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Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, March 28th.

And I'm Robyn Minter Smyers a partner at Thompson Hine and a proud member of the City Club's board of directors.

It is my true honor today to introduce this forum, which is the City Club's James s Lipscomb Memorial Forum on philanthropic spirit in the community.

It is fitting that we are joined today by two of the region's most notable leaders in philanthropy.

Lillian Kuri president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation.

And Rick Rapson, president and CEO of the Kresge Foundation.

For over a century, the Cleveland Foundation and Kresge foundations have worked to improve the lives of residents and championed equity in Cleveland, Detroit and beyond.

My own father, Steven Minter, was part of this legacy, serving nearly two decades as the CEO of the Cleveland Foundation.

Today, we are in the midst of a bold new era of legacy institutions thinking about the next 100 years of place based philanthropy.

The Cleveland Foundation has embarked on a remarkable new chapter with its historic move to the Midtown and Hough neighborhoods, focusing on growing our region, investing in vibrant neighborhoods and connecting people to prosperity.

In August 2023, Lillian Curry made history by becoming the first female president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation.

With over 25 years of executive and civic leadership experience and her special training as an architect, Lillian is known as an innovator, advocate, coalition builder and problem solver.

When others say it can't be done, Lillian tackles the thing and gets it done.

Rip Rapson is president and CEO of the Kresge Foundation, a private national foundation founded in 1924, which is dedicated to expanding opportunities in America's cities through grantmaking and social investing.

Since his appointment in 2006, he has expanded the foundation's long standing efforts to increase opportunity across American cities with a deep focus on its hometown of Detroit.

Rapson is also the author of the recently published book Drawn to Challenge stories of leadership in public Interest with Doodles, which showcases his unique approach to tackling the challenge of cities.

Today, we will learn more about how the Cleveland Foundation and Kresge Foundation will leverage their purpose and power to advance critical work focused on leaving no one behind.

Moderating the conversation today is Dr. Mark Joseph, professor of community development at the Jack Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University.

Dr. Joseph is also the founding director of the National Initiative on Mixed Income Communities and a faculty associate at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

If you have a question for our speakers, you can text it to 3305415794 and the City Club staff will try to work it into the Q&A portion of the program.

Members and Friends of the City Club of Cleveland please join me in welcoming Lillian Curry, Rip Rapson and Dr. Mark Joseph.

All right.

Thank you so much, Robin.

And wow, look at this audience.

Another full room at the City Club of Cleveland.

Welcome, everyone.

Great to be with you.

Great to be with the two of you.

Lillian, good to be with you again.

And welcome back to Cleveland.

Thank you.

Really, really good to have you here.

Quick moment of personal thanks just for the kindness that you've each shown me and the support for our center's work on mixed income community building over the years.

So thank you both.

All right, let's jump in.

We have so much to talk about and that clock is ticking.

Let's get started by making sure that folks in our audience know some high level things about each foundation.

Lillian, you've got a lot of fans here in the room and listening who are probably quite familiar with the Clinton Foundation, but Rip, I know you've got a contingent of folks up in Detroit area who are listening in who may not know as much about the Clinton Foundation.

And then likewise, for many of you, you might be new to the Kresge Foundation and very excited for you to learn more about it today.

So what would you each want to make sure that folks know about your foundations?

And Lillian, I'll start with you.

Okay.

Well, for Clevelanders, who probably do know this, but I think it's important to note that we are the oldest community foundation in the country.

Our founder, Fred Goff, who is here from Cleveland, a banker and philanthropist himself, created the foundation out of a big, bold idea that he believed that a single will or trust was not sufficient to solve the larger problems of our times and also to be flexible over hundreds of years for the needs that would come later.

And so what happened was he created the world's first collective savings account.

And that's what I like to say.

We are and and we are a place where I think you'll hear today what's important for me, for you to hear is even though we're very big, we're $3.4 billion in assets and we are the largest community foundation with the amount of unrestricted assets.

But what I hope you'll hear today is not about the dollars, but about the way that we are organized to be able to be flexible and involve for what the community needs today and solve some of the large intractable issues of our times that are difficult, that take a long period of time to solve.

And then also the third part of the magic of the Cleveland Foundation is how we are able to bring together donors and people who want to give their generosity back and can do it with and through us.

And for me, that's the secret sauce of the Cleveland Foundation and why I believe in the power of community philanthropy.

I think it is the future of cities.

I think we are important to cities.

And I hope you hear that today through everything we talk about.

Excellent report.

Can I just see the rest of my time, too?

Lillian, and tell you how inspiring I find both Lillian as a person and Lillian as a leader of this incredible institution.

So welcome, everyone.

Thank you for making the time.

You know, if they were ever to cities that were sister cities, it was really Detroit and Cleveland.

