In the past two decades, Ronn Richard had led the Cleveland Foundation in its work to help create thousands of renewable-energy jobs, successfully advocate for improvements in public education, and serve as a relentless voice and provider of risk capital for job-creation efforts in a region that had seen an exodus of Fortune 500 companies.
Now as Richard, 67, prepares to retire this year, he is especially proud of moving the foundation closer — literally — to the community it serves and leading efforts to develop real estate in a way that local residents will directly benefit.
Later this year the Cleveland Foundation, which had $2.8 billion in assets in 2021, will open a new headquarters in the midtown section of the city — an area Richard says has been long neglected.
The new offices will put the foundation in the same neighborhood as many of the people who most need the services it supports. Richard sees the headquarters as a community meeting place that will draw residents of the city — and donors — more closely together in a part of town that has not attracted significant investment in years. The foundation has purchased parcels of land around the new building and plans new development in the area. Rental proceeds will be plowed into a trust that community residents can use as they like.
As with most everything Richard has done during his two decades at the Cleveland Foundation, the goal is to create jobs and develop parts of the city that had suffered from little investment. At first, he says, he got a little pushback from his board for concentrating so much on development at the possible expense of supporting things like local cultural institutions. He responded that if the foundation didn’t focus on the local economy, “we’re not going to have an orchestra or an art museum to give money to in 20 years.”
Richard brought a different perspective to the job than other community-foundation leaders, many of whom come from the nonprofit world. In fact, Richard takes some pride that very few of his hires have come from the world of community foundations and philanthropy. His economic development-first approach to philanthropy was drawn from his previous experience at In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture-capital fund, and the time he spent as an executive at Panasonic. Before that, he served as a U.S. foreign service officer.
This week the foundation tapped an insider, Lillian Kuri, to replace Richard.
Kuri first worked at the Cleveland Foundation as a consultant in 2005 and joined as a full-time staff member two years later. She began as a program director and moved quickly up the ranks, serving as senior vice president for strategy and, currently, executive vice president and chief operating officer, where she co-managed the foundation’s $385 million impact-investment portfolio.
In her current position, Kuri has been a key player in the work to build the Cleveland Foundation’s new headquarters.
In an interview with the Chronicle, Richard talked about how philanthropy has changed since he came to Cleveland and how he wishes donors had the patience for long-term efforts.
Why did you decide to leave now?
I’m coming up on my 20th anniversary, and we have a new mayor and a new county executive. It’s a new generation. We’re also moving into one of the most underserved neighborhoods in Cleveland with a new headquarters. It just seemed like it was time for a changing of the guard.
Tell me a little bit about Hough, the neighborhood where the new headquarters will be and what the presence of a community foundation means for the area?
In the 1980s, the Cleveland Foundation saved Playhouse Square, which is the most vibrant theater district outside of New York’s Broadway. Starting about 15 years ago, I brought up with my board the view that we should try to catalyze another area in Cleveland by owning our own building and bringing our programs inside of it.
If you look at Cleveland, it’s kind of like a barbell. We’ve got these two strong centers, but the area in between them is sort of a no-man’s land. Hough is synonymous with the bad riots of the 60s, and it has suffered reputationally since then. There’s been very little investment. It was completely redlined by the banks. We wanted to stitch together the two halves of Cleveland by really catalyzing this neighborhood. We think we’re going to really make a difference in using all the tools in our toolbox, including our location.
Our new building has an art gallery where one month we can show the art of Cleveland Public School kids and the next month art by new immigrants to Cleveland. We can have free yoga for senior citizens from the neighborhood in the morning and then children’s dance after school. And we have a dedicated space for donors to help really connect with them.
Will the new location gentrify the neighborhood?
We wanted input from people in the neighborhood. We have been meeting with them every month for three years to understand what they want in the building and what they want for their neighborhood.
We bought up a huge amount of land all around the building that we could curate to make sure that we didn’t force people out of the neighborhood. We’re going to let people build buildings there that serve the community. They’ll pay us rent, which we will put into the Hough Land Trust, which will be controlled by the people of Hough to buy up more land so that they can hold it and steward it for things that they want.
