After 15 years as president and CEO of the Central New York Community Foundation, Peter A. Dunn is stepping down in June to take a similar position in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Over Dunn’s tenure, the foundation’s assets grew from $110 million to $399 million, annual grantmaking grew from $5.2 million to $18.1 million, and the staff grew from 16 to 25 employees.
Dunn also expanded the charity’s impact on Syracuse and Central New York — through its stewardship of the city school district’s Say Yes to Education college scholarship program; a $2 million investment in combating lead poisoning; and formation of Black Equity & Excellence, a $1 million grant program funding Black-led community projects.
Dunn, who grew up in Buffalo, learned early leadership lessons from his grandfather, who ran the family business, the stationery and office supply retailer Ulbrich’s. The chairman of the company was not above unloading trucks, if that’s what needed to be done. Ulbrich’s went out of business in the early 1990s. A crinkled shopping bag framed on Dunn’s office wall is a reminder of its success and failure.
As he prepares to leave Central New York, Dunn reflects on the progress the community has made and the challenges that remain. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What is the mission of the foundation? What do you see as its role in the community?
The Community Foundation is really about two big things. The first is working with donors who love this place, helping them realize their philanthropic dreams, and then creating permanent resources for the benefit of the community. The other part is about creating change over time. And that can be organizational change, where we’re helping nonprofits to achieve their missions; community change, where we are helping to move the needle on certain issues; and individual change, scholarships through our Say Yes work, for instance. We’re about trying to move the place that we all care about forward in a substantive way.
Did you have leadership experiences growing up?
My leadership roles were fairly limited. I was a quiet, geeky kid who read a lot, an only child … whose leadership roles were generally supportive, rather than out front. The place where I picked up the most leadership cues is from my engagement with our family business.
My family owned Ulbrich’s, which was a more than 100-year-old retail business in Buffalo that at its peak had 13 stores around Western New York, a couple hundred employees, and sold books and cards, art supplies, gifts and office supplies. I grew up in the stores and in the warehouse and driving a truck and doing all this stuff that helps support the business. My leadership lessons came specifically from my grandfather, Anthony J. Paul. He came of age during the Depression in an Italian American family in Buffalo, and he started his first job pushing a cart around downtown Buffalo, delivering books and office supplies. He rose through the ranks and ultimately bought the company from the founding family in the early 1970s. He had great success and then also experienced great failure because the business went away in 1990, like a lot of locally based retail operations did here in Syracuse and across the country.
But I distinctly remember his work ethic. He’s the chairman of the company and he’s unloading a truck. And he’s unloading a truck with a lot of gusto, you know? The quicker the stuff gets into the store, the quicker the stuff gets sold. And that, to this day, has stuck with me.
My family’s story is a classic family business story — highs and lows. And I think it’s instructive. It’s something that I’ve kept in the back of my mind throughout my own leadership journey.
I read that it was a bad boss who drove you into the nonprofit world. Can you tell the story?
I was a history major. I went to Notre Dame, and then I came back home to Buffalo, and I went to law school. This was during the era when “L.A. Law” was a big deal. And so I was like, oh, I’m going to be a cool lawyer. I became a civil litigator. And, you know, I remember getting cold sweats off the elevator … every day.
The work I was doing was highly antagonistic. It’s litigation. [It] made me want to look at a different way to use the talents that I had accumulated with some sort of social purpose. And so at age 28, I had my career crisis, and I decided to go in a different direction that first took me to the United Way in Buffalo as a fundraiser, and then took me into the community foundation field, first at our trade association, the Council on Foundations in Washington, and then in Los Angeles, the California Community Foundation, before I came here.
About that bad boss …
The boss was the reason for the cold sweats! Being screamed at. I remember distinctly at one point being accused of losing a settlement check that I had nothing to do with, and even though I pointed out that I had nothing to do with it, there was no apology forthcoming. It was like: Here’s 200 cases, go deal with it. It wasn’t exactly a welcoming and nurturing environment.
The Community Foundation has tripled in growth over your tenure. How did you create that growth mindset?
There was a demand from the community for us to have more impact. We heard that then and we hear it now. Philanthropically, Syracuse hasn’t been as well-resourced as we could be. And so I took it as a personal mission to grow our capacity. During my tenure here, we’ve quadrupled in scale and in across multiple metrics. And I think the lesson learned from that is that we were able to invest in our own capacity: the staff who work with our donors, the communication of our message, telling the stories of donors and of impact, and opportunity for change.
This building is an example. We bought this building (the CNY Philanthropy Center, 431 E. Fayette St.) at the bottom of the stock market in 2009. … One of the things that frustrated our board and our staff back then was that we were the largest philanthropic organization in the community, but a lot of people didn’t know who we were. Being able to have a street presence in a space that also had convening capacity, where we could bring people together, and work with our nonprofit partners and collaborators in different ways, was something that we had seen [work] in other communities.
