Investments in Belonging + Care
Our vision of a flourishing community is one where every member can participate and grow and feels a sense of belonging.
In 2024, we partnered with Capita Partners and the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common initiative to administer a national survey on loneliness, disconnection, and insecurity in America, with oversampling in Michigan to understand local implications. We hosted a roundtable discussion with policymakers in May of 2024, and the first Michigan Children and Families Summit in October, in partnership with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, to disseminate the findings to community leaders and nonprofit partners. Both convenings highlighted the cause and effects loneliness has on whole families and the need to intentionally create spaces for people to build connections.
For many of the young people supported by our grant partners, they find spaces of belonging and care in programs that allow them to connect with peers before or after school or during the summer to explore shared interests in artistic and creative endeavors and leadership and vocational training curated by trusted adults. Out-of-school time programming we supported in 2024 includes Friends of Grand Rapids Parks’ Green Team and Youth Forestry initiative, Girls Choral Academy Neighborhood Choirs and Summer Programming, and West Michigan Center for Arts + Technology’s Teen Arts and Tech program.
We’ve also supported in-school programming centered on belonging, such as Gilda’s Club Grand Rapids’ Tough Stuff, which provides classroom-based programming on navigating grief or other life challenges, and Grand Rapids Ballet’s Dance Immersion program, which provides weekly dance instruction on ballet and hip-hop to give kids a moment to move their bodies and learn a new skill together.
To support leaders in our community, in 2024 we concluded the first cohort of the Brilliant Leaders Fellowship, which creates space for nonprofit leaders to come together to invest in professional development, social capital building, and healing. Visionary leadership is often lonely and exhausting. The Fellowship creates space for leaders to step back from the daily demands of their roles to connect with others along a similar journey to recharge their batteries and imagine together how we might address complex and intersectional challenges facing our community.
To support newer nonprofits as they solidify their infrastructure for long-term impact, in 2024 we also supported two cohorts of nonprofits through our Early-Stage Operations and Planning Fund. Each quarter, we convened two groups of four nonprofits to learn together and from each other building community as they navigate the process of going from a founder-led and often volunteer-staffed program to an organization with the systems and structures in place to live on well beyond the initial visionary.
