Paying it Forward: Matthew Beatty ’01

10/15/2026

For Matthew Beatty ’01, community service is a full-time job and lifelong pursuit

When Matthew Beatty ’01 walked onto the stage of the Lewis Family Auditorium on January 15, it’s safe to say that the vast majority of Ransom Everglades students didn’t know who he was. That changed quickly. When he walked off, 25 years after graduating on that same stage, it was to a standing ovation. Beatty, who is the Market Director - Miami for the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority and recently earned the Ransom Everglades Founders’ Alumni Award for Distinguished Service to the Community, delivered a barnburner. The speech was eloquent and forceful in its efforts to connect the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with RE’s history and values.

“Because of what you’re getting here, you all are being trained to lead this world,” he said. “Other people’s lives will depend on your choices. The late, great Dr. Martin Luther King called you all the drum majors for justice. He is by far the best example that, when we live our purpose, there is nothing that we cannot reshape in the world around us.”

The speech was notable not just because it was an unusual feat of oratory for 11 in the morning. It was also highly personal. The “we” predominated. Beatty made it clear that RE had provided some of the foundational bricks of the life he’s built as a force for good. And at the same time, in its very craftsmanship, the speech attested to another side of his journey that RE helped shape: his path to becoming among the most transformative communicators in the history of Miami’s nonprofit sector, to the tune of over $150 million in fundraising.

In some respects, it makes sense that Beatty would go on to a career in civic engagement: he was born to two extraordinarily civic-minded parents. His father, the attorney Robert G. Beatty, worked as the Miami Herald’s general counsel and vice president for public affairs and served on the boards of several community organizations – including a financial advisory board for the City of Miami itself when the city faced budgetary shortfalls in the late ’90s. In 2007, he purchased and became the publisher of the South Florida Times, a Fort Lauderdale-based weekly that provides local news for the region’s Black communities. Beatty’s mother, Priscilla Beatty, was similarly active in civic life, contributing much of her limited time as a working parent to the Jessie Trice Community Health System and other causes in and around Liberty City.

“I spent a lot of evenings doing my homework in the back of a boardroom while she was leading a meeting,” Beatty recalled. “Seeing all that growing up helped me understand that no matter what I chose to do professionally, there had to be part of my work that was serving my community.”

From the beginning, a call to service was part of the family culture. But the call became louder after they joined the Church of the Open Door in Liberty City, when Beatty was around nine years old. The church became the place where Beatty discovered what it means to serve others in routine, hands-on ways.

“I was expected to be deeply involved through the church youth group. We fed folks who were unhoused on the weekends, and it was expected that you do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” Beatty said.

“[I understood] that no matter what I chose to do professionally, there had to be part of my work that was serving my community.”

Matthew Beatty ’01

At the same time, Beatty’s parents were also fierce champions of education. Robert was the first in his family to attend college, and he was insistent that Matthew and his older sister Victoria Beatty ’00 – now a law professor and a consultant for Ransom Everglades – see education as a source of both social mobility and self-preservation for Black people growing up in America.

“My dad always said, someone may not like you, or they may say you’re not qualified because of the color of your skin, but they can never say that you lack the education,” Beatty recalled.

Thus, the place for him and his sister was Ransom Everglades. But Beatty’s experience at RE wasn’t always easy. He recalled spending much of the earlier years orbiting Victoria’s friend group of slightly older Black girls as a collective “little brother” figure.

“I wasn’t sure if it was the fact that I was Black, and there wasn’t a ton of Black students there, or if it was the fact that I wasn’t a real athletic kid or wasn’t considered one of the ‘cool’ kids, but I spent those first couple of years trying to find my footing,” he said.

RE’s academic rigor also posed a formidable challenge. But Beatty feels grateful for teachers who “didn’t let me slip through the cracks” as well as those who “pressed and pushed me even though I complained, because they knew I had more in me.” And he found a space of particular solace in the Black Students Association, led at the time by then-Dean of Students (and current RE Chief Operating Officer) David Clark ’86.

“His guidance and support always validated what we were feeling as Black kids in the school, which was that, yes, we’re different, and that is okay, and we should still, in our differences, celebrate who we are, be comfortable with who we are, and show up as our full selves,” Beatty said.