So I feel like I'm walking some of the same streets that I do in Detroit.

It's a great feeling.

The Kresge Foundation was founded by Sebastian Kresge, who founded Kresge Five and Dimes 100 years ago that grew into into Kmart.

Kmart became too big to be a family foundation.

And so they sold their interest and created the trust.

And so for the let the last 20 or 25 years, we've really focused on on cities, which was a big shift from what we had done from the previous 25 years, which is to invest in building projects, including Playhouse Square.

We were one of the earliest and largest investors in Playhouse Square, thanks largely to a wonderful man who I don't think is here named Bob Storey.

Bob was on our board for many years and and never let the Kresge Foundation remember that Cleveland was right next door, but we shifted away from capital to become more of a sort of a broad based philanthropy with discipline based programs and health and human services and education, environment, arts and culture.

And over the last many years, we've sort of put a stake in the ground around working more intensively in place, not just in Detroit, but in Memphis and New Orleans and Fresno and Birmingham and Baltimore and other places.

And so what we've tried to do is sort of blend the sort of the local focus of what we've learned in and gained in Detroit with a sort of a discipline based focus.

And I think what makes us interesting is that our discipline based work has to understand how to work contextually in place in our in our contextual local work has to take full advantage of what our fields of human services and education and the environment know about what's going on nationally.

So I think I think what we'll hear is that ultimately when you land in place, you have both the advantage of the contextual ism of of knowing the terrain.

And you can also pull on the threads of discipline based expertise.

That's invaluable.

Wonderful.

Thank you both.

So the focus of our topic today is the value and focus of place based philanthropy.

And both of you are trendsetters, really in what philanthropy can do in cities.

And Robin introduced you correctly as regional leaders, but really your national leaders.

And that's one of the things when we get to go to cities around the country and hear people asking about the things that are happening here in Cleveland, sometimes we lose sight of that when we're here and we have them in our own city.

REP You were very modest a moment ago.

He talked about the shift that the Kresge Foundation may well please get his book and read about how he made that shift.

And it was a very bold call because the foundation was extremely comfortable with going in one direction.

And there's a shift that he brought to the table.

So read about that.

But can you help our audience understand what is the possible role and value of foundations in their cities?

We're going to start with you.

Yeah, I think that for the foundation, this very chapter that you're you're referring to, rep actually outlined the the power of place based philanthropy.

And so I'll say what it means to me, as is in this chapter, which is we can first of all take on the most gnarly intractable issues that no one else will take on that's written in the chapter.

A second is and we can take the long view.

Second is something that I think my predecessor, Ron Richard, really brought to the Cleveland Foundation.

But RIP brought to Took to Kresge Foundation, which I sit on the shoulders of this was to make philanthropy willing to be more courageous and take more risk and place bigger bets.

Right.

That these problems require us to do so.

Third is using our whole toolbox.

It's not just thinking about traditional grantmaking.

And for us, that also shows up in how we move to Midtown.

It shows up in how we're doing.

Stewart calls her chair of our investment committee, how we're thinking about our endowment and using it for place in a way that hasn't been done before.

And I hope I'll be able to tell the story of the Cleveland Impact Pool.

And and so the these principles, I think, are showing up for us every day and in our times today are even more important for us.

There's additional than rip describe because we are a community foundation which is different than a private foundation.

And one thing that the Cleveland Foundation is aspiring to do is to expand who is a philanthropist and who gives through the Cleveland Foundation and how, because I think the future of philanthropy actually lies in Fred Goff's original idea, which was how the collective power of people and generosity could be harnessed not for individual things, for collective good.

And so the numbers I'll give you that astonish me every day is that in America there is $500 billion of giving a year.

And of that, only 20% comes from structured philanthropy.

That means $400 billion is coming from individuals that could be giving to your church or giving to another organization.

These are individual givers, small amounts, big amounts.

Right.

So for me, as I look at this, as there's disruption going on also in the field of Community foundation, specifically, how can we play a role in harnessing that to transform place?

Because that's where the world is going.

So there's additional things that we're aspiring to do beyond even the investments we are making in in community or even in the work we are doing.

So do I forget anything?

This was his hard way away.

Before I answer the question, can I do two irrelevancies?

Sure.

One is whenever anyone talks about taking risk, I remember when Ron Richard 20 years ago, said, I want to put a windmill in the middle of the lake.

And I said, Yeah, right.

Good luck with that one.

Ron.

And then when Lillian arrived, risk all of a sudden took on the meaning of an unbelievably audacious movement of an entire foundation into one of the most disinvested neighborhoods in the city, complete with all of the surround of the buildout that they've done.

It's just remarkable.

