Category: Announcement

At the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, we know that embracing change will allow us to more effectively do our work. For the Board, good governance guides us to serve fixed terms, calling on members to hand leadership over to others on a regular basis and enable a renewal of the foundation’s work and presence in the world. To this end, there are various leadership transitions that I am pleased to share with you.

Rebecca V. Dixon will serve as Board Chair of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation beginning January 1, 2026. She is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Employment Law Project (NELP), a leading national nonprofit advancing a just and inclusive economy where all workers have expansive rights and access to good jobs. A respected national leader in labor and economic justice, Ms. Dixon has expanded NELP’s reach and impact by embedding racial and gender equity throughout its strategy and partnerships with more than 300 organizations nationwide. Her motivation for advancing workers’ rights and commitment to equity are deeply rooted in her lived experience growing up in rural Mississippi at the intersection of race, class, and gender. Ms. Dixon joined the Noyes Foundation Board in 2022 and currently serves on the Executive Committee as Treasurer.

Rebecca will work closely with the recently announced incoming President, Amy T. Morris, who will lead and guide us into this next meaningful chapter that continues to support our community of partners and allies across intersecting movements.

Change also invites gratitude. We extend our appreciation to Richard Burns for his service as Interim Executive Director for the past sixteen months. He worked closely with our Board and staff to steward the staffing transition with confidence and minimal disruption. We wish him continued success as advisor to the Johnson Family Foundation and future partners who will benefit from his wisdom and deep knowledge of philanthropy and leadership transitions.

As my term as Board Chair comes to a close, I’m proud to have served the foundation with an outstanding and committed set of Board and staff colleagues. Noyes has stood by its grantees and communities by elevating its financial support during the challenging years of the COVID pandemic and sustaining support in the face of attacks on our democracy, communities in Mississippi and New York, and Indigenous people in the US. We continue to lead in the field of responsible investing, with an Investment Policy Statement that demonstrates how to deploy capital to advance our vision of environmental and social justice with values-aligned managers and firms.

We now look to Amy and Rebecca to steward the foundation’s work to support organizations advancing justice and equity for all in a world that continues to oppress historically marginalized communities. It has been my privilege to serve as Board Chair for the past two years and serve on the Board since 2020, and I look forward to this next chapter for the foundation.

With gratitude, 

Marc Diaz
Chair, Board of Directors

Today marks the beginning of a new phase for the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation. After conducting an extensive national search with support from Koya Leadership Partners, we are thrilled to announce that Amy T. Morris has joined the Foundation as President and will start in the role on January 5, 2026.

Amy’s leadership draws upon a multi-faceted career in philanthropy that is informed by her early work in education, the labor movement, immigrant rights, and global human rights. Most recently, Amy served as the Interim President at Neighborhood Funders Group (NFG) — a funder network that has supported our foundation and other grantmakers to work together to accelerate racial, gender, economic, disability, and climate justice. Prior to guiding NFG through its executive leadership transition as Interim President, Amy was the founding director of the Amplify Fund, NFG’s first grantmaking fund. Operating with very similar values to the Foundation, the Amplify Fund’s grantmaking strategy is designed by local movement leaders and makes sustained commitments to support grantee partners’ operating expenses, while minimizing reporting requirements. Earlier in her career she served as Program Officer at Surdna Foundation, where she oversaw grantmaking to support leadership development, economic justice, and community organizing and served as the Director of Programs at the Fund for Global Human Rights, where she oversaw grantmaking programs that strengthened frontline human rights movements globally. She is a Board member of the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and Nexus Community Partners, and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Maria Fund. 

We look forward to Amy leading and guiding us into this next exciting chapter, ensuring that the Foundation not only supports our community of partners and allies across intersecting movements to navigate the complexities of advancing positive social change in our current environment, but also amplifies the call to broaden support and collaboration.

