Midori Lockett, the Chief Community Impact Officer for Community Relations at Vanderbilt University, has spent the past decade collaborating with the nonprofit sector in Nashville.
Lockett is a Nashville native who completed her undergraduate degree in New England before moving to the San Francisco area for a few years. She then attended graduate school at Drexel University in Philadelphia, after which she stayed in the city for about a decade. She describes herself as a person who likes adventure, going to new places and meeting new people.
Lockett ended up back in Nashville, where she has been a part of Vanderbilt’s Government and Community Relations division for the last 10 years. Lockett credits her mother, a retired social worker, for her professional career in community engagement.
“We grew up in a space of giving back and being engaged in our community,” she said. “I learned very early on to volunteer and be engaged with organizations, specifically organizations for groups of marginalized people.”
What is your job, and what does your team do?
The primary function of my role is the administration of Vanderbilt’s Community Impact Fund. This is the community investment fund that the university has had for several years.
Another big component of my job is relationship building, specifically with nonprofit 501(c)3 organizations. That can include building relationships with new organizations that might have an interest in engagement with Vanderbilt, or [with whom] Vanderbilt has an interest in engaging. That can also be new organizations that are interested in seeking funding from the Community Impact Fund, or that can be sustaining long-term relationships with organizations that we supported throughout the years, where we not only provide monetary support, but [with whom] we may have some kind of programmatic partnership.
A big chunk of my work is the administration of that fund, and then it’s relationship building, sustaining, and connections with the nonprofit sector and the university.
What are some past achievements that highlight your work as Chief Community Impact Officer?
The biggest one is making the Community Impact Fund known to the broader community. I’ve been in the position of working in this space within the division since 2016, and when I assumed the role, there wasn’t really a lot of public knowledge about the fund and these resources being available to nonprofits. Folks didn’t really know the fund existed unless they had a Vanderbilt connection, and there wasn’t an awareness of how to even apply for these resources. I wanted it to be more widely known and put a lot of effort into being in spaces with especially smaller nonprofits that may not have a direct pipeline to Vanderbilt. I spent a lot of time learning about smaller nonprofits, grassroots organizations, and elevating the fund publicly.
And then, in concert with that, we had an initial goal to implement an online application process by 2020. Of course, the pandemic hit, and everything changed drastically. We weren’t able to launch an online application process until 2024. That’s when we revamped all of the communication that went out about what the fund supports, eligibility criteria, and what organizations needed to provide to apply, etc. I call it democratizing access to the fund.
I think those two were the biggest achievements: one, just creating general awareness of this resource being available, and opening it up to the community so that smaller organizations that may not have had an internal connection to Vanderbilt had awareness of it; and two, publicly launching the application process so folks and organizations could apply.
What does the fund support?
Obviously, education is a big priority. We do provide funding support through organizations that serve adults and grades K through 12 (adult, elementary and secondary education). Within that could be youth development organizations, such as after-school programming, basically anything that enhances youth growth and development for the K — 12th grade age groups.
Another bucket area is arts and cultural organizations. We live in a creative city, and it makes sense for Vanderbilt to be in the space of supporting arts and culture since that’s such a big component of our being as a city.
The other is basic needs provided by human service organizations. We begin leaning into human services because if we’re invested in the growth and development and the education of young people, [there are] deficits that may exist, like the basic needs for food, shelter and those kinds of things.
The last one is social justice organizations that deal with the fundamental things that are needed to create access for individual growth and development.
What are you and your team focusing on right now and for the next five years?
Right now we’re primarily focused on strengthening connections between Vanderbilt and the Nashville community by fostering partnerships with nonprofit organizations, schools, neighborhoods, as well as civic leaders. We’re focused on supporting collaborations that will connect Vanderbilt people and its resources to the outside community. Over the next five years, we really want to deepen Vanderbilt’s role and its long-term community connection.
A lot of the work, especially over the last couple of years, has been creating the infrastructure so that we can truly be and serve as an anchor institution here in the city. That means we engage with the community and build strong relationships. We spend a lot of time engaging with organizations that we support financially or that we may have some kind of programmatic partnership with. This helps create more opportunities for our students, our faculty, and our staff to engage in the community, whether that’s through board service or nonprofit board service, those kinds of activities. And then the last goal is to create a collaboration that benefits both the university and the broader community.
In your work, you interact with different nonprofits in Nashville. What stands out to you when you look at the nonprofit sector in Nashville?
