Philanthropy’s Response to Flint Offers Lessons for Dealing With Water Crises — and Government Failures

Each week semi-trucks arrive with donations of bottled water at three community help centers in churches throughout the city, despite the fact that Flint’s water system has met state and federal standards for lead in drinking water for six years.

Thousands of water service lines have been replaced, and millions of dollars have been put into infrastructure improvements. But the city is still mired in the aftermath of its water crisis, which began more than eight years ago and eroded residents’ trust in their government to provide basic services and protection.

“There’s been a tremendous amount of work, but we still have a situation where a meaningful percentage of the population still doesn’t trust the water,” says Jamie Gaskin, CEO of the United Way of Genesee County, which includes Flint and provides water and other resources to the nonprofit help centers.

Flint was the canary in the coal mine.

Lessons from the city’s lead and water crisis are especially important now as other cities like Jackson, Miss., and Baltimore struggle with drinking-water issues resulting from failing infrastructure and decades of disinvestment. These cities have all seen their predominantly Black populations shrink in recent decades. Flint’s is a human-made crisis, showing leaders’ intentional disregard for the community’s health and welfare, while in Jackson, river flooding exacerbated decades of underinvestment in resources for the state’s mostly Black capital city.

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As nonprofits and foundations contend with what promises to be a persistent issue, the coordinated philanthropic response in Flint — where 10 foundations pledged $125 million to respond to short- and longer-term needs that arose from the disaster, and ultimately gave tens of millions more — offers a case study in how grant makers can shape a city’s recovery.

Foundations and city residents who helped distribute funds were determined to use the tragedy — and the influx of donations that followed — to tackle systemic issues of inequity and bring about long-term change. They boosted the capacity of local government and organizations and made investments in health care as well as economic development and education. They supported community organizing and helped elevate the voices of residents to advocate for policy fixes. And they recognized that access to trustworthy information, in addition to clean water, was critical.

A Grant-Making Powerbroker

Michael A. Naddeo

Flint’s water crisis began in 2014 when the city switched its drinking-water supply from Detroit’s system to the Flint River to save money, but it failed to adequately test and treat that water to prevent pipe corrosion. For well over a year, residents complained about brown and smelly water that flowed from their taps. Their skin was irritated, their hair was falling out. Tens of thousands of residents were exposed to unsafe levels of lead. Hardest hit were the city’s nearly 9,000 children, who were particularly vulnerable because their growing bodies absorb more of the toxin than adults. Exposure affects the nervous system and brain development, which can result in a wide range of long-term cognitive and behavioral problems.

It wasn’t until early 2016 that state officials publicly acknowledged the water was unsafe and declared a state of emergency. At that point, grant makers kicked into high gear.

It helped that Flint had a local philanthropic powerbroker to organize the response. Ridgway White, CEO of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, in Flint, brought other grant makers together on a call to highlight where support was most needed and help coordinate their response in ways that fit with their philanthropic priorities. (Editor’s note: The Chronicle is receiving support for its transition to nonprofit status from the Mott Foundation, which was not involved in any way with the reporting and editing of this article.)

Mott was the largest contributor, giving a total of $116.7 million for water-crisis recovery efforts. Other grant makers in Michigan and beyond — including the W.K. Kellogg, Ford, Robert Wood Johnson, and Kresge foundations — each contributed millions more.

Early on, nonprofits and philanthropies stepped into a leadership void, moving faster than government agencies to distribute water and begin to deal with the crisis. White called Michigan’s then-governor and offered to pay a third of the $12 million cost to reconnect Flint to Detroit’s water system. It was an unprecedented step for a grant maker to contribute to a major government infrastructure project. Foundations also funded new staff positions in the local government, bolstering the city’s capacity to serve its residents.

“We would be nowhere in Flint without philanthropy,” says Mona Hanna-Attisha, the local pediatrician whose research helped expose elevated levels of lead in the city’s water. “We’re so grateful that we had philanthropy there to do things where government failed.”

Foundations supported advocacy groups like Flint Rising and Michigan Faith in Action, which spread clear and accurate information about how to deal with the water crisis, and helped organize residents to push for lead-line replacements, new water quality standards, and financial settlements for residents.

Since then, the State of Michigan has provided more than $350 million to Flint, including nearly $100 million to replace all of the city’s lead and galvanized steel water lines. That project was supposed to be completed this fall, but work remains. The Environmental Protection Agency awarded the state an additional $100 million to support water infrastructure updates. The trillion-dollar infrastructure package signed into law by President Biden last year allocates more than $50 billion to improve water infrastructure around the country, but experts say even that investment will barely scratch the surface of what’s needed.

