Flint Area ‒ Cities of Tomorrow
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As part of the “Cities of Tomorrow” series, Philea interviewed Neal Hegarty, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to know more about the foundation’s work in the city of Flint, Michigan, US. Neal shared insights on the foundation’s motivation to focus on Flint, its main strands of work and local grantmaking.
Many of the global challenges we face play out at the level of cities. These complex, interconnected and dynamic ecosystems are where many social, economic, environmental and political factors converge. This series, curated by Philea’s Funders Forum on Sustainable Cities, showcases philanthropic initiatives that aim at making cities sustainable.
Introduction
For more than 95 years, the Mott Foundation has helped people and organisations work together to support and strengthen the community of its hometown, Flint. Through its local grantmaking, the foundation supports efforts to solve problems, create opportunities and build a vibrant future for the community and its residents. This work is part of the foundation’s broader commitment to promote a just, equitable and sustainable society.
| City | Flint, Michigan, US |
| Period | 1928-ongoing |
| Primary constituents | Inhabitants |
| Partners and collaborations | Local, regional and national NGOs/nonprofit organisations; community-based organisations; local administrations; universities. |
When did the Mott Foundation start to work at the city level, and what was the motivation behind it?
Neal Hegarty: For our foundation, working in the context of a sustainable city in Flint, Michigan goes back to our founding, as it was our donor’s intent. It’s in the original purpose and the DNA of the foundation, so we’ve been working in Flint for almost 100 years. And all of our global work as well as our US national-level work is somehow an outgrowth of our work in Flint. But over the 100 years of our activity, our work changed quite a lot and ebbed and flowed with different priorities and different focuses.
Could you tell us more about your different strands of work?
For the last 15 years or so our focus has been a really broad, multifaceted look at the health and well-being of the community from a more holistic perspective. We usually refer to a “well-functioning city”, where citizens have the resources and ability to thrive. Hence, we fund issues such as education, arts and culture, safety and basic needs, neighbourhood development, economic development and so on. Indeed, we consider that whether it’s environmental sustainability or economic sustainability, individual needs are all intertwined. Holistically, we could say that the number one strand of our work by dollar amount has been education. We use this term quite broadly, and in the US context, referring to preschool age roughly through young adult life.
These are our main strands of work, and we’re now increasingly looking at unifying around a strand of poverty and economic insecurity. The city where we are based and where we focus our work, Flint, is the poorest city in our state with the highest concentration of poverty. And there are some parts of the city where up to 80% of the kids are born into households that are at or below the federal poverty line. This is the reason why although it’s not presented as an official strategy per-se, economic equality and security of the inhabitants of our city are gradually becoming the direction of our work.
Do you collaborate with the local administrations and governments in your work?
We do, although it can be complicated due to the frequent changes of the officials at local and national level. We try to always have a good relationship with them and to be good partners with the public sector. I think there is also a tension around how we – as a philanthropic organisation – can leverage our partners or fill the government’s gaps without supplanting what it should be doing and absolving its responsibilities.
Looking at the opportunities side, when you have a strong relationship with an administration, it creates significant leverage to operate. We’ve experienced this especially in recent years when there’s been substantial federal investment in communities and infrastructure. This has enabled us to collaborate on various projects, such as redeveloping brownfield sites and revitalising old factory locations that have been dormant for decades.
I’d say that the biggest opportunity I see with local government is around economic development in terms of doing something different that we couldn’t do on our own, and that they probably couldn’t do on their own. As an example, I recently had a moment where I felt how lucky I am to do this work. It just felt great to see what we were able to do between government and philanthropy: We launched the project RX kids, the first citywide maternal and infant cash prescription programme in the United States. Thanks to this programme, for the next five years in the city of Flint, every pregnant woman in her third trimester will get a onetime cash payment of $1,500 (for food, prenatal care, rent or anything they need). And after birth, for every month of the first year of the child’s life, they’ll get $500, unrestricted, no strings attached direct cash transfer to the mother to spend on things such as diapers, formula, childcare, etc. This is a powerful attempt to eradicate poverty by giving cash directly to the person in need. And it’s also a profound maternal and child well-being programme in a community where there’s a really strong racial inequity around infant health and mortality. The foundation has put up $15 million for it, the state of Michigan put up $16 million, other private funders have put in smaller amounts to get to a total of around $55 million to run the programme for five years. This is the first time in the United States that there’s a city-wide programme of this kind with no restrictions at all, and from the government perspective, it couldn’t happen without philanthropy, and from the philanthropy perspective, it couldn’t happen without government.
Do you collaborate with any research institutes or universities that are looking into the dynamics in Flint?
We’ve been working with a couple of local universities that are active here. They’re always part of what we look at, whether it’s economic development or public health or community well-being. We also bring in specific consultancies, from time to time. For example we brought in a DC-based consulting group to look at economic development, in particular university-led research around economic development opportunities. Last year, we brought in another well-known international consulting group to look at higher education, how to maximise our higher education institutions, not necessarily for their own educational outputs, but for their community contributions. One of the reasons why we have worked with the universities and with a national think-tank focused on research and higher education linked to economic development is that we need to attract high-tech industries and advanced economic strategies. Without these, we will continue to face significant challenges.
For example, the bigger problems of population decline and job decline in our region are really difficult. As an illustration of this, we’re celebrating a brownfield redevelopment we did with the city in the last couple of years that just got finalised and that will bring hundreds of jobs. And that’s great. And those are good jobs. But that pales in comparison to that we used to have: 70,000 autoworker jobs in this town, and they’re not coming back. So, there’s that mismatch between the level of satisfaction we can have on an individual project scale with our partnership with the government on economic development, and the feeling that the biggest challenge we have as a community, and as a philanthropic organisation impacting the community, is the broader economic issues, the scale of job creation which is just not like it was.
