It’s sinking in. The impact left by Ralph Wilson and the foundation that bears his name has produced a paradigm shift for Buffalo, with key benefits in the cultural sector.
Recent gifts to local arts and cultural organizations both large and small help fill funding gaps that have long existed.
Wilson, the founder and longtime owner of the Buffalo Bills who died in 2014, entrusted the leaders of his Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation with disbursing $1.2 billion to worthy causes in Southeast Michigan and Western New York over a 20-year period. Because the foundation has an end date for spending this money, it can give big amounts for big projects, and that’s exactly what’s happened.
The former LaSalle Park is being transformed into the state-of-the-art Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Centennial Park, with completion due in 2025. This investment in outdoor recreation accompanies the foundation’s generous support of trail systems throughout the region.
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Wilson’s desire to spur Western New York’s economic development is demonstrated through sizable gifts to Buffalo’s startup ecosystem, with multimillion dollar investments in Launch NY, 43North and Endeavor Western New York. Nor was the foundation absent from efforts to provide economic revitalization for East Buffalo; there have been large investments in the Northland Workforce Training Center and East Side Avenues, an effort to rebuild business districts.
In football terms, we haven’t even reached halftime of this 20-year giving period and already the foundation has gone a long way toward fulfilling its initial goal of improving the region’s health – in every sense of that term.
One of the most admirable aspects of the foundation’s philosophy is its ability to connect arts and culture with a community’s economic health. As David Egner, president/CEO of the Wilson Foundation, put it: “Arts are economic development.”
Foundation Board Chair Mary Wilson, Ralph Wilson’s widow, expands on Egner’s statement: “Arts and cultural institutions, collectively, contribute to the very fabric of community identity, making them essential in retaining and attracting top talent that fuel our business community.”
This explains the extraordinary contributions the foundation has made to Western New York’s arts and cultural organizations, including a nearly $60 million permanent endowment, which dispenses $3 million in unrestricted operating funds ranging from $100,000 to $500,000 annually to 13 of the region’s largest arts and culture nonprofits, as well as provides $500,000 in grants for small and midsize organizations. This endowment is being operated by the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo.
Through giving an endowment, the foundation helps secure the futures of such organizations, small and large, for decades to come, with yearly gifts they can use to leverage other support.
Western New York’s philanthropic community often – and justifiably – targets its attention to areas of great need among the region’s most underserved communities. Sometimes, arts and culture are not perceived as urgently in need.
That’s why the Wilson Foundation’s recent entry into the local nonprofit environment has made such a sizable and welcome difference.
Recent news that the community area in the AKG Buffalo Arts Museum – which is nearing completion – is to be called the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Town Square is not surprising, given that the foundation was also a generous supporter of the museum’s expansion. But giving this extraordinary space Wilson’s name also provides the perfect spot to sit and pay tribute.
It is a legacy that deserves no less.
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