This article was originally in Crain’s Detroit Business.
Leaders of corporate, private and community foundations gathered Wednesday evening to talk about the landscape of giving amid their own economic realities and the increased demand for basic needs assistance.
But again and again, they returned to stress the importance of collaboration happening in the sector overall and the need for nonprofits to build relationships beyond the transactional with foundations to move their work forward.
The inaugural Crain’s Detroit Business Philanthropy Summit drew more than 350 nonprofit and philanthropic leaders for the conversation at the Saint John’s Resort in Plymouth. The sold-out event included a keynote address from Rachel Decker, founder and president of fundraising consultancy Detroit Philanthropy LLC. Decker stressed, among other things, the importance of looking beyond the dollars and cents in philanthropy to the humanity at its core. She also gave voice to the nonprofit sector in a call for more general operating support.
On the demand front, the need for basic needs assistance has risen with the expiration of pandemic-era public benefits and ongoing economic pressures, said Darienne Hudson, president and CEO of United Way for Southeastern Michigan and the moderator of the panel, “Corporate Philanthropy – New Realities, New Strategies.”
According to the 2024 update to the ALICE Report for the asset-limited, income-constrained and employed population in the state released by the Michigan Association of United Ways in June, 1.6 million of Michigan’s 4 million residents, or 40%, struggled to afford the basics like housing, child care, food, transportation and health care in 2022.
“When you start to drill down in our region in southeastern Michigan it’s 42%, Wayne County where we are tonight it’s 52%, the city of Detroit is 69%. I think all of us can agree that that’s not acceptable,” Hudson said. “We’re also still seeing an uptick in our turn. Since 2020, we’re actually up 40% from where we were before the pandemic was, 750 calls per day. So the questions that we’re going to be asking, the conversation that we’re having, it really is mission critical on the face of this need, how are we addressing these shifts? How are we managing partnerships?”
Rachel Decker, founder and president of fundraising consultancy Detroit Philanthropy LLC, gives the keynote address at the Crain’s Detroit Business Philanthropy Summit on Wednesday at St. John’s Resort in Plymouth.
Corporate foundations are funded by their related companies, said Rodney Cole, president of DTE Energy Foundation and DTE Corporate Citizenship. “When you see economic challenges that face corporations, the foundation is not insulated from that … whatever corporations are dealing with, we feel it downstream,” he said. “So for us, it’s been very important to really double down on our priorities and double down on meeting the needs of the communities that we serve, despite whatever economic challenges might be out there.”
DTE Energy Foundation’s funding priority areas include arts and culture, education and employment, environment, basic human needs, economic progress and community transformation. With the increase in demand for basic needs assistance in the region and state, DTE has had to figure out how to manage within a budget to help meet the increased need, he said.
“It’s been challenging because you don’t just create money … resources to go to priority areas have to come on the backside of difficult decisions. And so we have to do that,” Cole said.
Ford Motor Co. understands that “when times are tough, that’s when people need us the most,” said Mary Culler, president of the Dearborn-based automaker’s giving arm, Ford Philanthropy. “We saw that during the pandemic. And during these times, we have to really figure out what can we bring to the table that really provides the most help. We can’t do everything.”
Ford’s foundation directs its grants to essential services, education and entrepreneurship and coordinates the Ford Volunteer Corps in the community.
“And we do something that’s really essential, which is we bring mobility to people,” Culler said. “One of the things we’ve learned in the last few years is that mobility is the No. 1 way to get people out of poverty.”
Ford learned that during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people could not go out for food and needed services, she said.
“Frankly, it’s been a huge shift for us as a corporate philanthropy to, frankly, do what we do best, which is to bring our innovation and mobility to solve some of these problems,” she said.
Rocket Community Fund is also leveraging its expertise and strengths to help the community, said Laura Grannemann, executive director of Rocket Community Fund and the Gilbert Family Foundation. “What we’ve tried to do is create some clear lanes that allowed the business Rocket to impact the community in unique ways that only Rocket Companies could do, and then have the Gilbert Family Foundation really add to that,” she said.
One key area in which it’s doing that is its work to prevent Detroiters who are at risk of eviction or tax foreclosure from being displaced from their homes. It does that through direct outreach, knocking on doors to reach out to about 60,000 Detroit families at risk and doing targeted engagement with nonprofits that can help the foundation connect directly to those populations, she said.
“It’s a really beautiful connection to allow our team members to directly impact the outcome of residents of the city of Detroit and be able to support them through some really difficult times in their life, especially as they go through things like applying for a complex property tax exemption,” Grannemann said. “Our team members are sort of uniquely suited to be able to help someone in that circumstance.”
“We’ve seen some really tangible wins,” including a 95% decrease from about 15,000 foreclosures in 2015, the peak of the foreclosure crisis in the city, she said.
