Homegrown Foundation Leader Builds Bridges and Trust

Isaiah Oliver carefully parks his car in the crumbling parking lot of North Flint’s Greater Holy Temple Church. The lot at the single-story brick and stone building was meant for parishioners coming to worship, not 18-wheelers carrying pallets of bottled water.

But as the city has grappled with its water crisis, the church has been one of the main distribution hubs for donated water, food, clothing, and other essential items for the struggling neighborhood. That disaster exposed thousands to dangerously high levels of lead when an emergency manager switched the city’s water source in 2014 to save money. Officials failed to treat the water, a step that would have prevented pipe corrosion.

“The water crisis opened up our eyes to the needs in the city,” says Sandra Jones, who directs the R.L. Jones Community Outreach Center housed at the church.

With no easy access to a grocery store or social services, the center has continued to meet the evolving needs of residents — such as providing Covid-19 vaccines — through the pandemic.

On a spring visit, “Mother Jones,” as she’s known to many, embraces Oliver. They walk into a room at the center full of racks of donated clothes and then to the back lot where every Thursday 300 to 400 vehicles drive through to pick up water and food.

Oliver, CEO of the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, is well known at the center and throughout Flint. He grew up here and took the helm of the foundation in 2017, after working there for nearly three years.

“If it were not for the community foundation, we wouldn’t exist,” Jones says. The foundation has supported the outreach center with more than $430,000 in grant funding over the years. Other foundations in and around the city provide support as well.

Jones says Oliver and his colleagues understand their plight because many have lived it.

“They’ve been boots on the ground. They’ve got their ears to the ground,” she says. “If my water is not good, theirs isn’t, either. If I have housing around me that needs to be fixed, they do, too.”

As the public-health water emergency made headlines across the world, the community foundation raised more than $19 million for its Flint Kids Fund — from nearly every state as well as abroad. That money continues to help kids throughout the city, including those who were exposed to lead in the water.

Sean Work

Now as families try to figure out how to recover from the water crisis and the pandemic, during which time the foundation also received a bump in donations, the foundation and Oliver are building on their reserve of trust and their proximity to the community.

As the community foundation’s first Flint native and first Black leader since it was founded in 1988, Oliver has worked to build bridges between marginalized people and wealthy donors in the region. He believes working closely alongside people who have been left out is essential, and he’s worked to help other foundation CEOs do that, too. In his five years leading the foundation, working with his team of 23, he has helped the institution evolve, focusing on racial equity and advocating for more government resources.

“It’s so clear that Isaiah feels a real sense of accountability to his community,” says Susan Taylor Batten, president of ABFE: a Philanthropic Partnership for Black Communities, where Oliver is a board member. “That just makes him refreshing in this sector and a model for others.”

‘Erosion of Trust’

Even more than the erosion of the city’s water pipes, “the erosion of trust was the biggest issue that came out of the water crisis,” Oliver said in an interview in his downtown office.

Rebuilding trust in the institutions meant to protect people is a continuing process. Despite reassurances that the city’s water is now safe, many residents still don’t trust the tap and opt to drink bottled water instead.

The crisis also presented opportunities, Oliver says, both to help others learn about the value of community foundations and for his own leadership to shine through.

“The exposure that we’ve had has given me a platform to talk about what we can do to support people in marginalized communities,” he says.

To show some of the work the foundation has supported and where more help is needed, Oliver gave a reporter a tour of the city. As they drove and made stops in the city, he shared stories of Flint and its neighborhoods.

Sean Work

The driving tour cruises through Civic Park, the first General Motors planned neighborhood. Here single-family homes were built on an assembly-line process for workers and their families. As jobs and workers left, and the tax base eroded, the neighborhood became a shell of its old self.

Some houses have been preserved, but many have been torn down. Residents in Civic Park and across the city have been working to revitalize their neighborhoods, starting community gardens and hosting cleanup events, some with the help of the community foundation’s neighborhood small-grants program.

“People in our Flint neighborhoods that have been there for a long time have a lot of pride and connection, no matter what the narrative is,” says Lynn Williams, community-engagement officer at the foundation.

On the south side, near the city’s cultural district with its museums and concert halls, are the grand mansions built for Flint’s elites when the city was a thriving center for GM’s manufacturing. “The underbelly of that story is ugly,” Oliver says. Black and brown people could not live there; nonwhite workers could enter to do their jobs. They were not allowed to come to the neighborhood after dark.

Upper-income residents as well as some elected officials live in the neighborhood today.

As the leader of the community foundation, Oliver tries to be the link between Flint’s pockets of wealth and disadvantage. He points to other leaders such as Fred Blackwell, CEO of the San Francisco Foundation, as models of how to work to change systems that perpetuate disparities, while also getting wealthy individuals to support the region’s needs.

“I’m a bridge between those folks who have resources and those who need resources in order to get things done,” Oliver says.

The bonds Oliver has built throughout the city were evident as a who’s who of Flint gathered under a tent on a lush green lawn to dedicate a rebuilt public library in the city’s cultural district. Funded by foundation grants, wealthy donors, and government dollars, the gleaming modern $20 million building is symbolic of the central role philanthropies play in support of the city’s civic life.

The current and former mayors were there, along with members of the school and library boards and the leaders of other local foundations. Oliver could hardly walk a few feet without stopping for a hug, handshake, or fist bump with someone he knew.

The same thing happened during the short walk to the Farmers’ Market as he greeted people by name and mingled with them as they worked at food stands or grabbed a bite of lunch.

Growing Up in Poverty

Oliver, 41, was born and raised in Flint. For the first nine years of his life, he lived with his mother, stepfather, and two stepbrothers on the city’s north side, not far from the part of town now served by the Community Outreach Center. When his parents split, he lived with his mother, who supported them with a part-time job at a fast food restaurant and government benefits.

