Dear friends and colleagues,
We are writing to share exciting news from Blue Meridian Partners.
In the three years since our start-up in 2015, Blue Meridian Partners has been building a results-driven model that is unlocking unprecedented resources for solving problems that trap youth and families in poverty.
Today we are pleased to announce plans to embark on new growth to help our nation’s promising social sector leaders expand their reach and increase their impact. As we continually enlarge Blue Meridian Partners’ capital base (currently totaling $1.7 billion), we’ll be looking for more ways to innovate and extend our model, partnering with others where we can, to deliver more resources, engage more investors, and help ready more leaders and strategies to achieve their goals.
To support our work over the long run, we will also become an independent organization: Blue Meridian Partners, Inc. As a new 501(c)(3), Blue Meridian Partners, Inc. will carry on the work of our incubator and first investor, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF), which pioneered our performance-based investment approach to discovering and financing effective strategies capable of delivering results at national scale.
An accompanying letter, “An Update on EMCF’s Limited Life,” describes how Blue Meridian Partners, Inc. will help the Foundation complete its work with longtime Youth Development Fund grantees and chart PropelNext’s future.
The decision to become independent and grow Blue Meridian Partners, Inc. is based on our successful results to date and our rising confidence in our model’s potential to expand and accomplish even more.
On our website, bluemeridian.org, you can learn how Wendy’s Wonderful Kids and Youth Villages’ YVLifeSet are addressing the adversities of prolonged stays in foster care; how Nurse-Family Partnership and HealthySteps are helping families give children a stronger start in life; how Upstream USA is reducing unplanned pregnancies; and how Year Up is connecting economically disadvantaged young people to well-paying jobs. We’re also pleased to announce our two newest investees, Center for Employment Opportunities and The Bail Project, which are helping youth and adults overcome the negative consequences of involvement in the criminal justice system.
Two regional strategies, led by George Kaiser Family Foundation and The Duke Endowment, are augmenting our national investees. These strategies play an essential role in Blue Meridian Partners’ work by integrating our portfolio of solutions with community-driven early childhood efforts. By delivering a continuum of support to families in Tulsa, OK and Guilford County, NC, they are preparing children there to succeed in school and life, and they are providing examples that we hope to learn from and build on as we go forward.
Blue Meridian Partners has already approved a total of $350 million to back the first phase of each of our investees’ scaling plans, and, pending their performance, we have a line of sight to investing $1 billion or more to help bring these solutions fully to scale. Taken together, our model’s continued growth and our initial investees’ progress demonstrate the power of a paradigm shift that reimagines the way pooled capital flows to strategies that work.
Blue Meridian Partners, Inc. will be overseen by a new board, to be appointed in January 2019, that will initially comprise a subset of our General Partners, EMCF trustees and advisors. Within the next year, Blue Meridian Partners’ staff and several EMCF team members will transition to the new organization. To ensure a smooth transition, Blue Meridian Partners, Inc. will help EMCF follow through on its limited-life strategy and complete its remaining work without maintaining a separate team and infrastructure.
We are moving forward with the conviction that, by delivering bigger and better capital flow and support to leaders and strategies solving problems in America, we can help build a better future for our nation’s youth and families. We look forward to working with you and welcome others to join us as we embark on this next exciting chapter at Blue Meridian Partners, Inc.
Sincerely,
Stanley Druckenmiller, Chair, Blue Meridian Partners, Inc.
Nancy Roob, CEO, Blue Meridian Partners, Inc.
See our brief FAQ if you’d like to learn more about Blue Meridian Partners’ structure and transition plans.