White and other local foundation leaders say grant makers can help attract government funds, work with government agencies to create road maps for how to respond to a challenge, and push public officials to respond to a community’s needs. “We never want to supplant government,” says White, though there are times when foundations can help catalyze more government funds.

Ryan Garza/ZUMAPRESS.com/Newscom

Focus on Kids

With more than $3.9 billion in assets, the Mott Foundation has been the city’s largest philanthropic booster for generations. The foundation, whose namesake donor was a longtime General Motors board member and for a time its largest shareholder, is the 31st wealthiest in the United States.

In addition to the $4 million to reconnect Flint to Detroit’s water system, Mott’s grants also included $69 million aimed at improving educational opportunities for Flint kids, $24.7 million to help revitalize the local economy, and $13.4 million to help mitigate the health dangers residents — and especially children — suffered due to lead exposure.

“Having a foundation that is so prominent in terms of its scale in a relatively small market like Flint gave us a substantial advantage,” says United Way’s Gaskin.

His organization used a $100,000 grant from Mott to pay for immediate needs like distributing water filters to residents.

General operating support grants helped other nonprofits quickly ramp up their capacity to respond to local health needs in ways that have had a lasting impact.

The Greater Flint Health Coalition received a total of $840,000 from Mott over four years to support the expansion of its work in response to the water crisis. In July 2015, just a couple of months before Hanna-Attisha and other doctors urged Flint to stop using the river water, the coalition launched an effort to ensure that kids and some adults insured by Medicaid could gain access to health care.

The Community Health Access Program connects patients with a range of services, including transportation to doctor appointments. It initially planned to serve about 800 children a year, but as research began to identify unsafe blood lead levels in children, efforts to reduce health disparities by expanding access to primary care became even more important.

“All of a sudden with the water crisis, we needed to make sure that every child in a city of 100,000 people was connected to a medical home,” says Kirk Smith, who led the coalition for more than a decade.

Funding from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and other state and federal grants allowed the program to hire additional community health workers, social workers, and nurses to work directly with residents and connect them with health care and community services.

“We had to very, very rapidly accelerate to make sure that we were reaching as many kids as we could as quickly as possible,” says Smith.

Support from Mott allowed the small organization to bring on key administrative staff — an operations director and a special projects director, for example — that it hadn’t had before. Today the program is mostly funded by the state and health insurance plans, Smith says, but philanthropy’s initial role in its expansion “was critical to give us the bandwidth to ramp up to respond to the public health crisis in the community.”

As part of the $116.7 million total it counts toward its water-crisis response, the Mott foundation has made $5.2 million in grants to support safe drinking water. That included $292,227 grants to two nonprofits — Freshwater Future, an environmental group that advocates for protecting waters of the Great Lakes, and Evergreen Community Development Initiative — that created a lab where Flint residents can test their own water for free.

“Community-driven response and community-driven testing is the way of the future, especially in cases of environmental justice,” says White.

Courtesy of the Mott Foundation

Mott has increased the amount it gives locally since the water crisis began. The foundation gives more than 50 percent of its annual grants locally, up from 30 to 35 percent before. And other national or regional foundations have continued to make investments in Flint in recent years as well. The Ford and Robert Wood Johnson foundations both made $1 million unrestricted grants to the community foundation in the last couple of years. In 2018 the Kellogg Foundation, as part of its grant-making program for curbing racism, awarded an $825,000 multi-year grant to the community foundation to promote racial healing in Flint.

And while Mott doesn’t consider it as part of its water-crisis response, the foundation has been a major backer of Michigan State University’s public-health program, which it helped expand and relocate from East Lansing to Flint. From 2011 to 2013, Mott granted $12 million to MSU as well as $7.7 million to the Foundation for the Uptown Reinvestment Corporation to support renovation of the former Flint Journal building to house the program. In January 2022, Mott gave the program $25 million for Flint-based research, faculty, and community-health collaborations.

Hanna-Attisha, a C.S. Mott Endowed Professor of Public Health at MSU, credits the foundation with putting into place the kind of researchers and infrastructure to be able to do things like detect a water crisis and work on its recovery. It’s part of what drew her back to Flint.

Donations From Around the World

As the city made headlines internationally, donations from all over the world began coming to the Community Foundation of Greater Flint. At one point it had a license to solicit donations in every state, which is unusual for a locally focused fund. The grant maker established a new fund to support programs and services for the thousands of children exposed to toxic levels of lead from their early years and into adulthood. Some private foundations made gifts to the community foundation and its Flint Kids Fund.