So let me just before I answer your question, one more thing is that in this kind of crazy topsy turvy world, we're in, there are almost no absolutes.

But there is one, and that is that the Cleveland Foundation is the finest community foundation in America.

Full stop.

I did not plant that question that that was not planted.

Know.

But.

But I think you asked a question.

So let me see if I could answer it.

You know, localities, places are where problems come to get solved.

You know, the further you get from a local circumstance, the more a problem metastasizes.

This gets complex, gets abstracted, and the more it gets grown, the more it crystallizes.

And so it's at the ground level that these problems have to get sort of taken apart and put back together.

It's at the ground level where trust is built.

You've got to have trust with your community in order to problem smash in any meaningful way.

It's the ground level that you have sectors working together.

I mean, if there's any hallmark of the Cleveland Foundation, it's that you guys have pioneered the ability to work with the public sector, the private sector, the civic sector, the nonprofit sector, and you can't do that as you move to higher and higher levels of problem identification and problem solving.

So I think to say nothing of the fact that this is where the ebbs and flows of daily life occur, if you really want to touch people, you've got to touch them locally.

You just have to.

And I actually think we'll get to this maybe, Mark, but I actually think that's why as we look at this very difficult environment we're all facing, that it's the localism that will get us out of it.

Absolutely.

Let's drill into the move to midtown, because I'm sure that's what a lot of folks want to hear about.

You talked a moment ago about using all the tools of foundations.

And I think what makes the great one stand out across the country is the ones where there it's the other things.

It's the convening power, right?

It's the taking on the harder issues.

It's not necessarily about the money, as you said, but few foundations think about where they are themselves as a tool in the toolbox.

And here we are seeing a historic, historic move.

So many folks may not realize how long of a process that was to get to that.

Like we looked up and it was happening, but how long of a process and then once you arrived at, yes, we're going to do it, that's how do we do it?

And all the work that is still unfolding about the how to make this move and what we will all learn together here in Cleveland about that.

So pull back the curtain a little bit.

Tell us about it.

And what does it signify for you about the future of the foundati to talk about this forever?

But, you know, I first this was going on for a long time.

Ron actually thought that for a very long time we should get to the ground floor.

But we needed to be more present in the city.

And this idea of the move was going on for a very long time.

And there are so many aspects of this that have changed us as an institution and going through this process.

We're very different today.

So I like to say that our move was not about a building, right?

And so it was really about a foundation who wanted to think about what a community foundation should be, how more open, warm, welcoming, transparent, like why does community philanthropy have to feel like it's behind the curtain, right?

We are the community foundation.

And so with those aspirations, we moved forward to say, okay, not only how does it manifest itself in the building, but how do we do it and who do we do it with?

Jane Rey is here, the head of Fatma, who has from the very beginning, been one of our toughest but best partners in helping hold us accountable in terms of how we're doing it.

And a credit to Robin and her father, like I ask myself all the time, what would Steve mentor think?

Right.

And I will tell you the other day I had the most amazing experience where it hit me about the Steve Minter Conference Center, which was actually started in the Hanna building as an idea he had for the foundation to be a place where nonprofits could come and convene and use it for free, which became the nucleus of the ground floor of our space that in our first year of operation had 6000 visitors.

350 events are we're totally different organization than we were.

And so every day I'm so inspired by that idea that was started for who we ought to be, actually started there, right.

That we could change.

We just didn't have to be a grant maker.

And I also think that for us, the whole toolbox part is really important too, which is that the story of Playhouse Square where we are is so embedded in our DNA and our DNA of innovation, Robyn said.

I'm the first woman that is the CEO of the Cleveland Foundation, but it's actually not true.

There was a woman in 1973 named Barbara Hoss Ross, and if you know Judy and Bob Ross and his Bob's mom, who was interim female CEO for nine months during that period, and she was the one who convinced our board to do the first prize of a charity foundation in the country just by the Bulkley and Seltzer and say Playhouse Square, and she gets zero credit, first of all.

So we talk about that.

But you know, and that was real courage, you know, the courage for that.

But the point of Playhouse Square was we learned something.

And what we learned was that we could use our endowment to do something that had this 30 or 40 year transformation allowed the patients for Playhouse Square to form so that there was time.

And it was equally important not just to demolish the theaters, but for the foundation to have the courage to say these are not blighted assets that need to be raised.

These are important, rich cultural assets that we should invest in.

And to be honest, we're all here.

If they had been demolished, there would have been no revitalization of downtown Cleveland.

And so as we were thinking about moving, the whole toolbox really resulted in where we all get to the punchline.

It didn't really cost us anything.

We used the rent that we were paying, took a loan from our endowment to build the building and are paying ourselves back from what we had in rent.

We did not use grant money.

I like to say these problems and when we get to the problems of our day today, I don't think they're resource problems.