We’ve persuaded seven anchor institutions to come into the neighborhood. The health-care network University Hospitals is putting their diabetes research and treatment center there. The Cleveland Institute of Art is putting their advanced drone R&D center there and will teach kids how to design and fly a drone. We’re going to have start-up funder JumpStart, and Case Western Reserve University is bringing in their community health units. All these institutions that were viewed by some people in the neighborhood as ivory towers are coming right in to provide direct services.
How much will rent net for the Hough Land Trust once it’s up and running?
We’re going to probably break even at first, which is great. The point for us is to steward and curate these properties so that they’re bringing services that are needed in the neighborhood. It would be nice to have a recurring revenue stream from real estate, but that’s not our main goal.
How have donors changed during your time at the foundation, and how can a community foundation better work with donors, particularly those who give through donor-advised funds?
Donors these days really want to participate in their own philanthropy. People aren’t giving unrestricted gifts in the way they used to. We are not as dependent on donor-advised funds as other community foundations. About half the money that goes out of the door comes from them compared with like 95 percent at other community foundations. So we’re lucky we have this huge corpus that, for instance, allowed us to give a single $40 million grant to the Say Yes Cleveland college scholarship program.
I don’t really see any problems with donor-advised funds. They’re an easy way for people to give donations. People do get the money out the door pretty quickly, and they’re pretty much in alignment with what the foundation cares about. They’re giving to charter schools or other educational institutions, or they’re going to the Red Cross and to other things that we also fund. But sometimes it would be nice to garner some donor-advised fund money to leverage our investments in newer, bolder initiatives.
What are some of those bigger projects that have been ignored by donor-advised fund holders?
For instance, 15 years ago, we started the Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation. It’s basically an effort to build an offshore wind farm on Lake Erie. It took years to get all the permits we needed from the feds and the state and local governments and the Army Corps of Engineers. Finally, just months ago, we got our final permit and won a Supreme Court case against the coal industry, which was trying to block us.
That’s long term, complicated, and highly expensive. But the return on the investment will be huge. The first six turbines will employ 500 people, and we could generate 5,000 jobs. Hopefully in the future we’ll do a better job of educating our donor-advised fund holders about these kinds of complex but highly impactful opportunities.
To what extent should community foundations serve as advocates rather than simply grant makers?
Public policy is where the big money is. We’re proud that we give away $120 million a year. But that’s paltry compared to what local, state, and federal government puts out. So it makes sense for us to advocate for good public policy. In education, for example, Ohio had some very bad laws that made it impossible to get rid of nonperforming teachers, and that allowed art teachers to teach chemistry and physics. We had to fight to get those laws changed. Advocacy fights go hand-in-hand with economic development. We can’t have economic development in Cleveland without a great work force, and we had a very low graduation rate before the Cleveland Foundation jumped into public-school reform.
Why has the foundation focused on economic development in the first place?
One of the reasons I was hired is because I come out of the business world. And at that time, not too many community foundations were funding economic development. People said to me that’s not the role of a community foundation. That’s what your Chamber of Commerce should be doing.
So many Fortune 500 companies had left Cleveland. I said to my board if we don’t focus on economic development, we’re not going to have an orchestra or an art museum to give money to in 20 years. I’d much rather help people get a job that puts them on a ladder to career success than give more money to the food bank to help people who can’t afford to buy food.
Does a focus on economic development sidetrack social-justice issues?
We were the presenting sponsor for the Gay Games many years ago. We gave a $250,000 grant. We had never given more than $10,000 to sponsor an event before, but we felt it was important. There are a lot of very skilled and talented people in the LGBT community that we need. We need those I.T. professionals. We need those doctors and nurses. We need those accountants. We need those executives, and we need those people in the trades. And so by supporting the LGBT community in a state that has been pretty hostile to LGBT, we’re doing the right thing not only for human dignity and equality but for the economy.
Looking back, what would have you done differently?
Not much, to be honest with you. The thing that I succeeded in best was bringing in a phenomenal team in every department. And I’ve only hired one or two people that had formerly worked at a foundation because a lot of the skills that we needed were really business skills. We’re doing so many things now that involve really heavy-duty number crunching. We’re getting into real estate in a very big way.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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