Morgan Wallen’s Exile Was Swift and Decisive. Is It Permanent?

We appreciate this opportunity to introduce a newly-formed nonprofit, Midland Inspires, to the caring West Texans who inspired it.

Midland Inspires is a community of women who seek to transform lives through high-impact and lifelong giving. The organization will award $100,000 grants each year to worthy nonprofits that address critical social needs in Midland County.

Midland Inspires was founded in 2020 by Lisa Fielder and Brenda Harrison, long-time friends who found themselves living in the same city. Frustrated that many of our citizens struggle even during economic boom times, the two women discussed the need for meaningful, measurable, permanent solutions to Midland’s social challenges. The petroleum industry downturn, followed by the novel coronavirus pandemic and shutdown, highlighted the urgency and immediate need for innovative philanthropy.

Lisa Fielder first came to know about “collective” grantmaking when a nonprofit she led received a grant from a similar organization in Austin. Now a nine-year member of that Austin philanthropy, Fielder brings experience to Midland Inspires from all sides of the process: grant applicant, grant recipient, and participant in the grantmaking process.

Brenda Harrison has generously supported Midland’s nonprofit community for two decades as a fundraiser, volunteer, board member and philanthropist. She brings a wealth of community knowledge, relationships, philanthropic experience and personal credibility to the organization. Harrison works tirelessly to lead Midland Inspires as the organization’s president.

In the midst of the COVID-19 shutdown, Fielder and Harrison began recruiting members in July 2020. And, despite a serious risk of contagion, the Midland community responded: In just more than six months, more than 100 of the city’s most caring and committed women joined the organization, each contributing $1,250 toward Midland Inspires’ pooled grant fund.

“Our members want to make a real difference in our community,” Ms. Harrison said. “They want to learn about Midland's greatest needs, to learn about the nonprofits that meet those needs, and to see real progress fixing the underlying problems.”

In fact, women’s response to the idea of Midland Inspires was so enthusiastic that Fielder and Harrison coined a “secret word” to describe the quickly-growing cohort; they quietly refer to Midland Inspires members as #Philanthrobabes.

In developing a grantmaking strategy, Midland Inspires worked to recognize and respond to the deepest needs of Midland’s nonprofits. Similar collective philanthropies, for instance, limit funding to new programs proposed by individual nonprofits - but Midland Inspires will accept individual or collaborative proposals to fund a program and/or strengthen administrative capacity. Moreover, nonprofits may expend 20 percent ($20,000) of each grant award without restriction.

A secondary goal of the organization is to lead women to become informed philanthropists. More than half of Midland Inspires’ members, participating in the 2021 grant review process, will be carefully trained to evaluate proposals for credibility, capability, commitment, feasibility and significance.

Midland Inspires will award its first $100,000 grant in July 2021 to an outstanding local nonprofit that proposes to address a critical social need in one of three categories: Education (enhancing education and learning); Family (enhancing the lives of children and families) or Health and Well-being (positively impacting people’s physical or mental health). Applications will be solicited and evaluated from February through June 2021, and the $100,000 grantee will be selected in July 2021 by simple majority vote of Midland Inspires members.

Midland Inspires welcomes inquiries from all women who seek to enhance lives in Midland County. 

That it all happened while Wallen’s second project, Dangerous: The Double Album, was enjoying its third week as the Number One album in the country and its songs were smashing streaming records, makes his precipitous fall even more breathtaking. Contemporary country music is a community known to bury its head in the sand. Public missteps — from cheating scandals to DUIs — are often brushed away without consequence. Wallen himself had his share of mulligans.

Last May, he was arrested for disorderly conduct and public intoxication after an incident at Kid Rock’s honky-tonk in Nashville. He wasn’t prosecuted. Then in October, he lost that most validating of TV spots for a Nashville artist, Saturday Night Live, after he was seen partying in Alabama less than a week before he was to perform on SNL, violating the show’s Covid protocols. Two months later, he was invited back to both sing and appear in a sketch that lampooned his “what, me worry” approach to the pandemic. (“To no consequences!” Wallen said in one skit making fun of his cavalier attitude.)

So perhaps Wallen, 27, burned through all of his second and third chances and became a legitimate liability for those who both supported and afforded him opportunity. That he was caught on a Ring doorbell camera using the most vile of epithets, while the U.S. struggles with its ongoing history of racism and country music organizations are making public efforts to educate and acknowledge, certainly didn’t help.

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