Stillman College will be spending part of its 150th anniversary creating a better financial future for its campus after securing up to $1,040,000 in funding through a first-of-its-kind program.
The Tuscaloosa-based historically Black college was one of the 11 HBCUs chosen to become part of the HBCU Brilliance Initiative, which is tackling a history of inequality by providing each institution with $40,000 grants, up to $1 million in low-interest financing and opportunities to expand their network of financial experts and advisors.
Infrastructure modernization and budgetary planning will be the main focuses for Stillman’s new influx of capital. Next year will be the school’s Sesquicentennial. Stillman President Dr. Yolanda Page said her team wants to invest in the financial health of the campus in a way that protects it for another century and a half, if not beyond that.
“It’s like building a house,” Page said. “When the original owner builds a house, they want to make sure they’re building it on a very firm foundation so that even if there’s no intention of them being the owner for the house’s lifetime, anyone who buys that house in the future is assured that, ‘Hey, this house is not going to fall down on me because the foundation is not firm.’ That’s what I want to establish at Stillman.”
The initiative was started by the Reinvestment Fund, a financial institution funding community-centered solutions in under-resourced areas. That includes HBCUs, which historically have been deprived of funding equal to other colleges. In 2023, former president Joe Biden’s administration reported a $12.6 billion financial gap between HBCUs and predominantly white institutions. In response to the disparity, federal authorities sent letters demanding 16 governors to increase state funding. That included Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, who was told the state owed Alabama A&M University more than a billion dollars.
Donors, celebrities and nonprofits have spent the past couple of years boosting the budgets of Black institutions. Recently, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has poured $700 million into HBCUs across the country, $38 million of that being sent to Alabama State University.
Stillman is the only Alabama HBCU included in the Brilliance Initiative.
The following 10 schools were accepted into the HBCU Brilliance Initiative accepted along with Stillman: Coahoma Community College in Clarksdale, Miss., Fort Valley State University in Fort Valley, Ga., Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Paine College in Augusta, Ga., Shorter College in North Little Rock, Ark., Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Miss., Virginia Union University in Richmond, Va., Voorhees University in Denmark, S.C., and Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio.
According to the American Council on Education, private HBCUs experienced the deepest decline in federal funds per student between 2003 to 2015. With the exception of Coahoma, all of the colleges and universities involved in the initiative are private HBCUs, which depend more heavily on private donations and tuition revenue.
Research indicates that investing in HBCUs leads to tangible benefits. For instance a 2013 research study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine concluded that an increase in the number of Black physicians reduced the impact of implicit bias on health disparities. About 70 percent of Black doctors and dentists are HBCU graduates.
Research also shows that exposure to Black teachers by third grade increases college enrollment for Black students by 13 percent. HBCUs produce 50 percent of Black educators in the U.S. Eighty percent of Black judges and 40 percent of Black engineers came from HBCUs.
Along with the funding, the HBCU will also be advised by Dr. Kendi X. Ibram, Professor of History and founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Howard University, and Leah Rothstein, author and housing policy leader.
“HBCUs have long been incubators of Black brilliance, scholarship, leadership, and multiracial democracy. Investing in these institutions is not just an investment in higher education but it is an investment in an equitable, knowledgeable, and just future,” Kendi said in a press release. “The Reinvestment Fund’s Brilliance Initiative is ensuring HBCUs flourish. And when HBCUs flourish, communities flourish, our nation flourishes.”
According to Page, the $40,000 grant will be used to conduct preliminary work, while the $1 million in financing gives Stillman the ability to kick infrastructure projects into motion.
The college’s proposal focuses on four areas, including condition assessments of the 39 buildings on campus and implementation of the school’s master plan, which makes sure the college is using its buildings and 105 acres of land efficiently. Page said the money will also be used for budget modeling.
“As we start assessing these buildings, getting them up to par for our students and our faculty to support teaching and learning, it’s going to take resources,” Page said. “So what does that look like? How do we generate resources so that we have the funds necessary to start the projects and complete them because there’s nothing worse than building a building, and then it stays empty for X number of years because you just didn’t plan reasonably from a financial perspective.”
Another priority for the grant is digitizing important documents. When leaders broke ground on I Dream Big Academy, a tuition-free, public charter school located in Stillman’s Harte Center, Page said they had to find previous employees of the college to find the blueprints on the center.
“My thought was, ‘There has to be a better way to do this,’” Page said. “So we’re going to be taking all of those blueprints, all of those documents, and digitizing them. That way, in subsequent years, all we have to do is strike a couple of keys, click on a couple of links, and everything that we need is there.”
Money adds up when a school is modernizing aging buildings, Page explained. She estimated that an assessment for one building alone could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Page said two buildings on campus that were built before the 1970s need abatement due to asbestos. Depending on how much asbestos is discovered, an abatement may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, she said.
“So I’m very quickly at a million dollars even when I’m thinking about HVAC modernization,” Page said. “For many of my buildings, the HVAC looks like something from the 1920s or 1930s. so very quickly that money that is available for infrastructure improvements can be quickly spent.”
Page said Stillman is willing to pay these price tags because ultimately these projects create a better student and teaching environment and it helps to sustain an important legacy.
“That Black legacy is important,” Page said. “A lot of that legacy – for all of our institutions – is about the finances. It’s about being financially secure.”
