the first time at the company I got the chance to not only do creative things, but to start from scratch and create a new investment profile for the company.

Being the seventh largest bank in the United States, there was an important and big job for us to do. We were making grants prior to that merger, but when they said, " Lynette, you've now got a chance to set a new course and a different pathway for us," I was excited.

The company decided it would be a purpose driven bank, which means that we put our values and community first. I have dived into that mission and our purpose, inspire and build better lives and communities. The Foundation is the proof point for that purpose and mission.

As the President of the Truist Foundation, can you share a more about this organisation's core purpose, but also the activities it’s participating in to create long-term change.

When the company said we were going to be purpose driven, we were all taken aback a little, because financial institutions don't typically do that! We took some structured time to talk about not only clients, but with our community stakeholders and employees (who we call our teammates). We thought about all three of those very large components of the work we had to do as a company and a firm.

Driving change in communities takes all those levers to work successfully, and so purpose for us is not just a logo or a slogan, it is embedded in what we do every day. I know that we must be transparent in the giving that we do for the Foundation, and we want to go beyond just check writing for non-profits to make that change happen. We want to have deep, lasting partnerships which help them build sustainability and resiliency in the face of economic disruptions.

The pandemic happened right at the time of the merger, and we started reformatting the Foundation. We had to address basic care and basic needs at that time, and so we had to halt our work to do rapid response.

Being agile and responding in a timely manner to the demands and needs of our communities speaks to us being a change agent, and that’s why social impact and investing is important. You must be agile enough to address that change.

I will say as a foundation in a bank, what makes us different from some of our peers and competitors is we have an open application process. We’re making it super simple and easy for non-profits to get funding and to drive that change or impact we want to see.

We would like to continue to leverage our resources and to empower those on the ground to make a difference in their community and to address those clear challenges. These are the people who understand the dynamics that can make that happen, and they know what must be activated so real inspiration and change happens in communities. That's critical and core to who we are as the [Truist] Foundation.

What is your process behind identifying organisations who require support to create and make a difference? What barriers have you identified that most commonly prevent these organisations from accessing support?

When we talk about supporting community organisations to drive impact and address the barriers that exist, one of the things that we did was ask “how can we make sure our investment platform is meeting people’s demands and needs?" We did a dive into the common threads or issues we were seeing across multiple states and cities. We hosted listening sessions as part of that work, and this was before we decided what was going to be a strategic platform for this Foundation.

What we heard continuously was ‘economic mobility’, and we thought, “wow, what a big concept." How do you change people's economic status, so that the next generation has a different trajectory?” We realised that is a huge onion to peel back, and there's no way we can drive real impact with such a broad stroke.

We started talking to those same organisations, and part of the thread that kept coming forward was about helping individuals earn a living wage. We asked, "how do we get adult to learn more after their jobs have become obsolete?”

Information Technology feels like it changes every six months (or even six seconds)! When people's jobs are becoming obsolete because of technological advancements, how do we get them to upskill and reskill so that they can take their transferable skills and apply it to their new high demand jobs?

That's the part of economic mobility we want to address, helping people to build a career pathway to economic mobility. We want to help individuals get access to quality jobs and the technical support they need for sustainability in new high demand jobs, and so that's where we went first.

The second thing was we started the Foundation right as the pandemic was beginning. Small businesses in the United States are the DNA and fabric of this country. A lot of them were B2B businesses, and they did not have the technology to move to a back room or offline platform. They also didn't have the resilience to survive this disruption, and so we wanted to support small businesses.

Through non-profits, we can help build up that ecosystem for small businesses, and strengthening small businesses is our second pillar of impact. Out of all the work, evidence and research we gathered building career pathways to economic mobility, we discovered that firstly upskilling/reskilling adult workers to get the right jobs so they can earn a living wage and change their wealth trajectory is important.

Then, it’s about improving the knowledge sharing and ability for small businesses to collaborate, so that when the next disruption happens those businesses have the sustainability and technology to survive. The fact many of them did not have access to cloud was so surprising to us, and so that ecosystem for small business needed increased access to capital but also other technical and wraparound services for sustainability.

Those were the two areas we landed on addressing, because we saw the barriers that existed because of the disruption that was happening. As part of those two strategic pillars, there are different components which needed support in their infrastructure.

How have you seen the activities and structure of impact led organisations evolve and where are these opportunities for individuals to start or join the missions of non-profits?

When we provide grants to organisations as a funder, we ask for reports back. As part of those reports, we get indicators on whether the evidence we provided was correct, are these businesses moving in the right direction and are we really making an impact?

When it came to small businesses, one of the things we continually saw was that there were still technology gaps, even when companies had figured out and gotten access to the cloud. We wondered how can non-profits help small businesses get the technology advancements they need to build up their sustainability or resiliency?

We have for two years partnered with MIT Solve, a philanthropic arm of MIT University, to put out a challenge and look for innovators to come up with new solutions or challenge existing solutions addressing that specific gap.

The question we proposed was, “what innovative technology-based solutions is your non-profit implementing to create pathways to resiliency and sustainability for small businesses?” We had over 150 submissions from innovators across the country around this question, and last October, the Truist Foundation hosted and announced seven finalists who took part in this six-month program with wraparound support that included personal training at our Truist Leadership Institute on Management and Development for Nonprofits.