We can solve them and we can solve them here locally.

And this move for us has changed our way of thinking about what's possible, how to do it resources differently, and an era of collaboration and coalition building.

You know, as we look at what the foundation has done in its relocation, it is all those things and everyone is spectacular.

It also is an attempt to help fortify community right?

It purchased additional parcels to make sure that there would be an entrepreneurial center across the street.

They purchased parcels to make sure there would be a greenway down to the grocery store.

They purchased parcels and remediated really contaminated lands to sort of hold the possibility of long term investment, the possibility of creating community ownership of assets.

I mean, the ambition beyond just the sort of the self-interested, we need to move to a different place and hope that we can engage with community more fully is two completely admirable, but it goes so far beyond that.

And when folks from across the country look at what you've done, I think they just shake their head.

I can't think of a single foundation that has had the vision and the courage to sort of assemble land and make it all cohere.

It's not like you're just picking up pieces here and there and you have sort of no sense of what you want to do with them.

This is clearly an attempt to work with the residents of Huff and the commercial entities and Huff and make them stronger and more viable and more sustainable over the long term.

It's really remarkable.

Thank you for putting that in perspective.

Lillian, say a word about the Moxy, the Midtown Collaboration Center, which I got to visit yesterday.

It is incredible.

Just curious how many folks in the room have been to the foundation, to the new family.

All right.

Oh, look at that.

Wow, Look at that.

But many of you haven't yet been to the moxy across the street and you are going to see something.

So, Lillian, just a quick, quick word about that.

And I got a chance to give them a behind the scenes tour from the airport yesterday.

I think what you're going to see is an aspiration we had to there to look at what other cities had done, had built innovation or collaboration centers.

And for the most part, if you look at Saint Louis or Philly or MIT, where there are innovation districts, they're one one or two institutions going and doing research internally and the community or others not knowing what's going on in there are not having access to it.

So it's very internally focused.

And so this building we we really worked with many, many partners, institutions, community, others, and it turns that model entirely on its head.

These are seven institutional partners, Case Western bringing all six centers of community and population health into a new center where they'll be students, faculty, research community, the Cleveland Institute of Art, who I see back there, who are building a new interactive Media Lab and technology center that they they were so blown away doesn't exist today.

I venture to say anywhere where students will be working on game design and virtual reality.

But I had an experience the other day where just happened to be over there and Dean was there and they are talking about how this summer, her summer camp, which was among the best things in the country, the kids are going to go there one day a week, the whole summer.

So to be in that space and that was the real impetus for this, which is to create the not just the collaboration internally that's going on there, but the the ability for it to real time have the community have full, full entire access to it.

So you have to see it.

There's so much going on in there.

But one of the most important inspirations for it was actually Memphis.

We had taken a group of 30 residents and leaders from the community to Memphis with us to learn from the Memphis from source bill, if you know.

And our board chair, Connie, was with us and and it was amazing.

And we came back and out of that trip, we also realized that the history of black music and culture that was in Midtown and hough with Leo's casino and that similar kind of Playhouse square story that that people were just not recognizing and that we should really bring that to life through not just the collaboration center, but all of 66th Street and all of the history of Midtown, where it had some of the most important black owned businesses in it in Cleveland.

And so after that trip, amazing thing happened where five people who were with us raised their hand and said, we'd like to help you think about the music venue and the food.

And I saw her here toilet Scott Williams Pearls Kitchen put on our pier and the community selected her to to be inside there with Pearl's kitchen for the food.

And then we helped attract Cleveland's first black owned brewery, which they got a tour of in this music venue and space in there.

And that came from on that trip community saying to us, If I want to go out to dinner, I have to leave the neighborhood.

But I also want a place where I see myself and where I feel comfortable, where it will be a place where where people can come and do many things.

And so it's really out of that continuous listening and learning together that this building will really, I think, set the stage for even more to come in the examples of synergy.

So we're talking with Tony yesterday and about Pearls Kitchen and the planning, who's doing her business planning Jumpstart, which is also upstairs in the building.

You can get to mention that, but right upstairs in the building, their entire operation, by the way, now moved into.

So we can talk about that all day long.

And we fully intend to steal you to Detroit.

So that's good morning.

No fair or borrow river to take us to consider.

Okay.

You can work with take us to the ground in Detroit.

And I really do hope folks get the book because there are so many stories.

So this is hard for you because you've got to pick one in all your time.

But one story, I mean, what we're trying to do here today is give inspiration and specifics about what foundations can do on the ground to be transformative even in challenging moments.

And you all have been, as we know, Detroit has been through some massively challenging existential moments before.

Which one would you pick to share with us for inspiration with Detroit?

Where do you start?