How do you assess the impact of the foundation’s work?
I guess when you are a long-term embedded funder in a community doing philanthropy for 98 years, you don’t often think of your work as having a start and an end with an evaluation just like that. It’s always iterative, one project rolling into the others. Bill White, who was our longtime CEO, and chairman, used to say that the beauty of doing local grantmaking is that you can look out your window, and see the impact of your work, both successes and failures. We’ve been concentrating less on formal evaluations for our Flint-based work, and more on trying to get a holistic sense of whether the community is doing well or not.
Sadly, despite our investments in the community, many things are not improving, and we still have high rates of poverty and inequality, and health issues. Flint remains a poor city in a poor region in a relatively poor state. And so probably since the 1970s, we’ve seen negative trends, regardless of what we’ve done. There are a lot of issues in Flint that we fund where our attitude is that things aren’t going well, but they’d be so much worse without our funds directed to individuals and the community. On the other side, there are some very specific things we do measure and evaluate from time to time, for specific interventions. But in general, our view is that we’re here through the thick and thin of Flint and the ups and downs, and so we’re less data driven in this sense.
One of the biggest problems we have in Flint, in my opinion, is the absence of jobs. And that is probably the single hardest thing for a foundation to do, at least in the US context, because we can’t build for-profit businesses, and we can’t invest in companies locally that are hiring. How can we measure or think about our success of a sustainable city, when the market forces in our region of the country are so negative? That’s been a conundrum for a long time for us.
During all these years of work at the Mott Foundation, have you re-oriented your strategy based on the observations of the impact your funding is having?
Absolutely. For example, we have reflected on the balance between funding centres that strengthen institutions in the community in order to provide more capacity to those communities, or rather funding neighbourhood-based and community-led, citizen-driven initiatives directly. We’ve been concentrating on both things simultaneously somehow, but we’ve had this tension and question on the balance between the more “institutional” support versus direct support to people through our grantmaking. That’s been an ebb and flow over the years. Another regular reflection for us has been around the role of the foundation in replacing or complementing the limited capacity of the government to fund some basic services for citizens: As the city has had austerity measures, we stepped in to fund additional things like parks, public safety initiatives, and other needs that are typically funded by the normal function of the government. In addition, the biggest strategic change in the last five years, although it’s always been a focus and a stated goal for us, has been having a stronger focus on racial equity.
Have you had experiences with participatory and/or community-driven philanthropy?
Yes, there’s always been a big part of that in our work. Even going back to Mr. Mott’s lifetime he used to call it “shoe leather philanthropy”, meaning that the leather of your shoes needs to be on the sidewalks in neighbourhoods where we’re funding. So, we’ve always had a motivation from our founder to be very connected and rooted in the community. And in the last ten years we have been even more focused on ways of doing participatory or community driven strategies.
For example, we’ve done a project called “Focus in Flint”, where we’ve conducted community-wide surveys, combined with focus groups at neighbourhood and community level, and then we’ve organised meetings to talk about findings from these consultations, which we then use to drive our grantmaking. In one of the years of this initiative, we put out a citizen-driven voting system to let them vote on what we should fund with a given amount of money allocated. So, we did some direct citizens/community- driven grantmaking. Another indirect example of our experience with community-driven or participatory philanthropy has been endowing our community foundation, and enabling it to give out small grants to the neighbourhood with its re-granting programme for basic needs, reaching community groups directly.
What are the characteristics of an ideal future city for you?
The first thing that comes to my mind when I think about the ideal city, and this somehow guides our work, is that the city is a place where there’s opportunity for individuals to choose to live and thrive, a place where they want to be and where they can be successful. And if I look at Flint, it’s not a place where people are necessarily choosing to be there, either when they’re from here, or when they get sent here for a job. And not everybody’s thriving here. So, to me there’s something about that kind of agency we should have as humans to be able to choose the sort of community we want to live in and have the possibility within that community to thrive and know that our families and ourselves are doing well and have opportunities.
I would suspect many people in Flint think that the best future for their kids is not in Flint, and that makes me sad. That’s not a sign of a healthy community. I was at a meeting not long ago with a woman from New Orleans and she said “New Orleans has been through a lot, poverty and storms and everything. I’m so tired of people saying that my community, the people, are resilient. I don’t want to hear that. I want to hear that the people in my community thrive.” And I thought, “That’s beautiful.” And that’s what many of us feel around here, how long do people have to be resilient for? So, when I think of the ideal city, I have in mind that ability to choose to be here, and it’s about a place where you can thrive and your family can thrive.
Philanthropy Curiosity Corner
Mott’s Response to the Flint Water Crisis
In 2015, the city of Flint gained international attention when high levels of lead were found in Flint’s drinking water and subsequently in the blood of many local children. The failure of government officials to adequately test, treat and protect the city’s water supply spurred national debates about the safety of the country’s aging infrastructure. This crisis prompted swift action from the foundation’s newly appointed President Ridgway White and its board of trustees to restore clean drinking water to the community. The foundation provided immediate support including a $4 million grant to help reconnect Flint to the Detroit water system and $100,000 for the distribution of free water filters to local families. In 2016, the Mott Foundation pledged up to $100 million in grants over five years to aid Flint’s recovery and rise from its water crisis. After this period, the foundation continued making related grants for water crisis recovery efforts.
Beyond Flint’s crisis, the foundation committed over $4 million to promote a more integrated management of drinking water, stormwater and wastewater in Great Lakes cities in the United States. This approach aims to help cities reduce water use; improve water quality at the tap and in nearby surface waters; lower operating costs; and prevent floods.