“Matthew really felt like it was his safe haven,” Clark recalled. “It made a difference in his life. He was probably one of those kids where it took him a while to figure out who he was. And then when he figured it out, he was good.”

“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

Beatty also found inspiration in his humanities classes – including an AP U.S. Government class that ventured far beyond the test to tackle questions of morality and civic responsibility.

“There were a lot of discussions around not just learning our country’s system and how it’s set up, but how should people be governed?” he recalled. “We had much broader conversations about caring for communities, caring for people and what the best systems are to do that.”

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, Miami-based 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, multi-billion-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.

“I wanted it to be the central thing that I worked on every single day when I got up: to ensure that Black people were getting the equitable share of resources that they deserved in this country.”

Matthew Beatty ’01

“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, top-down 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.’ It was so boring. And I was like, that is so not who Miami is. We’re a place where there’s a sizzle to how we communicate things. We had to have that as part of the campaign,” Beatty said.

But Beatty was ahead of the curve in seeing the potential of a new communicative vehicle: social media. This was 2012. Instagram had just come online; if you wanted to schedule a Tweet, you needed a third-party app like HootSuite. Even so, Beatty not only made social media the linchpin of The Miami Foundation’s strategy, but also led training sessions for the nonprofits themselves where he taught them how to leverage the new technology. To this day, leaders in Miami’s nonprofit sector look back on those training sessions as transformational.

“He was critical in helping us expand our reach and our audience, reaching new donors across Miami,” said Lindsay Linzer, Chief Impact Officer at The Miami Foundation, who worked with Beatty. “Because he’s an expert storyteller, he was the face of a lot of those training efforts for nonprofits.”

The gambit worked. In 2012, Give Miami Day brought in $1.2 million – and Beatty’s team thought “it was all the money in the world.” And then the following years brought in $3.2 million, $5 million, $9 million, $12 million. Propelled by evolving versions of Beatty’s original strategy, Give Miami Day became a juggernaut that has raised over $150 million since its inception, consistently breaking its own record.

Many would’ve been satisfied. Beatty wasn’t. In 2020, amid the nationwide racial reckoning that was sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Beatty realized that he wanted to spend the entirety of his professional energy – not just part of it – serving Black communities in South Florida.

The Carrie Meek Foundation was the perfect fit. Named after the first African-American to represent Florida in the United States Congress since Reconstruction, the organization is one-of-a-kind in its singular focus on supporting and uplifting Black communities in the state.

“If you give the resources to individuals who know these communities, who know the solutions, and you support them properly, issues get solved.”

Matthew Beatty ’01

“He can tell a good story about what might seem to be a dreary set of facts,” said Lucia Davis-Raiford, the foundation’s CEO, who hired Beatty largely on the basis of his skills as a communicator and his ability to put people at ease. “He can turn mediocre messages into positive ones, and he also, I think, is smart about writing in a voice that people can ‘hear.’”

After Beatty joined as vice president and chief operating officer, he led initiatives that transformed the foundation’s work. One was the Meek Mobilize Grants Program, which looks for small, ad-hoc programs that are already working to address problems within specific neighborhoods – especially violence – and equips them with the tools, resources, and infrastructure they need to function like sustainable nonprofits.

“This community-building work – this stuff is not brain surgery. If you give the resources to individuals who know these communities, who know the solutions, and you support them properly, issues get solved,” Beatty said.

Beatty’s next career step extended his personal investment in his home community. This past summer, he stepped into his latest role: Market Director - Miami for the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority. Founded in 2023, the authority aims to help bring innovative solutions to local community challenges by identifying and supporting companies that improve residents’ quality of life. Beatty drives the organization’s on-the-ground strategy through partnerships, fundraising and program development.

“He probably doesn’t get the recognition he deserves, and what he’s done in terms of making a difference in the community is significant,” Clark said. “The people who’ve been around him recognize it, but the general community doesn’t. That’s why Ransom Everglades does.”

After entering his 40s, Beatty has found himself thinking more about paying it forward. Sharing the gifts – including his RE education – that allowed him to become a catalyst for positive change in the city he knows and loves.

“The least I could do is pay it forward, because I could never pay it back. Too much was poured into me. There’s no possible way,” Beatty said. “But I can ensure that those who don’t have access to that opportunity get it. That, I always think, is my purpose.”

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RE founder Paul Ransom, circa 1903

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