The Social Services Shake-Up

“I cannot imagine telling another young person to sleep outside,” Ozone House executive director Krista Girty testified emotionally at the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners in June. “I can’t.” 

A governmental alliance called the New Human Services Partnership (NHSP) had recently awarded five-year grants to seven human service nonprofits. That was good news for the Child Care Network, the Corner Health Center, Food Gatherers, Michigan Ability Partners, Packard Health, the Shelter Association, and Ypsilanti Meals on Wheels, each of which will receive $200,000 to $300,000 a year.

It was bad news for Girty’s youth shelter and more than two dozen other agencies that, until last year, enjoyed stable funding from a larger partnership that included Washtenaw United Way and the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation.

At the June meeting, speaker after speaker stressed the importance of the work done by the rejected agencies, which included such heavyweights as Avalon Housing, SOS Community Services, and the Alpha House family shelter. 

“Not one penny for Alpha House, SOS, Safe House [domestic violence shelter], or Ozone youth shelters?” asked Alpha House director Ellen Schulmeister, attending virtually. “Not one penny for the 200 children who become homeless each year?”

The commissioners were put on the defensive—especially because many speakers pointed out that they still had $10 million uncommitted from the $71 million the county received in federal Covid relief funding. Governments have considerable discretion on how to use the money, but it must be spent by the end of 2024.

The deadline was the reason some commissioners appeared reluctant to tap the federal windfall. Commissioner Katie Scott said that using short-term funding amounted to “kicking the can down the road.” Other commissioners described it as a “Band-Aid.” 

Some commissioners took the criticism personally. “I wake up every morning asking myself what I can do for Washtenaw County,” stressed board chair Sue Shink (who’s running for state Senate). Commissioner Caroline Sanders struck back at the critics, saying that when she checked the websites of some of the rejected agencies, she saw a “disturbing … lack of current reporting” like recent annual reports. And she noted that she didn’t see any diversity among the advocates who spoke, adding, “It would have been nice to see more of a rainbow representation.” 

When it was pointed out that “community reviewers,” not the commissioners, made the recommendations, no one in the audience seemed placated. Nor did it help much that the county was putting up more than it ever had before for social services—$1.7 million a year—because that was still less than half the $4 million given out by the public-private partnership, Washtenaw Coordinated Funders (CoFu, for short).

By meeting’s end, the commissioners had voted to tap their reserves to grant six more months of “transition funds” to the groups previously supported by CoFu.

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“It would not have happened without our advocacy,” says Derrick Miller, whose Community Action Network will get more than $77,000 to run seven community centers in struggling neighborhoods through year-end.

Since the start of the pandemic, Miller emails, his agency “doubled in size without any support from the county.” But lots of social service agencies went beyond the call of duty during the pandemic, and no one is getting special consideration for it. Instead, the NHSP is reaching out through minigrants to groups that CoFu hadn’t funded.

That reflects a philosophical reset in the world of social services. Both governments and traditional funders like United Way are reorienting from a focus on specific needs to attacking underlying causes. And in making funding decisions, they’re looking beyond existing agencies to grassroots organizations, especially those led by people who are themselves BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of color).

Alpha House’s Schulmeister, who previously saw the Shelter Association through a rocky patch, emails that she “cannot stress enough” that she supports “addressing systemic inequities and working on the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion … The shelter would not exist if the economy and criminal justice system and society were equitable.” But, she adds, “the shelter is as affected by these things as the people we serve are.” Translation: she still needs to pay her staff.

Until last year, the family shelter got one-third of its budget from CoFu. The county’s $53,000 in transition funding means it’s covered for the rest of the calendar year. But because Schulmeister had requested a six-figure grant from NHSP, she’d asked for only $25,000 from United Way—and been awarded just $10,000. 

The grant applications “were due at the same time,” Schulmeister explains. Deciding who to ask for what “is always a gamble. This year, we lost.” 

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CoFu was supposed to eliminate those gambles. In 2010, Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, and the Washtenaw Urban County (representing most of its other local governments) agreed to a joint application process with United Way and the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation (St. Joe’s later joined as well). The bold experiment represented “the first time that key human service donors across both the private and public spheres have agreed to share funding processes and outcomes,” according to an early document.

The members agreed to target five areas of need: aging; early childhood; housing and homelessness; safety-net health and nutrition; and school-aged youth. Having “a single overall set of guidelines describing the funds available from all funders,” its creators wrote, would streamline a cumbersome application process that forced groups to make multiple submissions. Another hope was that CoFu would bring like-minded agencies closer, encouraging information sharing and joint funding applications.

“The big-picture idea here is that we can make more of an impact on the area of greatest need in our community by working together instead of acting as independent entities,” Neel Hajra, at the time the CEO of the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation, was quoted as saying in 2012.

In 2016, the AAACF won a prestigious federal award for “public-private philanthropic partnerships.” Both Hajra and United Way’s CEO, Pam Smith, praised what Smith described as a “data-driven, outcomes-focused grant making collaborative with a $24 million investment in the social safety net in Washtenaw County.” 

But by then, funders’ priorities were already starting to change. United Way’s 2017 annual report laid out a “new strategic plan” that “targets Equity, Health, Education, and Financial Stability … By 2030 we aspire to live in a community where your zip code no longer determines your opportunity in life.”

In an online interview, Smith explains that her agency had begun to question CoFu’s benefits. The collaborative approach, she says, created “multiple levels of communication” that complicated decision-making.

