Turnaround Artist

Clotilde Perez-Bode Dedecker arrived in Buffalo, N.Y., 51 years ago, just months after her family fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba with little more than the $10 hidden in her brother’s bow tie. The family relied on charity to get by: The refugee resettlement program at Catholic Charities of Buffalo provided housing and food as her father, a dentist, spent two years at the University of Buffalo taking additional coursework so that he could practice in the United States.

That powerful childhood experience with a nonprofit inspired Dedecker’s career in public service and philanthropy. For the past 12 years, she has led the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo, overseeing the organization’s transformation from a low-key provider of donor-advised funds into a vital community leader on issues like education and racial equity.

“I came to philanthropy as a beneficiary,” Dedecker says. “It’s truly a privilege that I go to work every day and help pay it forward.”

Dedecker led the effort to bring Say Yes to Education to the city. The national nonprofit is known for its promise of providing college scholarships for students in the communities where it works.

Buffalo public schools had suffered through three decades of declining high-school graduation rates before the arrival of Say Yes in 2012, but the organization is driving a remarkable turnaround. Graduation rates have risen from 49 percent six years ago to 65 percent today, and college completion rates are also on the rise.

Racial-Equity Efforts

In 2015, Dedecker and the community foundation started the Greater Buffalo Racial Equity Roundtable — an effort to help minority residents share in the region’s economic recovery.

The community foundation also oversees an effort to reduce lead poisoning in Buffalo and has recruited investors to start a for-profit fund, the WNY Impact Investment Fund, that focuses on both financial returns and social impact in the greater Buffalo area.

“Simply put, Clotilde finds solutions to big problems,” says David Rust, the executive director of Say Yes Buffalo. “The community foundation is at the forefront of every important happening in Buffalo.”

Dedecker’s accomplishments in Buffalo, among the poorest cities in the country, have elevated her national stature. She serves as co-chair of the board of Candid, the nonprofit data aggregator formed by the recent merger of the Foundation Center and GuideStar. She also serves on the board of the Global Fund for Community Foundations, which provides grants and conducts research to further community philanthropy.

National foundations have taken notice and are eager to work with the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo. Both the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Walmart Foundation are supporting the work of the racial-equity roundtable. In June, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed $2.9 million to Say Yes Buffalo to help its scholarship recipients succeed in college.

Boosting Impact

Dedecker is a teacher by training, with a master’s degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages. She is also a past president of the Association of Junior Leagues International. Just before joining the community foundation, she led an Erie County government effort to improve the status of women in the Buffalo area, which helped create a Family Justice Center that provides free services for domestic-violence victims and their children.

She was hired as a vice president at the community foundation in 2005 with a charge to look at ways the organization could have more of an impact on the greater Buffalo area.

“We had always been a very responsible steward of assets and a thoughtful grant maker, but as we stepped back and looked, all the while the trends in our community had continued to head in the wrong direction,” Dedecker says. “It was a moment of reckoning. The board decided to engage with the community and hear what they needed from us. What we heard was they needed more from us beyond our grants. They needed us to use our time and influence to help coalesce the community around critical solutions.”

Before 2007, the community foundation primarily used grant making as its strategy. Since then, Dedecker says, “our toolbox has expanded significantly.” The community foundation serves as a convener to develop broad coalitions, tapping state and national networks and organizations for new ideas. It also now engages in advocacy and public-policy work.

At the time Dedecker joined the foundation, many experts felt that community foundations needed to focus on reining in the fees they charged for sponsoring donor-advised funds.

DAFs have become increasingly important sources of the grant money that flows through many community foundations. However, commercial providers of donor-advised funds such as Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard typically offer DAFs with lower fees than community foundations charge.

Dedecker realized that local donors would be willing to pay more if they saw the community foundation making an impact.

“Clotilde came in there and flipped this thing on its head,” says Bruce McNamer, president of the Greater Washington Community Foundation. “She invested in leadership instead of just operating as a pass-through for donor-advised funds.”