Organizers raised about $20 million from foundations and individuals for the Flint Kids Fund. More than $14 million has been distributed to date.

“There wasn’t something we could fund that would take away the crisis, but there’s a lot that we could support that could mitigate or buffer the impact of the crisis,” says Hanna-Attisha, who made the first gift to establish the fund. “We wanted this fund to be built on the science of what kids need.”

Grants have supported literacy programs, efforts to expand access to nutritious food, and early-childhood education. The money has helped train and certify dozens of lactation counselors to support new parents. It has financed the construction of new playgrounds to give kids safe places to play.

“It’s the kind of really, really awesome stuff that should have been afforded to Flint kids already but that was exceedingly important post-crisis,” she says.

She serves on an advisory committee with other local public-health experts, residents, nonprofit executives, and community leaders who review grant applications to make funding decisions.

One of the fund’s grantees, the Crim Fitness Foundation, has received a total of $1.8 million to expand its mindfulness program, which brings meditation and yoga into the schools and the broader community. Sarah Sullivan, who directs the program, says it gives kids a set of tools to respond to what happens in their environment rather than react to it.

“The impacts of lead are irreversible, but some of the challenges that young people impacted by lead face, like ADHD or hyperactivity or behavior challenges, we can support them with strategies that they can learn through mindfulness,” Sullivan says.

Teachers say that students who participate in these programs are better able to pay attention, Sullivan says. She recalls a fifth-grade student who, after a session of mindful breathing and guided meditation, told Sullivan, “This was the first time all day I didn’t feel like hitting someone.”

Courtesy of the Mott Foundation

Advocates hope their work in the city will have broader ripple effects. The Flint Kids Fund supported a program in which pediatric and prenatal clinics provide $15 vouchers, or “prescriptions,” for nutritious foods. Early evaluations of the program have shown it helps kids meet their daily fruit and vegetable needs, and in 2018 a similar program was created on a national scale in the federal Farm Bill.

Additionally, new philanthropy funded schools that quickly launched in the wake of the Flint water crisis may offer a road map for improving early-childhood education more broadly.

Educare Flint, a state-of-the-art early-childhood center serving children from birth through age 5, opened in 2017. The Mott Foundation provided $11 million in grants to support the 36,000-square-foot school’s construction — a building White calls “a Ferrari in Buick City.” With many needs competing for their grant dollars, White says the foundation wanted to show that the education of Flint’s youngest kids was as important as elementary and second education.

The building is owned by Flint Kids Learn, a supporting organization of the community foundation, and the Genesee Intermediate School District operates the school. Researchers at the University of Michigan at Flint, the American Institutes for Research, and other institutions help evaluate the school’s success.

Researchers are looking at ways to improve family involvement in their kids’ learning, including what it takes to help a child move successfully into kindergarten — findings that could benefit youngsters all over. Says White, “We helped local kids, but we also didn’t take our eyes off the ball of the larger need in Michigan and really across the U.S.”

A ‘Unique Dance’ With Government

Working with government was one of the challenges during the water crisis, White says.

“When you have a crisis that stems from a failure in government, that failure in government is also going to hold you back from responding and recovering quickly,” he says.

At one point Mott, offered more than $1 million to the city to support consultants helping to redesign the water system. But the city wasn’t prepared to absorb that, White recalled. Ultimately, Mott gave $120,000 in 2016 and $60,000 in 2017 to support the development of that infrastructure plan.

Isaiah Oliver, who leads the community foundation, describes a “unique dance” between local officials and foundation leaders in his city. “Where there’s more money, there’s typically more power and influence,” Oliver says, and in Flint, “there was always more money available in philanthropy than there was in local municipal government.”

Last May, at a dedication ceremony for a newly renovated public library for which Mott contributed half of the $30 million price tag, Flint Mayor Sheldon Neely got some laughs when he encouraged the group gathered to “gaze upon this magnificent building … that was mostly paid by Ridgway.”

In the early years of the water crisis, several grant makers helped pay the salaries for city administrative positions focused on public health and recovery.

Kellogg, for example, gave more than $2.9 million over four years to the city to increase the number of staff focused on economic development work. Skillman gave $220,000 to support the city’s hiring of a chief recovery officer, who helped gather feedback from residents to inform local and state government planners and guide their decisions.

Most of the municipal roles initially funded by philanthropy don’t exist in Mayor Neeley’s current administration, and those that do are no longer funded by foundations, a city spokeswoman says.

