The Detroit CDO Fund launched in 2020 to support Detroit organizations led by Black, indigenous and people of color or serving communities of color.
Historically, the nonprofits working in Detroit’s neighborhoods have received the least amount of funding, something that led the groups to struggle, especially during the pandemic, Clemons said.
It was very hard for these groups to get the attention of funders, but through the CDO fund they are getting that attention, she said.
“Larger foundations don’t have bandwidth to do numerous small grants, but they can do large grants” to organizations like ECP which then administers the neighborhood group grants.
The fund attracted a total of $11.7 million over three years to fill a gap in funding for local CDOs or community development corporations providing programs focused on safety, weatherization, new housing construction and preservation, home repair, youth programming and social programs like movies in the park, among other things.
Enterprise Community Partners lowered barriers for the smallest, BIPOC-led and BIPOC-serving community development groups in Detroit to receive grants by changing budget and staff size requirements.
“Sometimes an organization can do well with one staff person, (but) who are we to say they don’t need a team of five people?” Clemons said. And “if you need five people to get a grant, how do you hire them without out the grant?”
The unrestricted nature of the funding and three-year commitment were also important in helping strengthen the Detroit CDOs that attracted support from the fund, Clemons said.
There’s been a paradigm shift, she said. Instead of philanthropy being prescriptive, “we’re doing it the opposite way, saying, ‘You tell us what you need… because you’re in the community.'”
Twenty-five groups received unrestricted operating grants during the first three years of the program, using it to hire executive directors and other staff, pay rent and expand programming.
They also received technical assistance help to develop their boards and diversify their grant revenue by adding fee-for-service models and real estate development and leveraging American Rescue Plan Act dollars from the city, Clemons said.
The groups also accompanied ECP to other cities like New Orleans and New York to benchmark their CDO ecosystems.
“In other places, cities are providing operating support for CDOs like Cleveland. They don’t do that here in Detroit,” Clemons said, while also pointing out the organizations played a very important role in Detroit during its bankruptcy and New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the cities had to cut back on services.
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