Growth Spurt

Ralph Wilson Jr. paid $25,000 to found the Buffalo Bills in 1959 and held on to the football team for the rest of his life, delighting local fans who feared a larger city would lure the Bills away. Six months after he died in March 2014, the team was sold for $1.4-billion — and most of the proceeds went to the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation.

Ralph C. Wilson JR. Foundation

The man who patiently held on to the Bills had no interest in a perpetual foundation — the $1.3 billion grant maker won’t last even half as long as Wilson owned the team. He handpicked four life trustees, including his wife, Mary Wilson, and set a life span for the foundation of just 20 years.

Mary Wilson says her husband, who grew up in Detroit, wanted close confidantes to oversee the foundation’s spending after witnessing what he viewed as a philanthropic betrayal early in his life.

“Ralph had seen how the Ford Foundation left Detroit [for New York City, in 1953] and that really bothered him,” she says. “He wanted to make sure that the people who knew him best, and the ones that he had total confidence in, were part of this.”

With little direction from Ralph Wilson, the trustees had wide latitude to shape the foundation’s focus. They settled on two grant-making regions — Western New York, the fan base for the Bills, and Southeast Michigan, where Mr. Wilson lived. The trustees worked with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in 2015 to create four core subject areas that they thought would have appealed to the benefactor — children and youth, young adults and working families, caregivers, and livable communities.

In 2016, the Wilson Foundation hired David Egner, a longtime Michigan nonprofit and philanthropic leader, to become its first president.

Giving on a Curve

Wilson is already winning praise from outsiders for its innovative approach, including working closely with the community foundations in its target regions and setting up endowments to ensure that areas like youth sports and caregiving will be supported after the foundation closes in early 2035.

Having finalized its 20-member staff just over a year ago, the foundation has been spending cautiously — about $60 million last year — as it works to identify charities that can take on much bigger grants. Aided by a rising stock market, the foundation’s assets have risen some 30 percent from the original bequest of about $1 billion.

“We are failing miserably at spending ourselves out of existence,” Egner jokes.

Mr. Egner says the foundation’s spending will resemble a bell curve, with grant making peaking in the middle years then tapering to a smaller budget as the closure nears.

The foundation expects to soon begin spending about $100 million per year, roughly split between the two regions. That will add another deep pocket in beleaguered but philanthropy-rich Detroit, which has received significant support from the Kresge, W.K. Kellogg, and Ford foundations, among others, in recent years. And it will make Wilson by far the most significant grant maker in Western New York.

“One of our biggest challenges is where we fit in the philanthropic space,” Egner says. “Given our unique life cycle, how can we add value, fill gaps, and then exit gracefully? I don’t know the answers. We have a great opportunity to try some awesome experiments and then double down on what works. What we’re funding a few years from now could be completely different. I wake up every day exhilarated and terrified.”

The foundation has set up shop in Detroit, but over time it will spend roughly the same amounts in Western New York and Southeast Michigan, Mary Wilson says.

“There might be an imbalance in one year, but in the long run it will totally equal out,” she says. “Ralph would want it that way.”

Playing Ball

Its most advanced grant-making program to date focuses on youth sports and play. Wilson’s approach in that arena illustrates how it intends to use national research, local expertise, and high-performing charities to get as much out of its spending as possible.

“We’re never going to have 100 people on staff,” says Jim Boyle, Wilson’s vice president of programs and communications. “We’re investing in great partnerships.”

Ralph C. Wilson JR. Foundation

For example, more than a year ago, Wilson awarded $5 million each to the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo, and the Rochester Area Community Foundation to endow programs that will provide small grants to improve opportunities in youth sports. Then it asked the same foundations to assemble panels to help inform studies of local youth-sports opportunities that were conducted at Wilson’s behest by the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program.

The three studies found that only about 14 percent of youths in the recipient regions were actively playing for an hour a day, the level recommended by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — about half the national average of 27 percent. The studies estimated the costs of that relative inactivity — including health-care expenses later in life — at more than $1.5 billion.

Those findings prompted Wilson to spend an additional $10 million to expand opportunities for play in Western New York and Southeast Michigan via partnerships with two national leaders in developing space for play: The Tony Hawk Foundation will build up to 20 skateparks, and KaBoom will erect 20 “creative installations” at sites not typically associated with play, such as at bus stops or laundromats. KaBoom will also build two larger customized playgrounds in each region. Grants for local projects will be made by the community foundations in Buffalo and Southeast Michigan, from the $5 million donor-advised funds that Wilson set up at each organization, on top of the earlier $5 million endowments for youth sports.

