Biz 901: Responding to the Crisis

The Community Foundation collaborates to take on the coronavirus disruption.

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In mid-March it was clear that the coronavirus, already taking its toll on health and lives worldwide, was also destined to devastate on economic and social levels as we responded to its spread.

Doug McGowen, the City of Memphis’ chief administrative officer, contacted Robert Fockler of the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis. Officials with the city and Shelby County were pulling out the stops to prepare for the coming crisis and they wanted to see if private money could be raised to meet the inevitable need.

The Community Foundation is the largest charitable grantmaker in the Mid-South, with grants of $163 million last year. It manages 1,200 charitable funds for individuals, families, and organizations throughout the region and was in a position to host a community-wide effort to raise those private dollars.

That’s how the Mid-South COVID-19 Regional Response Fund came about. “We wanted to make sure that it was a community decision-making process,” Fockler says, “so we put together an advisory committee that meets every week to make grants.” Along with the city, county, and Community Foundation, there were representatives from the United Way of the Mid-South and Momentum Nonprofit Partners.

The city and county can identify what’s going on and where the needs are the greatest. The United Way and Momentum are in touch with more than 300 agencies ascertaining needs and vulnerabilities and determining ways to get service to those who need it most.

“We looked at models from across the country,” Fockler says. That included New Orleans’ response to Hurricane Katrina as well as Seattle, which was the first city in the United States to do battle with coronavirus. “We decided to spend 60 percent of the dollars in immediate response to the crisis and 40 percent on the back end.” In the experiences of these other cities, the 60/40 apportionment was an effective standard. “You certainly want to step up quickly and respond to the immediate needs, but there’s still significant resources that need to be devoted on the back end to recovery and resilience, fixing the damage done during the immediate crisis.”

The group identified the key populations that were most likely to be affected by the crisis, such as the elderly, the food insecure, the housing insecure, those quarantined without resources, and those displaced from their jobs, among others.

“So that’s how we put it together and it’s run now for nine weeks and with nine rounds of grants,” he said in mid-May. “Every Friday we look at how much money we have and then go around the virtual table for updates. We develop grant recommendations based on that.”

Things changed in the initial weeks. For example, food was clearly an immediate need and the Regional Response Fund gave money to the Food Bank and MIFA. But those organizations started getting other resources flowing in, which let the fund refocus on other areas. “We’ve actually most recently been funding a lot of smaller agencies that are in niche places around the broader community,” Fockler says.

That broader community goes beyond Memphis and Shelby County. While most grants go to agencies in Shelby County, there have been grants made in northern Mississippi, a food bank in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and agencies in West Tennessee. “[As of mid-May] we’ve made 108 grants to 84 different agencies,” he says, “and some have been fairly small grants, but we’ve also made some fairly large grants.”

Fockler says the Community Foundation is uniquely positioned to assist in a situation like this. “We have worked with both city and county governments in a number of public-private partnerships. They’re usually not disaster-related, like the acquisition of the Shelby Farms Greenline — we actually purchased the Greenline on behalf of the county. We were the vehicle for the public-private acquisition and renovation of the Harahan Bridge, for instance.”

He says that the fund has had to create some elements to respond to this crisis. For example, some of the initial fallout from the shutdown involved arts workers and hospitality workers losing their jobs.

“There isn’t really an infrastructure to deal with that and we’re not, under tax law, allowed to make grants directly to individuals ourselves,” Fockler says. “So we worked with some local agencies to build brand-new response funds to work with, such as Welcome to Memphis, which works in the Memphis hospitality industry. We needed a responsive fund to put dollars immediately into the hands of displaced hospitality workers, and that has grown and been very successful. We did the same thing with ArtsMemphis. The arts community is one of the first things to shut down when you can’t have meetings or groups of more than 10 or 50 people; you can’t have Playhouse on the Square. So we created an immediate response fund for displaced arts workers, again to put dollars in the hands of folks that had just lost their jobs.”

It’s an advantage, Fockler says, that the Community Foundation doesn’t have a big infrastructure or a traditional way of doing business. “Our business has always been problem-solving and finding the best way to get things done.”

The effects of the coronavirus outbreak contain lessons on how to handle a complex crisis. But even as it continues, the uncertainty of the health and economic situations challenges how those lessons will be absorbed. “It’s hard to look into the future to know well where funding will be needed but also when things are going to end,” Fockler says.

“Another thing that concerns me a little bit is that Memphis has such an incredibly generous community and the region has certainly stepped up to support the fund,” he says. “But this is a long-term thing. It’s not like a tornado or a flood that comes and goes, leaves its damage, and then you’re left to pick up the pieces. This crisis is rolling and it’s certainly going to be rolling forward for another few weeks. We’ve had great funding and great support to this point and we’ve been able do pretty much everything we wanted to do.”

But Fockler worries that even the noblest of intentions can get worn down by an unrelenting crisis. “I’m a little afraid of those resources lagging two, three, four weeks down the line when the needs haven’t gone away,” he says. “And the fatigue of writing checks and supporting these things really starts to kick in. But at the end of the day, I have a lot of confidence in Memphis and the Mid-South, and one thing that Mid-Southerners know is when people are in need, they’re prepared to step up and support whatever’s needed. I’m hoping that fear is unfounded, but that’s something I am concerned about.”

Another of the unknowable consequences of the crisis is what the long-term fallout will be. Fockler worries there may be some agencies that either go away or are severely damaged. “We may need to scramble to make those agencies sound again,” he says, “but we don’t really quite know at this point who that is or when and where those gaps and holes might be. And that’s why our survey process has been pretty important. The main thing that Momentum Nonprofit Partners has been doing is surveying agency needs. They’ve received input from more than 300 agencies and [as of mid-May] we’ve now gone through two cycles of those surveys. That’s going to be important to keep doing because the needs of an agency today may change and may evolve two, four, eight weeks from now. So the future is going to depend on the constant review of current information. It’s a little hard to know exactly what we’re going to need in four and six and eight weeks.”

Imagine, however, how the face of philanthropy may change in even more fundamental ways. It was undergoing substantive changes before coronavirus came around, but the ongoing crisis may speed the rate of change. There have long been private foundations as well as individuals and families that have done much of the heavy lifting of giving.

“Looking forward and certainly in view of our response to this crisis, we can’t just always look to a couple of privileged families to help us,” Fockler says. “We really need to help ourselves. I think the future of philanthropy is not going to be a couple of individuals or families. I think it’s going to be all of us coming together collectively and more formally pooling our resources. And I think that the Community Foundation in particular is going to be focused on how to draw community resources for a community-wide philanthropic effort to build an endowed foundation representing the collective resources of hundreds, if not thousands, of families as opposed to four or five families.”