Let me roll back the tape to 2008 2009.

You're all familiar with the recession that we all went through, the housing foreclosure crisis that we all went through.

But in Detroit, we had our big three automakers and the entire supply chain and of course, down into Ohio collapsing.

And we also had the unfortunate circumstance of having America become indicted and take about 30 of its best friends to jail.

And so from about 2008 to 2012, there was no civic interest culture that was properly resourced and properly with with proper capacity.

And so foundations had to really make a choice whether they could step in and not to substitute for the public sector or for the private sector, but to create scaffolding that would be sufficiently strong to hold until those sectors returned to their rightful role.

And so Kresge, as the largest local funder, took the lead in that.

And we created a whole suite of of investing.

It's around land use, small business development created a light rail line.

If you can imagine philanthropy doing that created a new arts and cultural support program on and on and on.

And the point was that we needed to recognize that there was plenty of leadership in the community.

There was plenty of resources, not always financial resources, but there's plenty of resource, there were plenty of resources in the community.

And so it actually held us until 2012 when we declared bankruptcy.

But that's another story.

But what the reason I wanted to mention that was that during the bankruptcy, the judge said, we can solve our pension problems and this was the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.

We can solve our pension problems, we can solve our credit problems.

We can balance the books of city hall.

But I'm not the bankruptcy unless philanthropy and Dan Gilbert and Roger Penske and a handful of other folks can commit to us that we won't be back here in two or three years.

And so how do you do that?

You can't point to particular investments and say, you know, we're just going to keep investing in that.

We try to identify roles that philanthropy could play that would help in particularly those difficult circumstances, but actually in any circumstances, and I could just take them off really quickly.

I mean, one and they sort of build on what willingness already said.

One is that you can be a powerful table setter if you want to land use plan.

And the city of Detroit is incapable of planning it.

You can actually gather people, resource it properly, and create a land use plan that endures if you don't have a a community development finance infrastructure in the city, you can actually help bring them in.

You can help fortify them and you can help grow it indigenously.

We did that.

You can take risks and we did a whole suite of investments that sort of took the first layer of risk away from the banks and away from private investors to start of start the the flywheel of economic and residential development in the city.

You can serve as a guarantor of value.

You can actually invest in things that signal to the markets that there is a future Think Playhouse square.

In our case, I think the riverfront think a light rail.

Those are the kinds of things that the private sector needs in order to justify thinking about long term investment.

You can serve as a Sherpa.

You can actually help outside talent, outside investors understand what's on the ground, where you could be most beneficial, where you might step on a landmine if you're not careful, where you can be disrespectful to community.

And sixth, you can serve as a steward of very fragile ecologies, human services programs, arts and culture programs, and the rest.

And what we found sorry, Mark, for the long answer, but what we found was that not only served us in this interregnum period between the downturn in the bankruptcy, but afterward it helped in COVID.

It helped in the post George Floyd era.

It helped in all sorts of ways because those are essentially ways of working that over time become manifested differently depending on what the nature of the challenges.

And I think that's what you're looking at with Lillian and her team.

I mean, when you sort of scroll through all six of those roles, they're hitting every single one of them.

And it's really powerful, beautiful.

Thank you.

Of speaking of courage and foundations, what I really appreciate about the book is the detail of the conversations behind each of those things.

You literally out you're sitting at a table across from a judge, across from a mayor.

And this is what they said and this is what I said.

And it took courage.

But that's for us.

So much of philanthropy can be this black box.

We don't know what happens.

We don't know it.

And you lay it out.

In some cases, you've got a letter that you share.

I guess it was a letter, not an email back then that derailed your that wasn't meant to be funny.

Sorry, but this letter derailed your run for mayor in Minneapolis, which was a lot of momentum probably would have happened.

And you share it now.

Years on, time has passed.

But thank you for sharing that level of detail because it's what those of us moving on the next generation need to hear.

All right, one more thing before we open up, because I know you all will have questions and deserve your time for questions, but let's just go head on in this moment, in this time, disruptions to public, private, nonprofit, every sector of society being disrupted.

You've touched on it a bit already, but what can foundations do philanthropy in this moment, Lillian, you've said you've never been more hopeful.

Mm hmm.

Which is shocking, right?

I haven't looked at the news tod what can give us hope in how philanthropy in moments like this can lean in?

And what would you share with us in this place?

Well, it's going to be embarrassed.

And he doesn't know what I'm going to say whether this you're going to say where she's going with this.

But there is a chapter early in the book about his father.

And if you don't know who Rip's father is, his name is Ralph Rapson.

He was actually an architect.

So you can tell I like this chapter.

But that's why.

And as an aside, Ralph Rapson invented something called the Wraps and Rocker.

So go Google that.

It's every other rocking chair that's modern.

