FALL 2026 Ransom Everglades LOG 9 Matthew Beatty ’01 photographs colleagues at The Miami Foundation after a successful Give Miami Day in 2018 By the end of his time at RE, he felt the inevitable pull (and some significant parental pressure) toward an Ivy – the University of Pennsylvania, to be specific. But he felt a calling to do something a little different. Inspired in part by the story of his maternal grandmother, a proud graduate of Florida A&M University, Beatty turned down his UPenn interview in secret and sent off an application to Florida A&M University (FAMU), one of the nation’s oldest public historically Black colleges. The experience of being at one of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) was transformative. “An HBCU validates you. It validates a Black person in a way that I don’t know that any other experience in this country can. It helped me recognize that I could design a life where who I was as a Black man was the first thing that I present to the world,” Beatty reflected. At FAMU, Beatty enrolled in a rigorous global business program where, as the old trope goes, the dean told students to look to their right, look to their left, and see the 60 percent of the room that wouldn’t graduate. This time, it ended up being true – and the peers who did last ended up being catapulted into upper-echelon careers in Washington and on Wall Street. But once again, a different path revealed itself – this time, when he started his first internship at a Black-owned, Miamibased PR firm called Sonshine Communications. He still remembers the moment he realized that the right message – and especially the right messenger – could change the material wellbeing of a whole community. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was working on a major, multibillion-dollar Everglades restoration project, and they were struggling to get support from minority communities who would be directly affected. Beatty’s team found a group of teen poets and “conscious rappers” who had already found an audience in Miami-Dade – and took them kayaking. “We brought them into the studio the following day and recorded a song and a commercial that became a public service announcement,” Beatty recalled. “The song that they created was the first time I saw that bridge being built, [where they adapted] these complicated messages for people who may not have been aware of how important it was to their community and their neighborhood. It worked, and it landed.” Meet people where they are. Don’t rely on cookie-cutter, topdown messaging. Find a way to get the message into grocery stores, hair salons, people’s everyday lives. These were the lessons he learned from his experience at Sonshine, and they directly informed his next (and much more ambitious) project: Give Miami Day. After joining The Miami Foundation, Beatty was given the daunting task of figuring out a communications strategy that would inspire what was, by some metrics, the most civically unengaged metropolitan area in the U.S. to participate in a grassroots fundraising campaign for local nonprofits. The models that had worked (to some extent) in other cities were not exactly worth emulating. “All of the campaigns felt so dry and flat and traditional and old-school. Like, you know, ‘Give to support your community.’ “He can turn mediocre messages into positive ones, and he also, I think, is smart about writing in a voice that people can ‘hear.’” – Lucia Davis-Raiford, CEO of the Carrie Meek Foundation
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