Diversity, equity and inclusion is a topic on every leader’s lips these days. What value does it bring to the organization?
For the new strategic plan coming out in June, we had a deliberate series of conversations around issues of equity — across different types and levels of systemic bias: racial economic, gender, ability, identity and so forth. My experience has been that when you take those kinds of lenses into account, and you apply them to your work, you end up with better decisions. It enables us to have an impact in a systemic way that we might not otherwise.
A good example is the lead poisoning work. Lead poisoning is an environmental injustice. It’s a racial injustice. It’s an economic injustice. If you look at the history of redlining and residential patterns in Syracuse, those maps from the 1930s, and [overlay] where the lead poisoning is today, they match up. This is decades and decades in the making. And most of the kids who are suffering from lead poisoning are kids who are from communities of color. Every dollar that we invest in lead poisoning remediation returns something like $20 to $200 back to the community, either in benefits or costs that our society has avoided. And anybody who looking at a financial return of 20-1 or 200-1 would be enthusiastic about that kind of investment.
As you say, the lead problem has been around for decades. Why couldn’t government alone solve it?
Philanthropy is able to do things that government cannot, or may need prodding to do, or may need partners to move forward. By putting a stake down on it publicly, making a multimillion-dollar, multi-year commitment to it, being very vocal, I think we helped partners in the city and county get more explicitly aggressive in this space. We were able to bring together folks from who were engaged in neighborhood and empower them, and also engage productively with folks in government. Ultimately, that produced significantly enhanced government-level investments. For the first time, we also endorsed a specific piece of legislation in the city around lead poisoning as a hazard related to the governance of rental properties in the city. That’s an example of the Community Foundation moving out beyond its historical niche into the public policy space.
You’re building leaders here in your own organization and in other nonprofits. Do you have some tips for up-and-coming leaders?
You have to pick your lanes. You can’t be everything to everybody. Understanding the ecosystem … and where we best fit is an art.
One of the things we do here is say “no.” We don’t get to say “yes” all the time. We have a grant round currently, where we have an enormous number of grant requests. They’re not all going to be able to be fulfilled. The distinction is: How do you say no? And one of the things that we have adopted over time is: It may not be now. The question is when.
If you could go back in time and give one piece of advice to your younger self, what would it be?
I would tell young Pete that life is not linear. When you’re coming out of high school or college, you don’t necessarily have a sense of path. I can point to different inflection points: my career crisis at 28, our decision to come back here, my decision to move on to Worcester, Massachusetts, where my next opportunity will be come this summer. There are inflection points in life, some of which you can control and some of which you can’t. And how you create your own personal resiliency through those is a constant thing.
What was your impression of Syracuse when you arrived in 2008, and now as you leave 15 years later?
The one degree of separation between people. I came from Los Angeles, and there are literally more kids in the L.A. Unified School District –— 700,000 kids — than there are people in Central New York. How do you move the needle in a community of 10 million people? Here, the level of connectedness allows for more opportunities to make change. So that’s positive thing.
The thing that was distressing to me was the constant negativity. I remember going to the DMV and talking to the person there, and I was getting my California license changed. The person said to me, “Why are you moving here?” And I was thinking, when we get to the point where we don’t ask that question, when we say how awesome it is when people are moving here, we’ll know that we’ve made an inflection point. And I think that is starting to turn, especially with the changes coming in the near term with the Micron development. We’re not there yet.
How do we turn that around?
People are rightly skeptical. There’s been a lot of civic trauma over time. However, there’s a lot to be encouraged about. There are a lot of people working in good faith with goodwill, moving the community forward. And there’s a lot to do. While skepticism is warranted, it is reasonable to have good faith in the future, based on what I’m seeing here.
What is our community’s biggest unmet challenge?
There is a lot to do, and the data doesn’t lie. We have the highest incidence of child poverty for larger cities in the country. Syracuse has the highest geographic concentrations of poverty for African American and Latino populations in the country. Those are not things to be proud of. They have been motivating for us and for other philanthropic actors, for organizations like CenterState CEO, for the city and the county. But the data is there. And that needs to change.
We have lingering and systemic issues around race that we need to continue to work on. And that is a challenge that isn’t specific to Syracuse but shows up in communities across the country.
What is Central New York’s best asset?
Central New York has amazing people, amazing ecological and environmental resources. At a time of change in in climate and change the population trends and whatnot, we have some distinct advantages. We’ve got a lot of water. But fundamentally we have amazing people. That’s are our best asset — and one of the reasons to be optimistic about the future.
The weekly “Conversation on Leadership” features Q&A interviews about leadership, success and innovation. Next week: Mike Intaglietta, executive director of the Landmark Theatre in downtown Syracuse.
To suggest a candidate for Conversations on Leadership, email Marie Morelli at mmorelli@syracuse.com. Read previous entries in the series.
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