“I lived poor as hell, and I didn’t exactly know it,” Oliver says. “My mom protected me from that reality and allowed me to dream.”

He says she impressed on him the importance of education and building relationships with people in his neighborhood. He bonded with his schoolteachers and principals. He spent much of his youth at church, first at King of Kings Church of God in Christ and later at North Star Missionary Baptist Church, where he played drums with the choir.

After he graduated from Flint Northwestern High School, he left home to attend Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, where he graduated with a degree in graphic design in 2003. He now sits on the university’s Board of Trustees.

Returning to Flint, a majority Black city, after living in the predominantly white college town, helped him see some of the divisions in his hometown that before hadn’t been as clear — the privilege of some residents, the lack of access to resources and opportunities for others.

In 2004, Oliver was hired as an administrator at the local Mott Community College, where he focused on community outreach and building partnerships with governmental and philanthropic organizations.

In 2011, when he and his wife, Shay, had their first child, Zaiah, Oliver ran for the board of Flint Community Schools. He won and served for six years, including one year as president. Oliver has also served as a board member at Hurley Medical Center, a nonprofit hospital serving three counties in eastern Michigan.

Sean Work

In his role at the community college, he became involved in a communitywide strategy to improve literacy in and around Flint. Many students entering the community college weren’t academically prepared for their courses, and the college knew that wasn’t an issue it could address on its own. Representatives from local elementary and secondary schools, businesses, churches, and philanthropies began meeting to discuss how they could serve the area’s most vulnerable students.

Because of Oliver’s role at the community college and his ties to other local institutions as a board member, he was asked to guide the discussions about how different groups could help with the issue. During one of those meetings, Kathi Horton, who was president of the community foundation, saw Oliver in action.

Horton says she was impressed by Oliver’s ability to ask the right questions and then get out of the way to let others talk and come up with ideas and possible solutions.

“It was obvious he was a very good listener,” she recalls. “He was just masterful in bringing out everyone’s voices and helping the group get comfortable with the fact that there wasn’t an immediate consensus, as is so often the case in really challenging situations.”

Horton told him that a job would soon open up at the community foundation. She encouraged him to apply, and in 2014, he joined the foundation as vice president.

‘Street Cred’

Years later, in 2017, when Horton was ready to retire, she said it was clear that the foundation would need someone who understood the neighborhoods and the hopes and needs of the people.

As the community foundation became the recipient of millions of dollars from other foundations that wanted to support water-crisis recovery, it was moving away from a top-down style of grant making and in a new direction that went beyond just writing checks.

“We needed to involve community members who before had not been involved in our grant-making decisions,” Horton recalls, and Oliver had developed a reputation as a leader invested in making Flint a better place to live. His engaging style of leadership was effective in encouraging residents to come together and participate, even those who might have been skeptical or reluctant to come to the table.

Oliver, whom colleagues and peers describe as emotionally intelligent, relatable, and always open to learning, “had street cred that was going to be critical for the foundation,” Horton says. “His style of leadership was just ideal during what was that huge transitional time kind of through the water crisis.”

The Board of Trustees tapped Oliver for the CEO role. He has continued to work to amplify resident voices and help the foundation expand its role as an advocate.

Equity Is Top Priority

Last year the community foundation and its donor-advised fund holders made $9.6 million in grants, closing out 2021 with more than $299 million in assets.

Improving literacy remains a priority for the community foundation’s grant making. Other priorities include increasing access to healthy food, strengthening resident-led neighborhood improvements, and providing grants to support the well-being of children affected by the water crisis.

The foundation has worked to keep racial equity as a focus through all of its work. That was especially important through its Covid-19 rapid-response fund and its participation in a local committee to address the causes of the pandemic’s heavy toll on Black residents.

The committee pushed to place coronavirus testing sites closer to where the most-affected people lived and to have community health workers go into neighborhoods to distribute masks and information about testing. As they were during the water crisis, churches were central in helping residents get the resources they needed.

The foundation is trying to help government keep equity front of mind, too. Oliver is quick to point out that philanthropy alone isn’t enough, and he expects the foundation to do even more to prod all levels of government in the future.

For example, the foundation is working with the Council of Michigan Foundations to get federal money to people and organizations that need it most. Using a $250,000 grant from the council, the community foundation is helping city officials figure out how to fairly distribute money from the American Rescue Plan, the federal stimulus package. With input from residents, the community foundation will help leaders understand what local people need and use its grant-making experience to assist in awarding the money.

As Oliver works with those in Flint, other leaders in philanthropy have noted his commitment to improving the work of foundations outside of his hometown. Oliver sits on several statewide and national boards and is a Civil Society Fellow through a partnership between the Aspen Institute and the Anti-Defamation League.

“He’s certainly centered and concerned about Flint, but in service to that, he is always exploring what’s out there that can serve his community and his peers,” says Kyle Caldwell, president and CEO of the Council of Michigan Foundations. “He’s one of those people who really wants to stay on the front edge.”

Tracking Donations

In the summer of 2017, not long after Oliver became CEO, residents demanded to know how the foundation was spending the influx of water-crisis donations. He made a personal commitment to answer every question about the foundation’s grant making and finances — through its annual financial reports and by talking with people when they called. He says he wants to be known as a leader people can approach.

“When you come to our door, I’m going to know you or somebody you know,” he says. “I’m a member of the community who just happens to be the leader of the community foundation.”

Flintstones, as residents call themselves, “reserve the right to question everything,” he says. And when it comes to building trust in the community foundation, he believes the foundation has come a long way. There’s no endpoint, he says, “but we’re in a better place than we’ve ever been before.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. See more about the grant and our gift-acceptance policy.