Kitchen Named Bryan Foundation President

Ed Kitchen was named president of the Joseph M. Bryan Foundation last week, succeeding the late Jim Melvin after his death in August.

Melvin left quite a legacy in Greensboro. After a decade as mayor, from 1971-1981, he was a mentor to generations of local politicians and public servants. But his largest and most sustained impact may have been as president of the charitable foundation begun by Bryan, his good friend and a prominent insurance executive and philanthropist.

When Bryan died in 1995, he named Melvin co-executor of his vast estate and put him in charge of his charitable foundation. Bryan left about $68 million to the foundation, enough to do some serious good in Greensboro, and a trust Melvin took very seriously.

Under Melvin, the foundation supported public parks, recreation centers, and the Greensboro Children’s Museum. It also provided tens of millions of dollars to K-12 public schools and projects at N.C. A&T and UNCG. The foundation helped secure the $10 million in funding needed to launch Elon University’s law school in 2004 and donated the title to its primary campus in downtown Greensboro.

The foundation was also instrumental in providing funding for the International Civil Rights Museum, getting Greensboro’s downtown baseball stadium off the ground, and assembling the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite that led to a Toyota battery plant and nearly $14 billion in investment, which state leaders called the largest economic development coup in North Carolina history.

For years, many in Greensboro wondered if the foundation so synonymous with Melvin would survive beyond him. As his health declined in recent years, there was widespread speculation as to who might replace him.

“I think it’s safe to say no one is going to replace Jim Melvin,” Kitchen told The Assembly in an interview last week. “I don’t see myself as replacing Jim at all. I see myself as sort of taking the baton for the next leg of the journey on behalf of Mr. Bryan.”

Melvin hand-picked Kitchen, a former Greensboro city manager with 30 years’ experience in local government. He came aboard as vice president of the foundation in 2006 and worked side-by-side with Melvin until his death.

The foundation’s resources are now in the neighborhood of $65 million, and Kitchen said its board is a strong representation of the best of Greensboro.

“We’re not a family foundation where the people on the board are all family or friends,” Kitchen said. “We have a very engaged, civically-minded board of directors.”

Late last year, Harold Martin, former chancellor at N.C. A&T State University, joined the board. During his 15 years at the helm of A&T, Martin led its transformation from a financially and academically struggling institution to the largest HBCU in the nation, growing its footprint in the city and setting enrollment records while making its students some of the most academically successful in the entire UNC system.

“He is a good example of the way all our directors have played leadership roles in the community for many years,” Kitchen said. “It’s a great group.”

The Assembly caught up with Kitchen last week to talk about what’s next for the foundation and for Greensboro.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Congratulations on your new role. Big shoes to fill, obviously, but you worked so closely with Jim Melvin for so many years. I wonder, did you have conversations with him in the last few years, and with the board members more generally, about what the Bryan Foundation needs to be going forward?

Yes, in fact, we’ve had conversations among the board members recently about that. I don’t see a whole lot of change occurring at this point in time. Mr. Bryan’s vision for it was for the foundation to be a benefit to the community, and especially to economic development.

What we’re really doing, I think, is a combination of supporting ongoing things in the community and taking those big swings.

For example, we give a large gift each year to the United Way to help support social services in the community. We are regular contributors to the arts. We do a lot of lot of gifting work and collaborative work, with regard to the public schools and the universities, and we see all of that as workforce development, which is another form of economic development.

So I think we’ll continue to do those things, but we’ll also keep some what I refer to as dry powder to go after the sort of the big swings—you know, the big transformational kinds of projects like the megasite and some of the other things we’ve been doing.

We’re one of the investors in the former News and Record site downtown. We see that as a real opportunity to take the downtown area to its next level. And we went into that as an investor, along with a number of other folks, because you don’t get 10 contiguous acres sitting right in the middle of your downtown very often that you can develop. We wanted to have some control over that so that it wasn’t simply just whatever private developers felt like they could make the most return on.

I worked in the old News & Record building for a decade. In my twenties, I probably spent more time there than I did in my apartment. It was much nicer. I think there’s a lot of public interest in what’s going to go on there, obviously.

We obviously want to see private investment made there, but also something that will be what I call a ‘wow factor.’ You know, a destination point. When you’ve got family coming into town and you want to show them something that’s really cool going on in downtown Greensboro, this is one of the places, hopefully, that you’ll show them. Whether it’s iconic architecture or it’s some kind of a destination for activities, that is probably our biggest short-term focus in terms of a major economic development activity. We want it to be something that there’s a buzz about, that people will talk about, and they’re proud of.

Does that kind of work, bringing not just investors but also the people of Greensboro together around something, get tougher in periods of economic and political instability like the one we’re seeing now? The Bryan Foundation has been around long enough to have gone through wars, the Great Recession, an international pandemic. Still, I think we’re in a period now that may be uniquely challenging.

Yeah. These are unusual times, not only from an economic point of view and a sort of political point of view, but also, I think, in a communication point of view. With the extreme changes that are going on in the media world, and particularly with print media, how do you bring the community together and communicate with them about their desires and what’s most important in the community? Yes, it is tougher.

Economic uncertainty is part of that, too. Right now, the market’s still doing pretty well, which helps us out a whole lot. But you never know when that downturn might occur, and so we need to be prepared for that. But that’s one of the things that I think foundations can do, is step up to the plate when those times happen and fill gaps as needed. And we would continue to plan to do that.

As we’ve talked with local political candidates this season, housing and economic inequality have been huge issues. How do you see the Bryan Foundation’s work playing into those concerns in the community?

Historically, the foundation has not been directly involved in housing, and I don’t see us getting directly involved in trying to come up with subsidized housing and so forth. I think that if we continue to focus on workforce development and we’re able to fill the better-paying jobs in the community that are coming in, be they advanced manufacturing or higher-paid professional jobs, that’s one of the most important things you can do. The wage levels in the community, to me, are one of the most important things that you can have.

And if you’ve got rising wage levels, then the housing issues automatically become more affordable. That doesn’t mean for those that are in poverty conditions, obviously. That’s a whole other kettle of fish that you have to deal with. And one of the ways we’re dealing with that is through education.

One of the projects that I’ve been working on for probably the last eight or 10 years here at the foundation is Ready for School, Ready for Life. We’re trying to get the families and the youngest children in our community better supported and better prepared to arrive at kindergarten, ready to succeed. If we can do that, if they’re better prepared when they enter kindergarten and they’re reading at third-grade levels when they reach third grade, then they go on to have success in high school and post-secondary. Then their incomes are going to automatically be higher, and they’re going to be ready for the jobs that we’re creating in the community.

Obviously, that impacts what they can afford in housing, it impacts homelessness, it helps the whole community. So it all starts with that early education.