Wilson plans to do even more with the Aspen Institute’s research. Possibilities include establishing a training and education program for youth-sports coaches and working to revitalize local youth leagues in urban areas, countering the trend of parents and children, especially in the suburbs, committing to costly traveling teams.

“A grant maker is a change maker,” says Tom Farrey, executive director of Aspen’s Sports & Society Program. “Wilson can create incentives for organizations to change their behavior.”

Focus on Partnerships

Wilson’s reliance on partners may stem in part from Egner’s long history in the nonprofit world. Early in his career, he worked as an executive assistant to Russell Mawby, who led the Kellogg Foundation from 1970 until 1995. (Mawby died in October, at 89.)

Egner learned from Mawby that philanthropy is not a solo endeavor. “Philanthropy is working with very modest resources when you’re looking at complex problems,” he says. “We need to see our resources as strategic stimulants. We can’t solve anything alone.”

Wilson has already set up four endowments worth a total of $19 million at the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo — along with the fund for youth sports, the endowments will be used to support caregivers, expand walking and biking areas in local communities, and buttress significant cultural or historic assets in the region. Similar endowments were established at the Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan.

“They’re relying on us for our deep local knowledge and our broad network of relationships,” says Clotilde Perez-Bode Dedecker, president of the Buffalo-area grant maker. “We’re the boots on the ground for them.”

“It’s a real partnership,” says Mariam Noland, who heads the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan. “Wilson isn’t just piling on — they’re building capacity at both of our organizations to be good partners.”

Wilson has also awarded $2 million each to the Michigan Health Endowment Fund and the Health Foundation for Western & Central New York to endow program-officer positions dedicated to developing strategies to support caregivers.

One benefit of those endowments is that others will handle the job of awarding and administering small grants — something Wilson isn’t staffed up to handle. Another benefit is that Wilson will receive information about all sorts of organizations, perhaps helping it identify groups that are ready for bigger grants.

“We can’t find another spend-down foundation that has this amount of capital and a regional focus,” Egner says. “We focus on 16 counties with about 8 million people. We’re going to have to up our game to make the deadline.”

Kyle Caldwell, executive director of the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University, has known Egner since the 1990s. Caldwell says he’s impressed to see Wilson experimenting now as it tries to figure out the best path forward.

“It’s so tempting to run the foundation as a math formula,” he says. “2035 is the end date — divide the corpus up and spend it out. They’re resisting that temptation, and embracing the framework of becoming a learning organization that wants to do strategic grant making.”

Other areas of focus for Wilson include after-school programs and work-force development. The foundation is channeling $5 million to organizations that run after-school STEM programs in the two regions. (The individual grants will run as high as $250,000 over three years.) Wilson is also a major sponsor of the North American competition of the MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge. The worldwide contest spotlights and supports entrepreneurs who use technology to help lower-income workers transition to new types of jobs.

Looking Toward Sunset

Egner is already looking ahead to the foundation’s sunset in 2035. Will it be challenging to hire and retain staff in the final decade? How will the foundation help employees transition into new opportunities?

He has studied the Atlantic Philanthropies, which made $8 billion in grants before issuing its final award in 2016. (It will close for good in 2020.) But he hungers for more research on best practices. Egner and Laurel Randi, head of the McCune Foundation, which aims to exhaust its assets by 2029, are working with the Johnson Center for Philanthropy to convene a meeting of leaders of spend-down foundations, perhaps this fall.

For now, Wilson’s biggest concern is getting more money out the door. It is building a nonprofit accelerator on the ground floor of its Detroit offices. It recently gave $4.75 million to TechTown, a business accelerator started by Wayne State University, to staff and manage the 7,500-square-foot space. A soft launch is expected this fall.

The hope is that the space will bring charities together and lead to coordinated efforts to attack local problems — the kind of approach that might need a big grant from the upstairs neighbor.

“We can’t get rid of $1.2 billion if we don’t build capacity for these organizations,” says Boyle, who is overseeing the effort. “Our program officers are pounding on my door every day, asking, ‘How’s it going.' "