Today is a derivative of his father's rocking chair.

But this chapter and why it relates to our times for me is it has an interesting title that I had to think about a lot.

It's called Principal and Transitions, and the titles of his chapters are really interesting.

And the point of this chapter is that his father, who what was the architect who was hired to do the Guthrie Theater, persisted through some of the most important lessons for me and this chapter one.

He wasn't the first doctor architect of choice.

He did not get along with Guthrie, and he had to stay true to his principles through this.

But the thing that he also did that I don't know if you intended me to think, was that he to he had to pick his battles.

And in our times today, he had to pick his battles in order to ensure that this kind of idea of unwavering courage to build this theater, the way that he thought it would do, could be built or should be built up against the gentleman who asked him to build it.

And the end of the story is that what he did was was like a day before the opening, the seats were in and he was adamant that this theater, which needed to change the mold of theaters to be more interactive, he would not put the seats in because Guthrie wanted them to just be like one monotone color.

And he felt like they had to be colorful in order to create this new interactive environment.

And you know what he did?

He waited until the last minute so they couldn't be taken out any of these thousands and I'm not suggesting people do things like this.

But the point is, if you now Google this, it's the number one image.

What it that you see when you do it is these chairs, which changed the game for how people thought about interactive theater going forward.

And the lesson for me is in these times is that we have to say we have to stay true to what matters most for us.

We have to fight for it.

We have to be principled about it.

And we have to also be smart about what the battles are that we choose and community, and because then we can make change.

And so that story for me is really about courage and and and leadership and a whole host of other things.

So thank you for that.

Oh, Rip, as I toss to you, you have this beautiful phrase at the end of the book, an alchemy of shared purpose.

And you talk about how crucial common ground is.

But then you say yourself, that feels quaint in these times.

That feels like naive in these times.

So I'm sure you don't believe that.

Talk to us about the power of common ground in these moments and what you see as needing to do.

Maybe I can then circle back to where I began because I think that so much is being talked about common purpose, bipartisanship, you know, stripping away ideology.

And I just think this is the time to do that in Washington.

But it is the time to do that in Cleveland, and it is the time to do it in Detroit.

And I think it's almost like reverse engineering.

If we can certify the objective we seek and then assemble the right tools in the right doses, in the right sequence, at the right pace with the right who are equipped to use the tools effectively, then you make progress.

And I think that's frankly the only choice we have.

That was such an exquisite answer.

I can't improve on it, but I do think it's the times are going to require us to be a little bit patient.

Some of this is kabuki, some of it is so crazy that it is going to have to settle, but it will settle and it is settling.

It is hurting people.

It is depriving people of all sorts of fundamental norms and freedoms.

And when that becomes clear, then to Lillian's point, we need to be very strategic and realize what is it that philanthropy can do, to be sure, But what is it a community can do?

That's where the reverse engineering becomes so important.

What can our private leaders do?

What can our community leaders do?

What can our foundation leaders do?

What can our, you know, our public officials do?

And I think therein is the alchemy.

Beautiful.

Thank you.

Thank you, Lillian.

All right.

Let's get to some Q&A and for our live stream and radio audience.

You might have joined us midway through.

I'm Mark Joseph.

I'm a professor of community development at Case Western Reserve, the Jack Joseph and Martin Mendell School of Applied Social Sciences there.

And I'm serving as moderator for today's conversation with Lillian Curie, president and CEO of the Clinton Foundation, and Rip Rapson, president, CEO of the Kresge Foundation.

So we welcome questions from everyone city club members, guests, as well as those joining via a live stream at City Club dot org or live radio broadcast at 89.7 Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for our speakers, please text it to this number.

33054157943305415794.

And City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

And may we have the first question, please.

Hello, Merrill.

Hello.

This is a very important program.

In today's environment, philanthropy is going to become more important than ever.

And so I'm wondering, do each of you do workshops in our high schools so that students could begin to understand the importance of philanthropy?

I would say in in Detroit, we don't.

But we have a phenomenal organization called the Skillman Foundation, which is essentially one of the nation's largest foundations committed just to kids.

And they are doing an enormous amount of this.

They're trying to improve civics curriculum.

They're trying to understand sort of the different parts of a civic ecology.

And they actually have designed new curriculum for the Detroit public school system, in which the kids really do learn much more about how civic problem solving is done, not just philanthropy, but all across the spectrum.

I love this question because, as I described earlier, about our desire to think about what's the future of philanthropy, it's a brilliant idea of us actually going and asking young people who give totally differently, who care about things totally differently, about us thinking about actually as a place to start, as we rethink what the next hundred years looks like, that we go and ask young people.

My question is that there was a talk about increasing the giving by the foundations to support the food banks, the school public schools and so on, so forth that are being dramatically cut back.

