image courtesy dreamstime / alberto andrei rosu
Kevin Dean exudes a “get it done” quality that has come in particularly handy in this pandemic year.
As CEO of Momentum Nonprofit Partners, he works to bring together nonprofits in the Mid-South so they all can benefit. Momentum provides the organizations with learning opportunities, resource connections, and assistance in order to make the most of their diverse missions.
Kevin Dean
While it’s been a grim year for groups that have taken significant hits in funding, Dean believes Momentum was able prevent what could have been even more disastrous. “This has been a big year for us because we’re built for something like COVID-19,” he says. With Momentum’s role at the center of the local nonprofit sector, it was able to help groups access around $36 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans that otherwise might have been difficult or impossible for organizations to obtain on their own.
Momentum’s knowledge of its member groups has made it an important voice in a regional collaboration. “The week that everything shut down,” Dean says, “the City of Memphis, Shelby County government, and United Way approached the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis about setting up a fund. Momentum was invited to participate.”
“The idea is that if you trust your grantees enough to give them a large amount of money, you have to trust them to do what they’re supposed to do without making them jump through too many hoops.” — Kevin Dean
The result was the Mid-South COVID-19 Regional Response Fund. “I really have to commend Bob [Fockler] and Sutton [Mora Hayes] for making sure that in this decision-making process there was going to be a rapid response-type scenario,” Dean says. “One thing that can often happen in philanthropy is that decisions are made in a vacuum, and with a crisis like this, you have to hear from the constituents, people on the ground, and people on the front line, because things move very quickly. At Momentum, we hear from both philanthropy organizations and nonprofits. So we were immediately hearing what the nonprofits needed in aggregate.”
Momentum quickly did a survey of nonprofits and about 300 organizations responded. “We used that survey to find the gaps in service delivery and how we could mitigate that,” Dean says. “We found organizations like the Mid-South Food Bank and MIFA [Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association] that were always going to be funded in situations and crises like this. But there were other organizations that were smaller and didn’t have the name recognition or the infrastructure of big organizations, but who were doing really powerful things under the radar in communities.”
Although the response was swift and the groups that needed to be there were part of it, there still wasn’t enough funding for everybody. “In that first month, we found a $32 million loss in earned revenue, special event loss, donations, and things like that because of the crisis,” Dean says.
The impact of the pandemic and the response of philanthropic organizations have brought focus to some traditional practices that are being reconsidered.
“There were a lot of lessons learned and it’s aligned with what’s happening nationally,” Dean says. “Before the crisis happened, there was already a national movement around trust-based philanthropy. The idea is that if you trust your grantees enough to give them a large amount of money, you have to trust them to do what they’re supposed to do without making them jump through too many hoops.” Dean remembers the case of a funder who provided $20,000 a year, but whose requirements were so onerous that the nonprofit had to spend some $50,000 on staffing and copying.
More philanthropies are giving more multi-year operating support as opposed to specific program grants that can be so problematic, Dean says. “They cause more harm than good, because they don’t cover overhead. They don’t cover staff salaries. They don’t cover evaluations although they require an evaluative process to be built into the program. That doesn’t work for getting the biggest bang out of your philanthropic dollars.”
Dean says the Kresge Foundation is a good example of a philanthropic organization that provides operating support and tells grantees to report back on what they did. “I think this kind of trust-based general operating support is something we’re going to see a lot more of,” he says.
Another aspect of philanthropic practices has been highlighted because of the impact of the pandemic. “The grant process itself has been a little weighty,” Dean says. “It’s a long process. It costs a lot of money to write a grant and get a strategic plan in place.” When the Community Foundation got its Mid-South COVID-19 Regional Response Fund going, there were requirements to apply for funding, but he says, “They got that money out quickly because the nonprofits needed it right away and didn’t need to wait six months.”
Dean would like to see a practice like that become more common so that grant applications are streamlined and nonprofits don’t have to stop delivering services to write a grant.