The grant makers’ pledges in Flint came just a year after Detroit’s Grand Bargain, when 10 foundations (including Ford, Kellogg, Kresge, and Mott) pledged $366 million over 20 years to a fund to protect the city’s art museum and help pay the pensions of city workers and retirees. At the time, Kresge Foundation CEO Rip Rapson told the Chronicle that the foundations hoped to apply lessons learned in Detroit as they deployed grants in Flint.

Both cities were overseen by emergency managers appointed by Michigan’s governor in response to local fiscal crises. These managers focused on cutting local government and services.

Those cuts, which far outpaced population declines, made nonprofit leadership integral to both cities’ recoveries, says Sarah Reckhow, an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University who has studied how philanthropy and nonprofits step in to compensate for a lack of government support.

Yet while Detroit went through a bankruptcy and restructuring that helped the city regain some stability, the same can’t be said for Flint, Reckhow says. “The philanthropic and nonprofit community is doing really essential work in a situation where the public sector hasn’t been able to fully recover.”

Today Flint faces a $14 million budget shortfall. The school district is considering closing additional schools to level its deficit.

Understanding Needs

As foundations increasingly shoulder responsibility for public services in places like Flint, accountability and transparency become all the more important.

Residents like Kenyetta Dotson, a social worker who’s actively involved in local organizations and serves on the advisory committee for the Flint Kids Fund, says philanthropies are making a greater effort to learn from people who have direct experience to figure out how best to respond to community needs.

Foundations are asking questions — How can we be more helpful? What more can we do to serve? — and they’re trying to deliver on what people are saying, Dotson says. “If those types of things were happening pre-water crisis, they weren’t happening at this level where we were seeing it and we were feeling it at a community level.”

Understanding what local residents need must be central to finding solutions to water issues and the problems unsafe water causes, says Rhea Williams-Bishop, the Kellogg foundation’s director of programming in Mississippi and New Orleans. Kellogg granted $10 million in Flint from 2016 to 2022 and has made grants in Mississippi since 2008.

In Jackson, where Kellogg has an office staffed mostly by native Mississippians, the foundation’s relationships and the trust it has built in the community have helped bring together a range of lawmakers and leaders to deal with water issues, “even before storms flooded the Pearl River, causing the water plant to fail and creating the current-day crisis,” Williams-Bishop says in an email.

U.S. Water Alliance, a Kellogg foundation grantee, is working with several local partners in Jackson to plan community meetings, she says, adding “it’s imperative that residents’ worries are heard and they can be part of the decision-making process, especially given they are the most impacted.”

In Flint, Kellogg and other grant makers also recognized that access to trustworthy information, in addition to clean water, was critical.

The foundation recently made a $300,000 grant to the Community Foundation for Mississippi to support an education and information campaign in Jackson. Through a new website, text messaging, and sharing information on public and school transportation, the campaign aims to ensure Jackson residents have accurate and accessible information on the current water status.

A Commitment to Well-Being

With the help of philanthropy, Flint has made some strides to support children, but the city continues to struggle and was still recovering from the water crisis when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Genesee County ranks 81 out of 83 Michigan counties in terms of health measures.

“We still have a long way to go, but a lot of that was also the case before the water crisis and before Covid,” says Smith, the former leader of the Greater Flint Health Coalition, who is now chief administrator for a regional system of health centers.

A big part of that is the multiple things that contribute to well-being, such as whether someone has food, housing, income, transportation, and feels safe in their community. That’s why Smith says it’s so important that grant makers continue to fund work that supports education, economic development, and even the social safety net in their approaches to health crises.

The fallout from the water crisis will be felt for many years.

Affected families are still waiting for recompense from the state. Residents had until the end of June to file a claim for a $626 million settlement for which kids who were under age 6 during the water crisis are the biggest potential beneficiaries.

A recent University of Michigan study found that math achievement for school-age children in Flint decreased and the proportion of children with special needs increased as a result of the water crisis. The study found that there was little difference in the academic outcomes of school-age children living in homes with lead pipes compared with those in homes with copper pipes, suggesting that the stress, trauma, and other factors resulting from the crisis may have had effects on health and well-being beyond those tied directly to lead exposure.

A 2021 report financed by the Flint Kids Fund tracked a wide range of indicators, including preschool enrollment, food insecurity, poverty rates, and lead-pipe replacements in the city.

“The state of Flint kids remains precarious,” it reads. “Even when the results are not as positive as we would like, they are likely much better than they would have been without all the interventions.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.