Five years ago, Cleveland Foundation President and CEO Ronn Richard, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Lillian Kuri and other stakeholders began thinking about moving the institution out of the city’s Playhouse District, where it had been based for about 40 years. The conversation raised a compelling question: When is a building more than just a building? To be more specific, could a foundation’s headquarters be not just an office, but an anchor to revitalize a community?
“One of the biggest reasons we thought about moving wasn’t to go from the 12th floor of an office building to the 12th floor of another office building,” Kuri told me. “We wanted to think in a way that would be catalytic and where we use our whole toolbox as part of a 20- or 30-year vision.”
In June 2019, the foundation announced its plan. It would move its headquarters to Midtown, at the southern edge of Hough, a low-income, redlined majority Black neighborhood afflicted by generations of chronic disinvestment. But there was more. The new building, which opened on July 15 and includes a cafe, a dance studio and art gallery, will serve as the nexus for a 10-year, $400 million initiative to create a 12-acre innovation district aimed at serving the surrounding area’s residents.
While the $3.2 billion community foundation has a long track record of place-based grantmaking, the new headquarters positions the foundation itself as an anchor institution galvanizing economic development and civic engagement in a historically underserved part of the city. At the helm of this new, forward-thinking effort is Kuri, who succeeded Richard as president and CEO as of today, after holding several leaderships roles over the years.
“The process made us think about what the community foundation of the future needs to be,” she said. “It needs to be on the ground and it needs to make philanthropy more understood and visible to people.”
The initiative is a good reminder that beyond making grants and stewarding donor-advised funds, community foundations shouldn’t be shy about making big, place-based bets to boost opportunity in areas where economic inequities are the most acute. “It’s going to take a long time to turn around the persistence of structural racism in these neighborhoods,” Kuri said. “Redlining is still deeply embedded, which has cut off a lot of infrastructure investments and why the change we want to see is still not happening.”
“No institution can do it alone”
The child of immigrant parents from Lebanon, Kuri earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Kent State University and a master of architecture and urban design from Harvard University. “I was especially interested in the way that cities develop, whether that be economics, politics or planning — all the aspects that kind of layer together to make change in cities,” Kuri said. After graduate school, she embarked on various projects, including developing affordable housing for the city of Boston and redeveloping Beirut’s waterfront as part of her post-graduate work.
In 2005, Kuri joined the foundation as a consultant. Richard tasked her with developing the strategy for Greater University Circle, an ambitious 10-year-plus placemaking strategy built on developing multiple anchor institutions spanning multiple neighborhoods. Through this work, Kuri saw philanthropy’s role in not just providing resources, but acting as a convening force bringing civic stakeholders together to make change in a holistic way. “The initiative taught us how to use the levers of philanthropy in ways we hadn’t done before,” she said.
Kuri went on to hold several positions within the foundation, including program director for arts, architecture, and urban design, vice president for strategic initiatives and senior vice president for strategy. Kuri has also served since 2006 as a member of Cleveland’s City Planning Commission, which she has chaired since 2022. She plans to continue in that role while helming the Cleveland Foundation.
Looking back, Kuri told me her background in architecture prepared her for the field of philanthropy. “In architecture, you have engineers, city planners and construction workers all working off a design to make a building,” she said. “And there’s a direct correlation to what we do in philanthropy. No institution can do it alone.”
The Midtown Collaboration Center
A year ago, the foundation announced the second building in the planned $400 million innovation district — the three-story, 100,000-square-foot Midtown Collaboration Center. The center, which is currently under construction, will house programs with about 250 employees operated by Case Western University, tech companies and other organizations. The foundation envisions the center as a community hub where residents can talk to a healthcare advisor, develop new career skills, and access capital and expertise.
At the time, then-President and CEO Richard said, “We think that foundations with big endowments should all move into the redlined, underserved neighborhoods in each city in the country,” he said. “It’s the best way to get proximate to the people you serve, and really understand their needs and work with them.”
Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb concurred. “This should be the future of philanthropy,” he said. “We talk about poverty, we talk about racism, we talk about improving these neighborhoods. Well, let’s put our money where our mouth is, and let’s be in the neighborhood serving with and for the people.”
To pay for the construction of the two buildings, the foundation took out a loan from its endowment that it will pay back over the next 20 years. Not a penny came out of its annual discretionary grantmaking budget, which is approximately $120 million. “It opened our eyes about what’s possible when we think about our endowment differently,” Kuri said. The foundation will recoup money through leases, parking fees and other kinds of revenue, without turning a profit.
Looking further out, the Midtown Collaboration Center will include a Black-owned microbrewery and music club. Kuri noted that the foundation selected these vendors in consultation with local residents. “Our goal is to continue to build on that and listen to the community about what they want, and how we can help to provide it,” she said. The foundation envisions the district will be fully built-out by 2033, with a total of 2 million square feet of construction.
“This is not a short-term thing”
What I found most striking about the initiative is the extent to which stakeholders can collect data to see if they’re achieving desired outcomes over the long term. For example, the new collaboration center will house a diabetes center run by University Hospitals with the goal of treating residents from nearby neighborhoods with some of Cleveland’s worst health outcomes. Speaking to Cleveland.com’s Steven Litt about the foundation’s plans, Dr. Daniel Simon, president of academic and external affairs and chief scientific officer at UH, said, “The proof in the pudding is going to be changing life expectancy and showing that these disparities are being eroded.”
Kuri and her team clearly have an eye on outcomes, but also preach patience. “The maps of the neighborhoods with the worst health or digital divide outcomes are the same as the redlining maps,” she said. “So this is not a short-term thing. This is a commitment to work collaboratively over the next 30 years so that the measure of success is how we’ve improved the lives of Clevelanders.” Leaders have also worked with residents to address concerns about gentrification and displacement. For example, the foundation helped residents create a community land trust designed to purchase, hold and lease land to developers.
Add it all up, and the Cleveland Foundation’s initiative has dramatically expanded the purview of a community foundation, and depending on who you ask, any institutional grantmaker. It suggests that funders have an obligation to set up shop in areas passed over by philanthropy and private investment, and those with “big endowments” (to quote Richard) should have financial skin in the game by bankrolling place-based initiatives where outcomes can be measured.
I suspect some foundation boards may pass on such an expansive charter. But for Kuri, it’s the next logical phase for the nation’s oldest community foundation, which was established in 1914. “For me, the foundation of the future has to be one where everybody feels like structured philanthropy can be for them, and that we do so in a collective way,” Curi said. “This is going to be a 20-year transformation for the district that we hope will also connect to the whole city. We’re just at the beginning.”
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