Another change is the significant turnover of nonprofit leadership. “It’s already happening,” Dean says. National studies indicate that 20 to 25 percent of nonprofit executives will leave in the next five to 10 years. Dean says those figures apply to Memphis as well. He did a study in 2016 of nonprofit leaders and since then, about 20 percent have moved on.
“We have to really be intentional about grooming the next generation of leaders in the nonprofit sector, because this is a really complicated job,” he says. “We’re setting folks up to fail if we install them in a CEO position without giving them the proper competencies and tools to be successful, but there are leadership initiatives underway in Memphis.”
Another challenge that nonprofits are facing is the consequences of the economy.
“This happened in 2008 when the economy collapsed,” says Dean. “There will be a lot of nonprofits closing, merging, and rethinking their missions. I don’t think the worst has hit the nonprofit sector. We got PPP loans and some extra grant money this year, but I think next year is going to be harder. Right now is the time for nonprofits to start talking about mergers or hibernation or sunsetting. The philanthropy’s responsibility to that is to help that happen where it needs to happen.” Philanthropies can help if two nonprofits are doing the same thing by encouraging a merger or some other solution.
United Way of the Mid-South
Dr. Kenneth S. Robinson is president and CEO of United Way of the Mid-South, a public charitable foundation that battles poverty by funding improvements in education, financial stability, and health. It relies on gifts from some 28,000 individual donors and 125 companies.
Dr. Kenneth S. Robinson
Many of those individual donors give through payroll deductions, but with a significant number of workers being furloughed or let go as a result of the pandemic, many have had to reconsider discretionary charitable giving. And the corporate donors also had to rethink their support.
“We are having to continue to refocus on making priorities and adjust accordingly,” Robinson says. “Understanding the reality is not distressful to us except in our capacity to provide grants to the vast network of nonprofit agencies that we’ve historically supported. That is on the revenue side.”
On the service side, however, he says that United Way of the Mid-South is able to be creative. It continues to provide its Free Tax Prep program for low- to moderate-income families. “We typically see 10,000 individuals and prepare their tax returns for free,” Robinson says. Volunteer tax preparers have gotten about $14 million returned over the last few years. Normally people would come in and sit across a table from the preparer at several locations around the city. In the age of COVID-19, that’s a non-starter, of course.
“I think that trend of greater reliance on digital appeals, a greater reliance on digital marketing in general, and a much more important stream revenue generated by social media and crowd-sourcing techniques and platforms will be where philanthropy will continue.” — Kenneth Robinson
But this year tax assistance became a drive-through service at the United Way headquarters. “These individuals could come and drop off their documentation and their consent forms to allow us to then prepare their taxes away from them remotely and to electronically file them,” he says.
Another way the agency has adapted is changing one of its critical services, which Robinson calls “a network of agencies that work seamlessly in sharing clients that have multiple needs, but who walked through one door and then can get referred to multiple services through our integrated collective action network.” This year, they decided to expand that program during COVID-19. Many more people have needed services so it opened a call center that got numerous people into the network. “We are normally an intermediary, a foundation that makes grants to other front-line agencies, but this was a front-line service, much like our Free Tax Prep.”
Such adaptive responses enhance the regard people have for the United Way, Robinson feels: “covid-19 has reiterated the value of a United Way that has the capacity to bring multiple agencies together out of multiple domains to address the multiple needs of people that are occurring simultaneously.”
As for when things go back to something resembling normalcy, Robinson says the pandemic has, in its way, yielded unexpected and unprecedented positive outcomes.
“We’re able to reach people digitally with our virtual campaigns and with our digital tool kits and materials,” he says. “I think that trend of greater reliance on digital appeals, a greater reliance on digital marketing in general, and a much more important stream revenue generated by social media and crowd-sourcing techniques and platforms will be where philanthropy will continue.”
Assisi Foundation
Executive director Dr. Jan Young of the Assisi Foundation oversees millions of dollars in grants in the areas of arts and culture, education, social justice, health and human services, and community enrichment.
