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The 2024 Lambeth Lecture was held in November 2024, and John Hood and Joy Vermillion Heinsohn were the lecturers invited to comment on “North Carolina 2025: Reflections on People, Policy, and Philanthropy.”
Hood is the president of the John William Pope Foundation, and Vermillion Heinsohn is the executive director for the Z. Smith Reynolds (ZSR) Foundation. Both foundations are philanthropic organizations which aim to promote the wellbeing of North Carolinians but have different ideas of what this means and how to do so, according to a press release.
After what was described as a “grueling, polarizing, often infuriating” election cycle, the lecturers discussed the role of philanthropy in moving the state forward.
You can watch the video here.
John Hood on the moving forward
Hood grew up in Mecklenburg County. His mom was a teacher, and his dad was a principal. His family’s library consisted of more than 1,000 books they saved from the school library’s dumpster. The collection of volumes was heavy on history, he said.
Hood’s comments start at 12:10, and he talks about history, characters in our shared history, and freedom — individual freedom, political freedom, and national freedom.
“For a free society to survive and for people to thrive within it,” said Hood, we need “a thick and healthy layer of civil society between the individual and the state.” He said that includes “strong nuclear and extended families, close knit neighborhoods and religion congregations, a robust and innovative private sector, and charities that alleviate suffering in the short run while promoting virtue, character, and self reliance in the long run.”
Hood said the role of philanthropy is to maintain and strengthen these institutions.
He talked about what is happening now in our society relative to the American Revolution, Civil War, Jim Crow, World Wars, and the Great Depression, but he noted that history doesn’t take “the sting out” of the 2024 elections. And that’s a good thing, he said, because “it reminds us that our differences aren’t artificial.”
In the moving forward, Hood encouraged us “to understand our differences, to understand each other, to hash things out when we can, and to keep a level head when we can’t.”
Hood wants North Carolina to be first in freedom because he believes “that would make North Carolina a better place to work, live, love, worship, and raise a family.”
“At the John William Pope Foundation,” he said, “we invest our philanthropic dollars accordingly.”
Joy Vermillion Heinsohn on the moving forward
Joy Vermillion Heinsohn’s comments begin at 30:41, and she begins by noting the importance of being able to “disagree with both conviction and civility.”
The Lambeth Lectureship honors Thomas Lambeth, who led the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation as its executive director for more than two decades until his retirement in 2000, according to the website. Lambeth was Vermillion Heinsohn’s first post-college boss at the age of 21 when she joined the ZSR team in 1998. She said Lambeth taught her the importance of showing up, how to approach philanthropy with humility and respect for all North Carolinians, how to bear witness to the diversity of the state, and how to break bread, build relationships, and get to know our neighbors across the state.
Vermillion Heinsohn discussed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian novelist, and her caution of the dangers of a single story. She then applied this analysis of danger to her own story, the story of ZSR, and to the story of North Carolina.
The problem with stereotypes or labels that lead to a single story about a person or organization or state being the only story — for instance, being liberal or conservative — is multifold, said Vermillion Heinsohn. Citing Adichie, she said when only one story is acknowledged, it robs us of dignity, emphasizes our differences, and allows us to “flatten the larger story and miss an ocean of nuance, which ultimately leads to additional polarization and feeds our society’s hunger for feuds.”
In this election, Vermillion Heinsohn said, voters in North Carolina rejected the single story that we are red or blue, voting for both Mark Robinson and Josh Stein and splitting votes for the Council of State. “We are complex,” she said.
In her work at ZSR, the foundation is committed to all North Carolinians, and they are committed to investing in targeted strategies for meeting people where they are are given the data on the significant racial and ethnic disparities people face across the state. She and the foundation have a “commitment to understanding the nuance in a world full of deeply complex social challenges.”
“We are a people in progress,” Vermillion Heinsohn said, “and the story of the future of our state has not been written. None of us and yet all of us get to decide what it means to be a North Carolinian, and there is freedom in that because it leaves room for us co-create a North Carolina that honors and celebrates our many stories rather than reducing us to one.”
Vermillion Heinsohn urged us to resist the simple, single story, embrace the complexity of nuanced narratives, and focus on what unites us — our common bond as North Carolinians. “We seek to shine a beacon of light that will cut through the darkness of bitter us versus them, winner take all, my way or the highway politics,” she said.
Editor’s Note: The Pope Foundation previously funded the work of EdNC, and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation currently invests in our work. Here you can see all of the past Lambeth Lectures.