“A core belief of mine that aligns closely with the Foundation is that grassroots organizing led by the people most impacted by injustice is key to our collective liberation,” said Amy. “I look forward to building on the depth of community that exists amongst the Foundation’s peers and partners and stewarding the Foundation’s long-term commitments through grantmaking and impact investments while also stepping into the possibilities of what this moment demands.“

Amy is enthusiastic about getting to know the Noyes community, as she has said consistently that she prioritizes relationships first. While we invite and welcome your questions about this transition, Amy will take some time to prioritize space for rest through the end of this year. She looks forward to being in conversation in the new year when she can be reached at amy@noyes.org.

In our more than 70-year history, the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation has consistently adhered to values and priorities that address the country’s most challenging social problems. We’ve changed as the world has changed, but we’ve never wavered in our commitment to equity and justice. Even as we continue to live through a national reckoning with injustice and white supremacy coupled with a global pandemic and threat to democracy, we have a responsibility to act and repair hundreds of years of harm and discrimination to Black and Indigenous people and people of color. As funders, we must reverse and address the overwhelming underinvestment in these communities from the philanthropic sector.

While we will continue to evolve our approach to meet the needs of movements, I’m excited to share several strategic shifts that we’ve started to make based on feedback from the field to better support our grantees.

• Fund intersectional organizing
  While we have always funded grassroots organizations led by the people most impacted by injustices — particularly Black, Indigenous, and people of color — as they have the lived experience of being disenfranchised by unjust systems and have the clearest view of solutions, we had for many years done so in a siloed way. As of 2019, we began to fund intersectional organizing — organizing on multiple fronts, not single-issue programmatic silos — to advance racial justice and gender justice. We also expanded our focus to include a grantmaking budget specifically for Indigenous-led groups.
• Shift to place-based grantmaking
  We are also beginning to concentrate the impact of our grants by working in partnership with communities in a limited number of geographic locations, particularly New York and Mississippi. Since our founding, we have been supporting partners in New York City where the foundation is based, and now we have expanded beyond New York City to support the robust ecosystem of statewide grassroots organizing efforts. Philanthropy has historically overlooked and under-resourced the US South, and we are beginning to more deliberately funnel resources to this region. We are also working with a select group of national partners who support the work of place-based partners through building the capacity of local leaders, fostering cross-state collaborations, and bridging the organizing work at the state and local levels into regional and national movement infrastructure.
• Provide larger, multi-year grants
  Historically, we have supported our partners year after year, but we are being more intentional in providing multi-year support while also exploring ways to increase our grant amounts. At the end of 2020, our Board approved an increased payout to double our grantmaking budget to $4 million to better support partners to fulfill their missions over the long term.
• Couple grants with investment capital
  For the first time, we leveraged our broader endowment to provide a grantee partner, Higher Purpose, with a $100,000 loan guarantee to unlock capital from Hope Credit Union to support Black women entrepreneurs in Mississippi. Through these efforts, we provided an integrated stream of resources to priority places not just through grantmaking, but also with investment capital. We believe that we need to leverage all of our resources to support the work of our grantee partners.
• Support the broader movement ecosystem, grantee-driven capacity support, and healing justice. 
  In response to the ongoing needs of partners, we will launch a $500,000 flexible grantmaking mechanism in Spring 2021 to support emerging and unforeseen opportunities for new and existing partners, including grantee-driven capacity support and healing justice as a way to aid partners in confronting trauma and centering well-being. This new part of our work was informed by our COVID-19 emergency relief rapid response grants to nearly three-quarters of our existing grantee partners in 2020. We have also earmarked a portion of our core grantmaking to specifically support Black and Indigenous-led networks and coalitions to strengthen the ecosystem of movements advancing racial justice and Indigenous sovereignty.

While we have made some important changes, we will continue to grow and learn in community with you all. Thank you for being a part of our journey to become a stronger and more effective organization — a journey that builds on the strength of our past and is full of opportunity for the future. As Amanda Gorman said in her inaugural poem, “For while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption.”