Member Spotlight: Betsey Russell
Betsey Russell, Senior Director of Community Engagement - Dogwood Health Trust
Brief Bio: Betsey Russell oversees all internal and external communications, public policy, and capacity building work in support of Dogwood Health Trust’s community investments. She is an expert in foundation and nonprofit branding and communications. An entrepreneur and consultant for nearly 30 years before joining Dogwood, she exercised her passion for helping foundations express complex concepts to target audiences in a clear and captivating way in order to build stronger and more strategic community relationships. In 1996 Betsey created WordOne, the first business in the Southeast devoted exclusively to developing strategic marketing communications for nonprofits and charitable foundations. The firm’s award-winning work delivered superior results for clients like the Center for Rural Strategies, the Southeastern Council of Foundations, the Atlanta Women’s Foundation, the Georgia Center for Nonprofits and many others. In 2005, Betsey sold WordOne and returned to a full-time freelance practice, moving to Asheville, NC in 2007. In 2014, she published a novel, Other People’s Money, set in the world of Atlanta philanthropy. She is a graduate of Davidson College. She and her husband, Mitch, and their two children live in Asheville.
How long have you been part of AFN? In what capacities are you currently involved with the Network? Dogwood Health Trust is still quite new, so our organization has only been part of AFN for about two years. I currently serve on AFN’s Steering Committee.
What is the mission of your organization, and why is this pursuit important to you? Dogwood’s purpose is to dramatically improve the health and wellbeing of all people and communities in Western North Carolina. Our focus is on “upstream” factors that have an outsized impact on individual and community wellbeing, such as housing, education, economic opportunity, and broader health and wellness issues. WNC is mostly rural, and in my career, my work with rural funders was by far the most rewarding and meaningful. So, having the honor to serve the region I call “home” in this way was, quite frankly, irresistible.
What is a project you have recently worked on that you’re passionate about? What was the impact of this project? How did you demonstrate that impact? One of my favorites since joining Dogwood was the project I led to increase our region’s participation in the 2020 Census. Rather than use traditional grantmaking to larger organizations, we chose to support local nonprofit organizations and communities by creating a system where participating organizations were “paid” by the number of people they helped get counted. We knew that the Census was not highly trusted in some of our rural communities, and that small, grassroots organizations would have the relationships needed to convince people to fill out the Census online and walk them through the process (and even supply the broadband or cellular connection to make it happen). We provided administrative funds to help keep those organizations afloat during a time when many were suffering from decreased donations. We also provided county governments with incentives based on their percentage point increases, and funded a regional advertising campaign to help raise awareness and encourage participation across the region.
Dogwood’s investment of $1.5 million to improve Census response rates across the region resulted in Western North Carolina outperforming the state and nation in terms of improving counts from 2010 and will likely yield $18 billion in federal funding through 2030. The U.S. Census response rate increased by 0.5% from 2010; North Carolina decreased by 1.4 percentage points. In contrast, Western North Carolina, where Dogwood concentrated its efforts, increased their response rate by 2.2%, going from 47.7% in 2010 to 49.9% as of October 17, 2020. Across North Carolina, 32 counties exceeded their 2010 response rates; ten of those counties are in Western North Carolina. In addition, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians nearly tripled their counts from 2010.
What do you see as the greatest strength of Central Appalachian communities? First and foremost, the people of course. We know how to get things done no matter the odds. But lately, I’ve also come to appreciate that, in terms of climate change, our ecosystem is increasingly valuable. Our region is likely to become more of a climate refuge than it already is, so protecting that ecosystem becomes even more important.
What is one thing you’d like to see improved in how funders work together in Central Appalachia? Many of us who are in the region are specifically place-based, which can make it difficult to work across county or state lines. I’d love to see a philanthropic culture in which we all had more time to travel to each other’s places, see each other’s work, and build on each other’s successes in ways that benefits the whole region.
What do you see as the primary hurdle in the pursuit of equitable Appalachian transition? How would you approach this challenge? Our region’s history of extraction, coupled with the media’s exploitation of Appalachian poverty gives us a lot to overcome - not only in terms of how investors (of all sorts) view our region, but also how we feel about our own possibilities and define our worth as a region and as individual communities.
The narrative change work that AFN is embarking on should help us begin to clear that hurdle. At Dogwood, we’re looking at ways to boost objective and accurate local news to counter the national narrative of division, so that our communities have more access to stories and information about themselves and the value they add to the world. We’re also exploring ways to support more civil discourse and civic engagement work so that communities can bridge divides and chart their own paths forward together.
What questions do you think funders in Appalachia should be asking regularly about improving their grantmaking processes? So many! What questions are we asking our grantees to answer and why do we really need that information? To what extent are we making the process more difficult for our partners for the sake of reducing our own internal burden? What can we do to make evaluation elements less onerous and more beneficial for both us and our grantees? What traditional funder/grantee practices can we change or update/streamline given the technology we have? What can we learn from other funders about their processes?
What is the one experience from your past, personal or professional, that most influences the work you do today? I’ve almost always had a hand in rural philanthropic work, but the most influential experiences have been projects that took me deeply into rural communities to see first-hand what effective funder/community partnerships look like. I’ve had the good fortune of traveling to communities across North Carolina, and also to four exemplary rural funders in very different parts of the country to learn about and document how they and their community partners worked together. There were so many great lessons and inspiring accomplishments that these communities had to share, and it re-energized me about what is truly possible in rural areas.