Leadership & Strategy
Golden LEAF names its general counsel, a 21-year staff member, to succeed its retiring CEO
Ted Lord will lead the North Carolina foundation, funded by the 1998 tobacco settlement, when Scott Hamilton retires. Two recent releases give different results for the same year.
By The Editors · The Game of Giving
The Golden LEAF Foundation, a North Carolina grantmaker created with tobacco settlement money, named Ted Lord, its senior vice president and general counsel, as its fourth president and CEO on October 29, to take over when Scott T. Hamilton retires.
Lord has worked at the Rocky Mount-based foundation since 2005 and oversees its grantmaking, according to the foundation's announcement and his staff biography. He came to the foundation from law practice in Greensboro, after a clerkship with U.S. District Judge James A. Beaty Jr. and a fellowship at the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
When does the handover happen?
When Hamilton retires, which the foundation said in June would be at the end of 2026. The October announcement gives no exact start date for Lord. Hamilton has led Golden LEAF since 2019, and the board began a search for his successor this summer.
Brian Raynor, the board chair, said in the announcement that Lord brings "more than 20 years of institutional knowledge" and experience in economic development to the job.
What does Golden LEAF fund?
Projects in rural, tobacco-dependent and economically distressed parts of North Carolina. The foundation was set up in 1999 to receive part of the state's money from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with cigarette makers, and it operates as an independent, perpetual foundation. It says it has awarded $1.5 billion to 2,412 projects since 1999. By our arithmetic, that is an average of about $622,000 a project, or roughly 89 projects a year.
Under Hamilton, the foundation adopted a strategic plan in 2021 and helped launch NC Ag Leads, a statewide agriculture plan; Golden LEAF Schools, which focuses on rural middle schools; and the SITE program for industrial sites, BizFayetteville reported when his retirement was announced.
Why do two releases give different results for 2025?
We do not know. Both of the foundation's recent releases end with the same "About Golden LEAF" paragraph on fiscal year 2025, but with different numbers. The table is our side-by-side.
| Fiscal year 2025 result | June 4 release | October 29 release |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs Golden LEAF helped create | 1,665 | 1,300 |
| New payrolls | More than $116 million | More than $54 million |
| Workers trained or retrained | More than 4,722 | More than 1,900 |
Neither release explains the difference, and we could not determine which set is current.
What can other foundations take from it?
In our view, two things. Golden LEAF joins funders such as Baltimore's Deutsch Foundation in choosing a long-serving insider, which keeps grantee relationships intact but puts more weight on the board to bring outside views. And a leadership change is a good moment to reconcile the impact figures a foundation repeats in every release, so the numbers a new CEO inherits are ones the board can stand behind.
General information for donors and nonprofit leaders, not legal or tax advice. How we report is set out in our editorial guide.