What is the what is the is that movement really growing or is that both just talk?

I think it's I think it's a little bit of both.

There are foundations, particularly national foundations, who don't quite know how to land locally, who are pooling funds for litigation, for public advocacy, for a whole suite of things, local journalism.

The MacArthur Foundation has taken the lead on.

I would say, though, the other side of the question is a little bit what I said before is before we start throwing money at something, let's understand what we're throwing money at.

Let's understand where the pressures are coming and where we can be helpful if if it's going to fall to philanthropy to make up for all of the loss in public funding.

We're lost.

On day one, the Detroit Public Schools will get more of a cut in their budget than we give annually.

And so we just have to be very careful that we understand.

Is that bridge support?

Well, you need something on the other side of the bridge.

And if the money is going away, we may need to think about different systems in order to feed into them.

Is it local litigation and defense?

Probably if you're if you're concerned about litigation, if you're about immigration, you want to park a big amount of money.

There is that public advocacy trying to create the case for the power of local nonprofit work.

Probably.

I just think this is a very complicated thing because it's everything everywhere at once, right?

And so you've got to pick your moments, understand what your tools are, understand who your partners are.

And then I think and then I think we can have a conversation about do we then need to put more money on the table?

Probably, yeah.

Well, one thing I would add is that the thing I've come to truly appreciate from being at the foundation this long is that is that we have seen many different crises, but I've been there.

So I was there through the oh eight crisis, through COVID, George Floyd And the one thing that a community foundation can do, and our community foundation specifically is be very nimble to think about a whole host of things that we can do.

And for example, some of our practices as a community foundation.

One, we about half of our grantmaking is what we call immediate or responsive, and half is more long term and strategic is we were able to flex and COVID, our board met every two weeks and that kind of 5050 split could change to be more immediate and responsive.

And to do that in oh eight.

We have increased our payout before, but we also had things in place that made it really, really possible for us to do more.

Like in oh eight, we we calculate our giving over a three year rolling average.

So at the time when a lot of foundations had a lot less money to give out, we were able to give out the full amount every year because we book our dollars in a certain year and that practice allowed us actually to do more, not less.

So we have a whole host of things that we can do to be really really nimble and responsive.

And and I think our board, we're having conversations about this, but some of it won't just be dollars for us.

It will be a whole host of things that we can do and we will look at all of them.

And so and in COVID, one of the things that was truly extraordinary was the amount of donors.

It was one of the most important times in our history that donors collectively gave large amounts of money to the COVID fund in a way that we hadn't figured out actually before that time of how to put them to use for very immediate needs.

So we can do those kinds of things.

And I think the mechanism of a community foundation is for me just, you know, so such a great platform for for both these crises and then for what's possible for the long term change.

Just a quick punctuation.

I just came from Memphis, where about 35 folks, New Orleans, came to visit a number of folks in Memphis to try to talk about over the next two or three years how New Orleans can sort of fortify and grow its medical district, not just institutional investment in their own buildings, but actually build a district of affordable housing, walkable small job creation, career, laddering.

And that's all private money and that's money that that we couldn't possibly step in to support.

But what we can do to Lillian's point, it seems small, but it actually was profound to watch the room work was to bring those folks together.

And so philanthropy can do that.

Sometimes they can sort of step back, be a neutral broker, be a safe place for people to come and share ideas that'll only get you so far, but it will get you some way or the distance.

Just quickly to jump in Moderator's privilege, a safe space to bring ideas.

One of the challenges in this moment where the calculus is, am I in the line of fire?

Or if I stay really quiet and don't do anything, will I stay out of the line of fire?

Is so many people sitting on the sidelines and rep You tell a story in your book about a gang leader in Detroit who would only come meet with you and you had to go in.

And it was fun talking to dinner about this with the trepidation.

But would say, I'm willing to come talk with this person who I see.

I see that as a safe space or someone else who was going to turn themselves in only to you.

Can foundations provide that space, right?

You may not know what how to move in this moment.

Come talk to us.

Come talk to us, and we will help you think that through.

We can help create the forums for quiet conversation where you can talk together.

Because when you're keeping your head down, you're also not talking to your friends.

My question, I'm inquisitive, as you know, Lillian, that we have a foundation where we empower vulnerable population around the world, globally and locally.

And some of the pillars are education, health and civic engagement.

But what we struggle is and we we give grants to other organizations because we don't manage that.

And I have a twofold questions for both of you.

Is how critical is endowment in terms of your foundations?

Because both of you have billions of dollars of endowment.

How did you guys manage to get to that point?

And what we struggle is when we give grants to a lot of our organizations overseas and here globally, Nobody has a concept, unfortunately, of endowment.