Then came a somewhat critical 2018 outside report that evaluated “outcomes”—the effectiveness of the programs funded. And the first Covid lockdown in March 2020, she says, “showed us we want to respond in a timely manner” to a crisis—exceedingly difficult when 90 percent of its funds were locked into three-to-five-year CoFu commitments.

New AAACF CEO Shannon Polk and vice-president Jillian Rosen also say the evaluation influenced their decision not to continue: “We couldn’t necessarily connect our investments” to the outcomes they sought,” Rosen says. For instance, one program was intended to improve school attendance in Ypsilanti, but the study found absenteeism unchanged (though, encouragingly, graduation rates were up). 

In August 2020, AAACF told its CoFu partners it would not renew its participation. In November, it informed its grantees. United Way announced its departure at almost the same time.

“We were all in the same room,” Smith says. “Nobody was in the dark, including the nonprofits.” Both agencies fulfilled all their existing obligations, and like the county, provided “transition” funds to the affected service providers. But Washtenaw Coordinated Funders is now defunct.

“We’re an anti-poverty and anti-racist organization,” says United Way’s Pam Smith. “Ten years ago, I don’t think we would have said that.” 

In choosing what to fund, Smith says, “We want to talk about poverty, we want to talk about racism, and we want to talk about trauma”—and they want to fund groups that “are also working in those areas.” 

United Way’s new Community Impact Fund is providing $1 million annually for three years “to support solutions that mitigate and disrupt the intersectional impacts of poverty, racism, and trauma.” Its new Justice Fund is granting $380,000 to “historically excluded communities inWashtenaw County as they build power, agency and resilience.” 

The grants are unrestricted. ”Do what you need to do with the money,” Smith says she tells recipients. “If that’s paying the light bill, pay the light bill.” 

Forty-one organizations received Community Impact funding, including familiar names like the Ann Arbor YMCA but also newcomers like the Mutual Aid Network of Ypsilanti. MANY describes itself as a “worker self-directed 501c(3) organization” that helps “local, grassroots groups and programs committed to anti-oppression, cooperation” access “fiscal sponsorship, tax incentives, liability insurance, and other benefits.” 

Justice Fund grants went to the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice as well as the recently organized Coalition for Re-envisioning our Safety (see Calls & letters, p. 16), which advocates for an unarmed safety response team. And Smith proudly reports that,  including board members, about two-thirds of the recipients have BIPOC individuals in leadership positions.

The Community Foundation, too, looks “forward to partnering with local groups who center equity in their work,” emails Rosen, its vice president for community investment. But its most dramatic initiative is a partnership with Washtenaw United Way and UpTogether, a national nonprofit that provides direct cash assistance to families. The $250,000 budget, jointly funded by the foundation and United Way, will provide quarterly payments of up to $625 for forty families. “We’re just really excited to be able to bring together philanthropic capital in that way to help financially empower the people here in our community,” Rosen says.

It’s an idea that’s growing in popularity across the country, though studies so far have shown mixed results. Meanwhile, the groups that provide services like housing and senior assistance are scrambling to replace the lost funding—or figure out how to make do without. 

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Leaders of several agencies say that while the New Human Service Partnership was being planned, they found it difficult to get answers from the county about how it would work; emails were either not answered, or answers were vague. They knew that county staff, like themselves, were beset with pandemic headaches, but this didn’t ease their anxiety. (“I certainly share some accountability for that,” says county administrator Greg Dill.)

Then, once the grants were announced, the unfunded agencies that weren’t funded faced a financial cliff. They’re grateful for the six-month reprieve—but are wondering how they’ll make their budgets balance without CoFu’s long-term funding.

Alpha House hosts about six families at a time in its building on Jackson Rd. After losing her “gamble” on an NHSP grant, Schulmeister emails, she’s facing the prospect of having to raise $245,000 from donations to cover its costs next year. “That is $100,000 more than we have raised before.”

In separate interviews, leaders of five CoFu-funded agencies told me they were disappointed by the breakup but acknowledged that the partnership was not all they had hoped for, either. While applying for grants had become somewhat easier, funders’ requirement that they demonstrate outcomes required staff to spend hours documenting their work. And while “we did coordinate a little more,” says one leader, “we all have boards. We’re all competing for increasingly scarce funds.”

CoFu was “not perfect but we could rely on it,” says Anya Abramzon, the director of Jewish Family Services. Though JFS didn’t make the cut for an NHSP grant, it was one of four agencies placed in a second tier, meaning it would be considered if “future funds become available.” JFS got more than $89,000 from the June extension, but unless those future funds appear, Abramzon faces a 20 percent shortfall in her senior services budget next year.

County administrator Dill says he doesn’t “want to fund critical services with soft money or non-structural money,” but emphasizes his commitment to finding a “stable funding source” for social services. He also doesn’t rule out some kind of future partnership with outside funders. “Full disclosure: I’m on the United Way board. In fact, I’m president.” 

But after the CoFu disillusionment, it seems unlikely that they’ll return to such close, long-term collaboration anytime soon. As existing agencies hustle to replace the lost revenue, and as funders seek to develop new, community-based collaborators, the social services shake-up could just be beginning.

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This article has been edited since it was published in the August 2022 Ann Arbor Observer to credit Washtenaw United Way as a partner and co-funder of the UpTogether cash assistance program. 

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Calls & letters, September 2022

United Way of Washtenaw County CEO Pam Smith emailed to point out an omission in our August article on social services funding: the UpTogether guaranteed annual income trial is a partnership between the national nonprofit, Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation, and United Way. The Community Foundation and United Way are sharing the $250,000 cost.