Turning 80, United Negro College Fund Stages A Revival
UNCF CEO Michael L. Lomax has driven up donations with a $1 billion capital campaign.
With an ambitious capital campaign, CEO Michael Lomax has led his nonprofit back onto the Forbes 2023 list of America’s Top 100 Charities, ranked by private donations.
In 1944, amid World War II, a group of 27 small, private historically Black colleges and universities, all in the South and all struggling financially, decided they could raise more money at less cost, and gain more visibility, by coordinating their fundraising efforts. And so was born the United Negro College Fund, an organization whose name still reflects the nomenclature preferred by Black Americans 80 years ago. In its first year, UNCF raised three times the prior year’s collective take of the founding HBCUs.