How do you promote endowment so we can be sustainable as foundations in giving?

Thank you.

Well, I you know, first of all, I think it is critically important to think about the power of an endowment and what it can do.

And so I'm going to tell a story of a very, very kind of something we're working on here.

And Credit goes to Mayor Bibb for this, but also for Fred Nance and Brad for something I to tell you about the Sites fund.

But this model for me is going to tell why thinking about permanent endowment is so important.

So Mayor Bibb had committed $50 million of ARPA money to the sites fund and to to go and to to assemble large tracts of industrial land in Cleveland for economic development.

It was a huge, huge amount of money.

And we began working with the team and the mayor and everyone to say, could the foundation participate?

Could we partner in a whole new way?

And the model that we really helped develop with, with the mayor and the sites fund is to not spend that $50 million, which sounds like a lot of money, but it really if you really think of what it takes to take a very large site and clean it up, that's upside down in environmental costs.

You really won't make a dent in the problem.

That is, we have 5000 acres of vacant industrial land in this city and every neighborhood next to every home and across the city.

That is a big, gnarly problem, right?

Big, gnarly problem.

That seems like it's not possible to solve.

And through the innovation and brilliance of the team and the leadership, we said, wait a minute, what if you brought it to the Cleveland Foundation and our board committed 10 million, we're going to help raise another 40.

And if you can get to 100 and you endow it, we can clean three or four sites a year for the rest of our lives and we'll all be dead and we won't be here.

But that will clean up the whole city.

It will solve the problem and it won't wait for money to fall from the sky, from the federal government.

And we did that right.

That is the power of an endowment, which is to say that we're thinking about the people who who when we're not here, are going to be sitting under the trees that we've planted today.

That's Fred Goff, Right.

100 years later, the Metroparks, for example created 100 years ago.

We are all taking advantage of an idea that was planted 100 years ago.

The power of endowment is to tell people that these problems are so big and so hard to solve that it requires a mechanism that is going to be doing it in a continuous way to, solve these big problems.

And I'm so proud of this city and so proud of this because this is the most important one of the most important things we need to do because there are people living next to these environmentally unjust properties, houses, whole rows of them, and and and so for me, that is why you do it, because $50 million isn't going to solve the problem.

It's not even going to put a dent into it.

But the endowment will wrap.

Thank.

One of the longstanding criticisms of philanthropy is that it doesn't try to align its endowment with what it's actually trying to do with its grant money.

Right.

That that the purpose of the endowment is just to make money and to grow it.

Cleveland represents a perfect counterexample of how you can blend those two things.

I would add one more, which is we've at Kresge and I don't understand why more people have not come to this, have used something called a guarantee tool.

We have we have a triple-A bond rating.

I mean, there is no safer money than in foundation money.

And if we guarantee repayment of things through our endowment, we may never end up having to pay a dime and yet can actually precipitate the kind of transactional progress that we all hope for and we have probably put 3 to $400 million of guarantees on two different projects without a single default, without a single default.

So when you think about that, if you put put all of that money to work and let it sort of sit on our balance sheet, it's not a bad result.

But the more you can think about your endowment in creative ways, and I know that Cleveland Foundation has got like eight different ways.

They're thinking about using their endowment more creatively.

I think your your question is absolutely right.

Right.

Thank you.

All right.

Well, I see our signal that our time has come up.

So, Robin, we'll invite you back up.

Thank you very much to Lillian Curry, Rip Rapson and Dr. Mark Joseph for joining us today at the City Club.

Forums like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club, Dawg.

Today's forum is the James s Lipscomb Memorial Forum on Philanthropic.

Spirit in community leadership.

James s Lipscomb was the first executive director of the George Gund Foundation.

He was chair of the National Council on Philanthropy and was president of the City Club in 1980.

We are grateful for the support of conversations on philanthropy because of his endowed gift.

The City Club would like to welcome guests at tables that are hosted by the Acacia Foundation, CEO and Housing Partners, the Cleveland Foundation, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Public Theater.

The MetroHealth Foundation Near West Theater, Ohio Guide.

Stone Plexus, LGBT and Allied Chamber of Commerce and Project Management Consultants.

Thank you all for being here.

Coming up next week at the Z Club on Friday, April 4th, the City Club will host a special forum in partnership with the Cleveland International Film Festival, featuring the documentary film Sally the Buckeye Flames.

Ken Schnack will lead a conversation on what we can learn from the life and legacy of the first woman in space, Astronaut Sally Ride and the battle for LGBTQ and diversity, equity and inclusion rights today.

You can get tickets and learn more about these and other forms at City Club, dawg.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Lillian, Cory Rapson and Dr. Mark Joseph.

I'm Robin Mentor Smyers and this forum is now adjourned for information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club.

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