This story is a companion piece to an article on a capital campaign focused solely on large gifts. Both stories were featured in our April package looking at new ideas in fundraising.
Janelle Green has been courted as a donor enough to know what to expect. “Typically, development campaigns are trying to figure out: ‘What do the donors want?’” says Green, a Michigan native who owns a winery in Santa Barbara, Calif., with her husband, Dan. “‘How can we entice them? Do they want a front-and-center table? Do they want a limousine ride to the event?’ All of these are things that, quite honestly, I’ve never been interested in.”
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Upon first meeting with Birth Detroit officials and volunteers, she realized their campaign was going to be different. The organization is trying to raise $4 million over two years to build the first Black-led birth center in Michigan, and at this initial meeting, over Zoom, participants were gently led to open up and talk about their personal hopes and fears about joining the campaign.
“Typically, we’re expected to walk into a room and write a check and get the sense of confidence that comes with that,” she says. “But we were asked in this situation to be vulnerable — ‘Who are you as a person? Who are you as a human?’”
Unorthodoxy is the norm for Birth Detroit’s campaign, which is being led by public-health experts who see conventional big-dollar fundraising tactics as toxic. “We will not have a birth center be named after the highest bidder,” says Leseliey Welch, a Birth Detroit co-founder. The organization instead will honor every donor in a virtual scroll at the center. The first 25-30 donors of gifts of $2,500 or more will be recognized in a quilt that honors the tradition of that craft in Black communities. Those who donate more than $250,000 will be named on small plaques accompanying art pieces by Detroit artists or Black birth workers.
The drive launched in January and has raised more than $700,000 in contributions and pledges. It is attracting big gifts but also plans to host a series of broad-based community events like an open house last fall celebrating the first year of its prenatal and childbirth education programs. The event had a festival-like feel, with a D.J. and catered food. Families who had received care at the center mingled with donors and their families. “It was a community event that brought people together across all these barriers and boundaries,” Welch says. “People just had a great time — and people wrote checks.”
Not Just Carnegies
Alyssa Wright, a fundraising consultant working with Birth Detroit, says its campaign is one of several rethinking donor relationships as they work to close racial-equity gaps. The declining number of average Americans giving to charity means nonprofits must seek big gifts from the wealthy, Wright says. “There’s no choice if we want to hit significant fundraising goals. But we have to figure out our approach and strategy to build right relationships and not relationships that feel uncomfortable to access those dollars or do harm.”
Part of that strategy, she says, is communications and activities that focus on bringing donors together in the community, like through house parties that aim to raise just a few thousand dollars. “We have to take control of the narrative. It’s about community investment. We don’t want it be, ‘Look at the Johnsons and Rockefellers and Carnegies.’”
The Neighborhood Birth Center in Boston, another Wright client, is running a capital campaign to raise at least $4 million to create a multiuse facility that would be home to artists, activists, and healers. that, like Detroit’s, will be led by women of color. Both centers seek foremost to address racial inequities in maternal health care. The rate of pregnancy-related deaths is more than three times higher for Black women than for white women, according to federal research. Yet the relatively few midwife-led birth centers in America are hard for women of color to access and are typically led by white women.
Donors, however, shouldn’t see themselves as saviors of poor Black women, says Nashira Baril, project director and founder of the Neighborhood Birth Center. She previously had been involved with a youth group whose fundraising included taking disadvantaged teens to see potential big donors. “It was really just like a minstrel show,” she says. “It was grotesque.”
When talking to donors, she instead focuses on the broader goal that she shares with Welch: to establish midwifery as a key component of a maternal health care system they believe is failing everyone. To wealthy white donors, Baril says, “Let’s be clear: This isn’t working for you, either.”
“We want to invite everyone to see themselves in this vision,” she says. “We’ve heard from white folks with terminal degrees earning $200,000 a year who are largely unhappy with their experience and their care. That understanding has really informed our approach to fundraising.”
Welch and Baril are both new to fundraising, learning the conventions of campaigns even as they upend them. With Wright, they try to anticipate the questions that might arise from donors about naming opportunities, board seats, and other campaign standbys. “It feels good to stand on our values,” Baril says. “But it’s also exhausting. We have to practice being countercultural at every turn.”
For Green, the winery donor and a mother of three, the approach is a welcome change. A former intensive-care pediatric nurse who also has trained as a nurse-midwife, she recently co-founded the Victoria Project, a nonprofit that pays for holistic maternity care for those who need financial help. She wants other women to have the care of midwives, doulas, hydrotherapists, lactation consultants, and others that she lacked.
Birth Detroit, Green says, is building a community of people committed to a shared vision. “Offering a donor name recognition or free advertising is transactional,” she says. “The opportunity to authentically connect with others and be valued for more than one’s money, in my opinion, is rare.”