The approach didn’t shrink financial support for the community foundation — instead, it drew in new donors, just as Dedecker had hoped. As McNamer says: “She got to have her cake and eat it, too.”

Assets at the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo have risen from $175 million in 2005 to $485 million today. About a quarter of the assets are in perpetual endowments that aren’t restricted to a specific cause and allow the foundation to address changing needs over time. The foundation’s staffing has grown with its workload, from 12 in 2005 to 35 today.

Building Coalitions

Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo

Dedecker believes community foundations are uniquely positioned to serve as conveners when communities are looking to tackle big challenges.

“The most valuable asset that community foundations bring is relationships,” Dedecker says.

The community foundation’s board worked with the Lumina Foundation to identify Say Yes as a program that could help turn around education in Buffalo. The community foundation then tapped its existing donors to raise the $15 million locally to match the $15 million that the national Say Yes foundation would bring to the area.

Say Yes provides generous college scholarships to graduates of Buffalo public schools, including full scholarships to students who have been in the district since kindergarten.

Dedecker has served on Say Yes’s operating committee, which meets every three weeks, since its inception. At one early meeting, school-district leaders cited mental-health issues related to poverty as one of the biggest challenges affecting student achievement. But parents said they had trouble getting time off from work to get students in to see mental-health counselors.

County officials on the operating committee quickly agreed to move at least one family-support specialist into each Buffalo public school.

“That’s the power of this work,” Dedecker says. “We have this coalition of strange bedfellows that meets every three weeks to solve problems.”

Maria Whyte, deputy executive of Erie County, who also serves on the Say Yes operating committee, says the change has allowed social workers and mental-health workers to intervene before student problems become acute. “People’s lives are improved with the right level of support when they need it,” she says.

Whyte says Dedecker is “a force to be reckoned with.”

“She has the right combination of subject-matter experience and tactical expertise on how to successfully move an agenda,” Whyte says. “Those two things come together to create really great outcomes.”

Impressive List

For the community foundation’s key work on racial issues, Dedecker recruited an impressive list of more than 30 local leaders to join the Greater Buffalo Racial Equity Roundtable. She gave the diverse group at least a year to talk freely among themselves about tough topics like racism and changes that were needed locally.

Early on, the roundtable left off some important stakeholders — including the superintendent of the Buffalo Public Schools and the Erie County district attorney — but the community foundation quickly added them when it became obvious their input would help, Whyte says.

The roundtable has released a major report documenting how achieving racial equity would benefit the local economy and neighborhoods, improve safety, and help close the wealth gap. It has also arranged for more than 1,300 people from 80 organizations to go through training that shows them how to use a racial-equity lens in their decision making. Recently the roundtable has worked with local partners and national consultants to design new approaches for prisoner re-entry and the juvenile-justice system.

The Kellogg Foundation is providing $2 million over three years to support the roundtable’s operations and to help create an endowment for it. Oronde Miller, a program officer at Kellogg focused on racial equity, says one factor in Kellogg’s decision to support the roundtable was the wide range of partners Dedecker had recruited.

“The institutions that touch people’s lives — they’re all present in that roundtable work,” he says. “That’s hard to get.”

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, who helped Dedecker launch the racial-equity roundtable, says he’s hired a chief diversity officer since the roundtable’s formation, and some major Buffalo companies have done the same.

The educational turnaround prompted in part by Say Yes and the achievements of the racial-equity roundtable are contributing to a “real renaissance” in Buffalo, Brown says. M&T Bank, which is headquartered in Buffalo, recently committed to bring 1,000 new technology positions to Seneca One Tower, Buffalo’s tallest building, which had previously been vacant. The company may also start a “tech academy” to help the increasing number of high-school graduates gain career skills that could prepare them to work in the building.

“Clotilde is a strong collaborative leader,” Brown says. “The community foundation has partnered with many organizations and entities in the community to help make Buffalo a stronger, better place to live, work, and raise a family.”