I have to say first and foremost, especially for the organizations we engage with, is the commitment and dedication of the folks who lead the organization as well as those who provide direct frontline services. I have met some people who are truly, genuinely committed to making Nashville a better place for all of the people who live within it. That commitment is what I’ve seen, the commitment and dedication to doing the work.
Another big component is commitment to working collaboratively with others who do similar work. I think there’s a lot of desire for how we can collectively address and meet the needs of the constituencies that we interact with. While there are a lot of nonprofits — and perhaps maybe too many for all the resources that we have — there is a commitment to how we work collaboratively together.
Funding is always a challenge in community work. What would be your main advice to local philanthropists on how to make impactful investments?
Be in spaces where you learn, interact, and engage with the organizations that you fund. Now, I understand that that’s obviously not something that all funders in the city can do because they get applications from hundreds of organizations, and they may not be able to be in spaces where they can directly meet or interact with particular nonprofits. But I would recommend to try to learn as much as you can beyond the proposal application process.
Another piece of advice would be to look at multi-year investments. Typically, three-to-five years would be a nice range to start. The Community Impact Fund has organizations that we’ve supported for multiple years, and you can see the growth and potential impact that long-term investment can have for those organizations.
I think nonprofits often have to spend so much time looking for funding support as their primary function that there is less energy for visioning and looking at how they can grow, how they reassess, how they work collectively or collaboratively with others, how they engage with our university communities and how they better maximize who they interact with and who their stakeholders are. If philanthropy can take some of the weight of the funding off the nonprofit leadership, they have time for visioning.
Talking about impact. I have observed that often impact reports actually list outputs rather than outcomes or impact. Have you made the same observations, and if so, how could that be changed or improved?
Yes, I have made that as an observation. But I think that happens for a myriad of reasons. One is that often organizations want to put their best foot forward. So they will write in an application or in a proposal for funding the things that they think a funder wants to hear about their success and what they’ve been doing. It’s very much data-driven: we interacted with these numbers of people, and sometimes applications ask for that kind of information.
The data is important, but ultimately, it’s the social impact that’s important. And that happens over time. It can take years. That’s why I said [earlier] investment levels for three-to-five years are important because it can take a while for an organization to be able to present the impact.
Another piece can be funding operating support and not necessarily focusing solely on programmatic support, if you have the latitude to do that. Often, the operating support provides dollars potentially for professional development for the staff and the team so they can grow and have greater awareness of some of the resources, which, again, allows for the visioning piece. This provides space so that the sector is not constantly just having to be reactive to what’s going on but can be in a space where they know they have the funding, they have the relationship, there’s trust that’s been built between them and the potential funding source, so that they can then work collectively and look at how to tackle a particular social challenge and move a community forward.
That’s part of it, making space for looking at how to have a real, honest impact without so much emphasis on the data and the metrics. Not to say that those things aren’t important because they are important, but how can you shift and tilt it so that that’s not the primary objective in doing the work?
How could nonprofits work more closely with universities?
It’s interesting because over the course of the last couple of years, as a unit, we have intentionally been trying to focus on building infrastructure so that we can have clarity for our community partners on how to work best with us. I think it can be very cumbersome to try to figure out how to make connections with universities the size of Vanderbilt and how to get access and know who to work with. For us, the primary function has been creating awareness so that organizations know that coming to our community relations team is a way to make connections. We can help facilitate connections with the broader Vanderbilt community, whether it’s with other faculty, staff, or students.
Another way is to convene organizations. A couple of years ago, we did a few sessions called The Power of Collaboration where we talked about what can be an outcome from organizations working collaboratively together. [We also focused on] the power dynamic that can be involved and how do you manage an elite institution that ostensibly does have power with its work in the community, and how do you level that playing field and value the lived experience of the organizations that we support and the people that they provide resources and services to.
Last summer, we launched Get Connected, which is our volunteer engagement platform. It’s an opportunity for nonprofits to post a profile and post volunteer opportunities at their organizations. Those can range from doing actual, hands-on work at the organization, or it can be board service. Get Connected is open to members across the Vanderbilt community, so faculty, staff, and students can volunteer with organizations. It can be for research projects where a faculty person has expertise in a particular area and can provide that as a resource to a nonprofit organization. There are many ways beyond the check that the nonprofit sector can engage with a university.
And for our team specifically, we have the space to be in a lot of spaces — with nonprofit partners, public service partners, and with other funders to look at how we can have better coordination and a greater understanding of what other funders are funding. It’s an opportunity for the university and college sector to be in a lot of rooms with a lot of different stakeholders, whether it’s through research projects, programmatic activities, or educational and learning opportunities. Those are the biggest things that universities and colleges can bring to the sector and to the work.