A lot of one-on-one coaching and skill-based workshop helped optimise and increase their effectiveness as non-profits when they work with small businesses. We also helped them showcase that their solution would address that specific need through technology.

At the end of the program, they did a competition and live pitch in front of an audience, and on April 24th we were so excited to be in Charlotte, our headquarter city. We brought these people in from around the country to present their pitch at a local theatre, and we had a winner and runner up.

We were so excited that Centro Community Partners was the winner and audience’s favourite, they’ve developed a platform that helps drive technology for small businesses across the country. It gives them the ability to still do their work with their B2B platform, but it also provides small businesses with technical features such as inventory management and digital marketing.

Our second-place winner was Immigrant Rising, which addresses the needs of those who are new immigrants in a country where their financial platform is so different. They’re not only a gaming platform, but it's in multiple, diverse languages and addresses cultural differences so users can understand the financial system in the U.S. and get their businesses established.

We were so excited to have such a diverse set of innovators with the right solutions to help small businesses, and we think things like that are innovative for us as a financial institution, but it's also a game changer in this space.

What is the role of philanthropy in growing the capacity of changemakers to challenge problems and create solutions?

I was at a conference recently, and I loved this quote from a session that a foundation president led. I’ve started stealing and using it, but she was talking about philanthropy and the role of philanthropy. When the pandemic happened, $9 billion went out into our country to address the basic and critical care needs of people and small businesses during the pandemic, but philanthropy is supposed to take risk.

Philanthropy is supposed to be the fuel and catalyst creating change by supporting those change makers on their journey to break down barriers. Philanthropy is fuelling the marketplace of ideas, that is the critical role it plays today. We are supposed to help address and bring the right resources into play that will allow communities and non-profits to foster innovation and lead by example.

As I stated earlier, these people are the boots on the ground, and they have the ideas and solutions that will make that change not only decisively but for the long term. We want to help build a more sustainable and equitable community, so that all individuals have that equal right to thrive, that's what philanthropy should be doing.

It should be taking its dollars, investing in ideas and taking those critical risks, because we cannot make change happen without taking risk. It's easy to stay in the safe zone and play it safe, but we must move outside of that and be a catalyst for change.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?

One of our biggest assets and initiatives is called Where It Starts, and this originated from us asking, how does change begin? Where does it start? It starts with those boots on the ground, and so we came together using a design mindset and looking at the evidence.

We looked at the issues occurring in several cities across the United States, and explored the non-profit partners who are trying to address these problems individually and separately?

Under the Where It Starts platform, we brought together three large non-profits who kept rising to the top, and as we looked at some of their problems and concerns based on the data, we brought them together and activated them by asking, “how would you create a solution?"

We told them to not worry about the funding, because we're going to provide the funding. All we want is for you all to work together to address these common demographic threads and barriers that exist across multiple cities. We identified five cities across the Southeast; Atlanta Georgia, Charlotte North Carolina, Memphis Tennessee, Miami Florida, and Nashville Tennessee. In these cities, we thought about how we could help individuals cannot enter a career pathway to earn a living wage?

These three nonprofits, The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), Living Cities, and Main Street America had never met each other (which was surprising). They were doing some very similar work and making differences in their communities independently, but they had never worked together, so we brought them together. That was novel, so then we decided we want to address these problems across multiple cities.

We weren't trying to be simplistic in how we do this, because again, every city still has unique nuances, but there are still some clear themes every single one of those cities had, something that had not addressed wealth creation for people through providing sustainable living wages as well as helping small businesses.

We thought that this would be a great way to address this problem, by testing and taking risks to fuel these creative ideas and see what happens from a change perspective. I will say that today as we are working on this, the Where It Starts initiative across the five cities is doing well.

We’ve gotten some great learnings, things are moving along, and businesses are getting the technical wraparound support they need. We are working on the digital marketing piece and ensuring individuals are getting the training and wraparound support to get into new high demand jobs. As you can imagine, when people migrate to a new role, it's a new industry and sector for them.

We thought that we would give them technical wraparound support with staff, a coach, and a mentor who's going to be with them for 6-12 months as they enter this new arena, so that they can grow, be sustainable and keep advancing in those companies. We're seeing great results, and part of the initiative says while it’s in the private sector, it's also in the public sector. Every mayor across these five cities agreed to bring their publicly funded dollars, or state allocated budgets to support this initiative, and in four of the five cities it is working well.

We're having some difficulty in one city, which is a great learning for us because we know we can't attack the problem in the same way. Those three nonprofits are still trying to bring that other city along, and I'm excited about the work we're doing.

Again, we can't see the full impact because the strategy is only one year old, but we know in another two years we're going to have received great learnings and insights from this. We will have hopefully changed the trajectory for many people.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend for our audience?

I am big on affirmations, and so I'm reading Michelle Obama's book The Light We Carry. I think it’s great and Think Again is the other book I'm reading. I like leadership and positive books that talk about changing your mindset and how you view the world and your surroundings.