Dr. Jan Young
The consequence of COVID-19 has been particularly brutal to arts and culture organizations, but Young feels there have been some remarkable adaptations to the situation that forced performing arts groups to shut down the usual presentations.
“We’ve seen some really creative responses like Opera Memphis going around in the truck singing,” she says. “Some of the performing arts venues have had to become a little bit more creative to figure out how to do things, maybe outdoors or to respond in a very different way. So we’re there working together in ways that maybe they weren’t working together before. They’ve done some things with virtual events as if they were performing to a live audience. It’s allowing them to demonstrate their creativity in a different way.”
She points out some of the efforts that organizations have made, such as Hattiloo Theatre’s playwrights workshops, and the Germantown Performing Arts Center’s outdoor Grove stage. “Playhouse has been really good about taking care of their folks, and the dance folks have been showing their rehearsals through virtual means,” she says. “We’re so proud of them. They’re still doing well and they’re highly respected nationally, so we’re very fortunate in Memphis.”
Christian Community Foundation
Rex Jones is president of the Christian Community Foundation and although he knows the business of philanthropy, he remains in awe of the giving power of people.
Rex Jones
The fiscal year ending in April, he says, was a record year at the foundation, having given away $84 million. “Memphis is already an extremely generous city per capita in the United States,” he says. “What happened when the pandemic came, I watched people that were already generous begin to think and give more.”
CCF is not a fundraising organization. “We help people get strategic plans for how they want to do their charitable giving and the more people that we can influence to be more charitably minded in their giving, then we will have accomplished our goal,” Jones says.
“When we have our donors calling us, it does speak very highly to the charitable hearts of the people that we get to serve here.”
His foundation also takes pride in working with other community foundations, which he sees as crucial to the city. He cites the Jewish Foundation of Memphis and the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis, both of which he works with toward common goals.
“We had donors saying they wanted to help, but not tomorrow — they wanted to help today. So I think most of what we did differently was just a quicker response.” — Rex Jones
When the pandemic hit, he noticed that although many people were working less or out of work entirely, there was still an impetus for giving. “People were seeking opportunities to give, looking for opportunities, especially for opportunities to meet the needs for the underserved here in Memphis,” he says. “We had to ask ourselves what is the role of a community foundation in a pandemic? We needed to be responsive on a timely basis for people’s desires to get the money that they entrust with us. Normally we write checks every other week, so we decided during the pandemic we’d write checks every week to get them in on a quicker, more timely basis.”
One of the roles of a community foundation, Jones says, is to have its fingers on the pulse of what is happening in the community. “We got so many questions and were able to give information on food pantries, homeless shelters, understanding the basics of rent,” he says. “Timeliness was important.”
He points to the foundation’s Hope for Memphis Fund, which he calls the crown jewel of what CCF does. “If we generate any fees for what we do over and above our budget, we basically give it away about every quarter.”
When the pandemic started, CCF went to people it had supported in the past in the Hope for Memphis Fund. “We gave them a short questionnaire grant request form for what they were doing to give to the things that we would support,” Jones says. “It would have to be in Memphis, be for an underserved population, and would have to have a gospel message at the center of it. There are countless people that have those three things in common. We had donors saying they wanted to help, but not tomorrow — they wanted to help today. So I think most of what we did differently was just a quicker response.”
With the lessons of 2020 well learned, Jones looks to the future of philanthropies and sees how two aspects must remain in balance. “Organizations need to stay focused on what they do,” he says. “A tendency I saw a little bit during COVID was people beginning to drop what they normally do and start to address what the glaring needs were. But you can’t be everything to everybody. Organizations need to stay grounded on the foundation with which they start and their purpose for why they exist.”
Simultaneously, he says, philanthropies can’t turn a blind eye to change. “We really don’t know what those changes are, but we also need to be able to adjust to the needs.”
Ultimately, Jones says, people want to give where they can have the largest impact. “What we do is just get out there and study the impact that people are having in the community,” he says. “And it doesn’t take long to figure that part of it out.”