“It’s certainly not just because of Rocket Companies or the Gilbert Family Foundation … it’s been a huge collaborative effort,” Grannemann said. “A way that philanthropy can show up is often by creating those connections between Detroit residents and nonprofits or even some of our public institutions like the city or the county to help, really advocate based on the data and the engagement that we’re doing on the ground.”
The Gilbert Family Foundation builds on those efforts by working to help Detroit residents thrive in their homes and community with additional investments in public space arts and culture and economic mobility, Grannemann said.
“It is a unique position for me because while there are some challenging times economically that do impact Rocket Companies … we as a team have been fortunate to then be able to couple that with a private family foundation that has been so generous in the last few years,” she said.
The economic impact on corporate philanthropic resources emphasizes the importance of community foundations, said Nicole Sherard-Freeman, COO of the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan.
“Our purpose is to be a source of long-term permanent assets for the region so that … the community has a basis, a foundation, no pun intended, that they can always count on when all the other resources take a dip … or a hit for whatever reason,” Sherard-Freeman said.
The Community Foundation is looking to help address the increased demand for basic needs through a partnership model and its grant focus areas of economic opportunity, health equity, youth and education, arts and culture, community-based place making and green spaces.
“It’s the first time we’ve articulated a direction that clearly so we’re excited about bringing to bear not just the resources of our partners and our donors, but also bringing more attention to you where we think we can really make a difference,” Sherard-Freeman said.
The inaugural Crain’s Detroit Business Philanthropy Summit drew more than 350 nonprofit and philanthropic leaders for the conversation at the Saint John’s Resort in Plymouth on Wednesday.
Building relationships
Metrics that show the impact of work in the nonprofit sector are critical, Cole said. But as a funder, “it’s not our place, in my opinion, to predetermine and tell our partners how to specifically measure their work … data is always helpful, but understanding the outcomes of the work is something that we need to do in partnership” with nonprofits.
The numbers alone don’t show the full impact grants are having, Cole said. Funders want to understand, at a high level, what are the outcomes of work so they can say it’s working and they can continue to fund with a nonprofit partner, he said. Knowing the “stories of the work” is just as important in understanding the outcomes, and that requires having conversations with nonprofit grantees to understand who the grants are impacting and how.
That understanding is something he can take to his board to explain the work the foundation is doing and advocate for it, Cole said.
“It’s one thing to put up a host of numbers,” he said. “I mean, these folks look at numbers all day every day; they can decipher numbers. But it’s, I think, even more impactful to tell the story of Mary or John or Sam that participated in this program that we were able to support.”
Focusing on the dollars is understandable because it’s what keeps the lights on, Culler said. But she echoed Cole’s admonition for nonprofits to build relationships with funders beyond transactional.
“What I have found in my work is that sometimes just having a conversation leads to a synergy or leads to a connection that may not be necessarily about funding … it’s like baby steps; you start to have relationships, you start to have people get interested,” Culler said.
That’s especially true with corporations because there are opportunities to engage with employees for employee-giving goals and volunteering and opportunities for board engagement, among other things, Grannemann said.
The same holds for the Community Foundation, Sherard-Freeman said. For every one of the six focus areas the foundation has carved out, there are thousands of donors with funds at the foundation focused on other areas of interest. “So have the conversation,” she said.
Collaboration across the philanthropic and nonprofit sector is front and center, as well, leaders said.
“The power of convening is something that … we always think about, because sometimes we’re not people who can really provide the best resource, but we know we can bring the right people to the table,” Culler said.
Ford operates community centers all over the globe and brings in partner organizations to provide resources for them, Culler said.
“What’s really powerful is the fact that when we bring our partners together, some of them will never speak to each other on a given day, but under the one roof are starting to see the different programs that they’re all offering and then they start to find synergies” and figure out how they can do more things together, she said.
“At the end of the day … if we can all come together with our sweet spot around how we can actually solve problems, that collaboration is really critical,” Culler said.
All of the Philanthropy Summit panelists have longstanding relationships, having worked together for 5-10 years or longer, said Sherard-Freeman, who before joining the Community Foundation was CEO of Detroit Employment Solutions Corp. and chief economic and workforce development officer for the city of Detroit and Detroit at Work.
“What’s unique about our region and what we really have planned in our favor, that other regions, other cities across the nation of other countries across the globe don’t have is the degree of philanthropic presence, corporate, private, community philanthropy. Other places just aren’t as rich in philanthropic resources as we are,” Sherard-Freeman said.
Just as it is important for nonprofits to build relationships with funders, it is equally as important for funders to have relationships with each other “so that we know where the whitespace is, where there’s nobody leaning into an issue,” she said.
Grannemann said what excites her is the opportunity to build connections between funders’ different priority areas “so that one plus one equals five.”
“I think for a long time, philanthropy has had sort of stratified pillars … Our arts and culture team does this. Our housing team does that. Our public space team does this. But together, we can have a more comprehensive vision. And I hope that philanthropy continues to push in that direction,” she said.