The Dive: Out With the New

On Monday, the New Hanover Community Endowment announced that president and CEO William Buster had resigned. Hired in early 2022, Buster was the endowment’s first employee, the public face of the organization, and the driving force behind its approach to philanthropy. 

With roughly $1.25 billion from the sale of New Hanover Regional Medical Center, the leader of the endowment would have eventually directed over $60 million in annual grants–enough to credibly promise what Buster and the Endowment called “transformational change.” 

But Buster was pushed out, and the endowment has offered no official explanation for his exit. 

The endowment’s communication director was out of town on vacation and would say only that it was a “personnel issue.” Board members all deferred to Chair Bill Cameron for additional comment, but Cameron didn’t return a phone call, instead declining to speak in a message passed along through the spokesperson. 

That lack of transparency–one of the endowment’s professed core values–gives license to all kinds of speculation. Why did Buster leave?

He hasn’t announced a new gig, so while he’ll no doubt land on his feet, it doesn’t seem he was poached the way the endowment hired him from the Dogwood Trust in Asheville. Nor has Buster made any obvious misstep over the last two years that might have led to the board coercing him into resignation.

The most likely answer, based on both my public reporting and private conversations with those most familiar with what happened, is a growing philosophical rift between the endowment and its founders.

The endowment board recently underwent a perceptible shift as founding members Hannah Gage and Virginia Adams were replaced with former Republican commissioners Pat Kusek and Woody White in a party-line vote by the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners’ GOP majority. Kusek and White had helped craft the endowment and were originally expected to step directly from county politics onto the inaugural endowment board. During the hospital sale process, a two-year “cooling-off” period was added for elected officials before they could serve on the endowment board; that paused, but didn’t derail, that plan.

Critics cried foul, saying the move seemed political, even racially inequitable; Adams was the county’s only Black appointee, and Kusek and White are, well, white. “Inclusivity” is another core endowment value, and while Attorney General Josh Stein had required additional diversity on the endowment board as part of his approval of the hospital sale and rattled his saber at Adams’ removal, he took no official action.

Meanwhile, County Manager Chris Coudriet defended the shakeup as a way to bring the endowment closer to its original purpose–a community foundation guided by the county’s strategic plan. Coudriet told me the independence of the endowment was meant to shield it from fleeting political whims, not decouple it from the county entirely.

The scope of Buster’s ambitions seems to have run afoul of that originalist understanding of the endowment. The endowment’s new leaders seem to feel it would be better to have someone at the helm who, like Coudriet, serves at the pleasure of a board–not someone leading the charge with gusto.

And to address the elephant in the room here: many in the community will see the ouster of a high-profile Black leader, by a board that has recently gotten more conservative and less diverse, as a particularly nasty kind of racialized politics. 

I’m not suggesting the move was racially motivated. But the endowment, a young foundation that is still struggling to connect with the community, can ill afford the poor optics. 

In short: If finding another CEO was the will of the board, that’s their choice, and there may well be defensible reasons for it. But effectively removing Buster in silence and secrecy isn’t transparency–or “integrity” or “courage,” to name two more core endowment values.

There are other unanswered questions in the wake of Buster’s exit. And, again, the endowment’s silence threatens its uneasy relationship with the public, especially the nonprofit community.

It’s not clear, for example, whether the staff Buster had assembled around the endowment’s four “pillars”–health equity, community safety, community development, and education–will stick around. 

It’s also unclear what will happen to the many plates Buster had spinning, which include a proposed program to help nonprofits get up to speed and make better grant applications, his “Breakfast with Buster” series soliciting feedback from experts and stakeholders in the nonprofit world, and a targeted series of meetings around affordable housing and homelessness.

Uncertainty about the latter has been particularly stressful for nonprofits who got left out of the endowment’s most recent grant round but were promised the endowment would be making a big move on that front in early 2024. 

The endowment has offered no public plan for those programs, leaving the nonprofit community in a kind of stunned, quiet chaos. 

And watching a private board of unelected officials sit on over a billion dollars of public money and recoil into its shell makes me think of one more core endowment value: Accountability.

–Benjamin Schachtman

Read this newsletter online or contact The Dive team with tips and feedback at wilmington@theassemblync.com.

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Around the Region

One Buster Out, Another Buster In: Word’s gotten out that Dave & Busters is planning a location in Mayfaire. Port City Daily was first to report the arcade-restaurant is eyeing a spot next to the theater. 

What’s in a Name? The winner of the national contest Own Your Own backed out because it turns out, she learned she wouldn’t get to own her own restaurant in Burgaw, among other reasons, Port City Daily reports.

Don’t Say Race: The New Hanover County School Board approved a new policy that prohibits teachers from saying racial oppression played a role in the nation’s founding, WECT reports.

Crooked Commodore: A barge-based social club has docked in Wrightsville Beach, but the structure appeared wonky after the voyage. Greater Wilmington Business Journal talked to the construction manager who assuaged concerns about its structural integrity.

Sky High: Wilmington staff proposed a tax increase to help pay for big projects, including improving the Skyline Center that the city purchased last year. Port City Daily reports council hopes to rework the numbers to avoid a tax increase. 

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Around the State

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