The Gilberts: Four Years After the Big Give
In May of 2022, a year after the splashy press conference in a sunny high-floor room at One Campus Martius where Dan and Jennifer Gilbert announced their $500 million, 10-year charitable pledge to revitalize Detroit’s neighborhoods, the money’s stewards launched a new, impressive-sounding initiative. The Gilbert Family Foundation, one of two Gilbert-controlled nonprofits — along with the Rocket Community Fund — funding the big give, joined co-backers DTE Energy and ProMedica in opening phone lines for folks seeking money to fix their homes through the $20 million Detroit Home Repair Fund.
“The first week, we received 250,000 phone calls from Detroit residents,” recalls Laura Grannemann, executive director of both the GFF and the RCF. (Of the $500 million pledged, $150 million is from RCF and $350 million from GFF, the Rocket Mortgage founder’s personal philanthropy.) “That showed us we had tapped into a very significant need and we would need to think more innovatively about how to increase the quality of the housing stock in the city of Detroit.”
Indeed, almost four years and $232 million (as of December 2024) into the decade-long charitable spending spree, Grannemann now says that the program helped clarify the broader focus. She had known that $20 million wouldn’t be enough to repair every leaking roof, electrical malfunction, and crumbling foundation in the city, but she admits being taken by surprise that a program designed to assist about 1,000 homeowners had, when the wait list was closed, 14,000 people on it.
What followed was a series of new programs to address other elements of the housing problem. The $13 million Detroit Eviction Defense Fund has provided legal services to keep 7,500 renters in their homes; the $10 million Detroit Housing Network and Detroit Housing Resource HelpLine provide renter services, down payment navigation assistance, and homebuyer education; and Tomorrow’s Housing Innovation Showcase supports construction of factory-made houses that can be cheaper and more durable.
Grannemann cites one clear-cut triumph. The first program launched when the $500 million pledge was announced was a $15 million plan to wipe out property tax debt for some 20,000 low-income homeowners. In 2024, tax foreclosures of Wayne County owner-occupied homes were down almost 95% from 2015, according to the Detroit Taxpayer Service Center. “There’s a lot of progress that’s been made to make sure homeowners are stable in their homes when it comes to property tax foreclosures, but now rental stability and also housing quality are the two highest priorities,” she says.
As huge as the housing issues are, they’re just one area of focus for the gift. What good are stable homes, the thinking goes, if the quality of life is not also any better? Thus, there are arts and culture programs such as Seed and Bloom, an initiative providing 10 grants of $150,000 each distributed over three years to artists of color to “grow their artistic practices into sustainable businesses embedded in Detroit neighborhoods.” And there’s the $15 million given to the Unified Greenway Campaign to help pay for construction and maintenance of the 27.5-mile regional Joe Louis Greenway and the $1 million Thriving Neighborhoods Fund, which is doled out to 19 Detroit nonprofits. “We want people to actually want to be a part of the community and invest in their neighborhoods and stay in the city,” Grannemann says. “It is so critical to be investing in that kind of strong infrastructure.”
New programs are under constant consideration, Grannemann says. Typically, they’re announced in the spring when her team issues an annual status report. They’ve spent more than $50 million a year, so Grannemann says they’re ahead of schedule to use up the $500 million commitment before 2031, but they’re guided most by where they can make a measurable, tangible difference as soon as possible.
“With this $500 million commitment, we have the opportunity to braid together all of those investments to really drive systemic change for a specific group of Detroit residents,” she says. “Our goal is to support Detroit residents who are economically vulnerable and who are at risk of displacement. We make all of our funding decisions on this basis, not based on spending a certain amount every year. If there’s a good idea that will help people, we do it.”
Riverfront Conservancy Fights Back
When Ryan Sullivan agreed to jump in as interim CEO of the scandal-rocked Detroit Riverfront Conservancy last May, he was unsure how damaged the organization was. The longtime Chief Financial Officer William Smith, it had just come to light, had been embezzling upwards of $40 million from the DRC’s coffers over the course of 11 years. Federal charges and a civil lawsuit followed, but the embarrassment over a failure to catch this much grift over this length of time cast a dark shadow.
The nonprofit has, over its 20 years, raised hundreds of millions of dollars to redevelop 5.5 miles of Detroit riverfront and put on programs and events for some 3.5 million visitors a year. And the scandal emerged as the DRC was in the process of completing perhaps its most monumental addition to the shoreline, the elaborate, scenic, and fanciful 22-acre Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Centennial Park the nonprofit hopes will turbocharge visitation.
Everything was at risk, Sullivan knew. As the summer of 2024 approached, he wondered: Will people still come to the events? Will volunteers keep showing up? Will anyone ever feel comfortable giving money after such a massive failure in oversight?
When he speaks with Hour Detroit six months later, the answers astonish him: “I’m really proud that I can sit here today and say emphatically that we delivered 100% of our programs this year. Not only did they continue uninterrupted — we set records in terms of the numbers of people who were participating in the Riverfront Run in June, and this was the second straight year we had more than 50,000 people come for Harvest Fest in October.” Volunteer hours were up 13.5% over 2023, too.
The funding story is less clear. In November, Smith pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering, each carrying a maximum 20-year prison term. As part of the plea agreement, he agreed to pay at least $44.3 million in restitution; it’s unknown, though, if any or all of that money exists to be recovered. A civil lawsuit is pending against Smith; his wife, sister, and mother; and others believed to have benefited from the theft.
Sullivan was brought in because he has crisis management experience. He navigated Detroit-based football helmet maker Xenith through a safety recall in 2016 as CEO and, later, through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic when sales plummeted because nobody was playing contact sports. He’s from a family deeply rooted in Detroit, worked six years for Rock Ventures, and lives in Indian Village with his wife and four children. “The riverfront is something important to me personally,” he says. “I’ve seen and experienced its importance for families like mine going back generations.”
Sullivan went to work shoring up the DRC’s reputation by implementing what he dubs the “four P’s” framework — prosecute the thieves, preserve the accomplishments already achieved, protect the organization with new protocols for oversight on spending, and prosper in the years ahead.
Within a month of Sullivan’s tenure, the DRC found a lifeline, a $35 million pledge from the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation to ensure work continues on schedule for the park — with the money managed not by the DRC but by the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan.
“Major funders have stepped forward, and the existence of this structure has shored up confidence in the organization, our ability to complete construction, our ability to live up to our core promises,” Sullivan says.
That said, Sullivan understands if folks are queasy about giving money right now: “That’s certainly understandable, but there are other ways to contribute. You can volunteer time or come down and enjoy the riverfront and remember why it’s important to have such a beautiful riverfront that is the envy of many other cities and towns. Whatever is best for you, but we’ll still be here.”
Public School COVID Funds: Detroit Outshines Ann Arbor
It’s not every day you hear the Detroit Public Schools Community District being compared favorably to the vaunted Ann Arbor Public Schools, but chalk that up to yet another way COVID turned the world upside down.
The finances of AAPS, located in one of the state’s wealthiest communities, are a mess. Last spring, the state warned the district its fund balance — also known as its savings — was projected to hit a perilously low 2% of its general fund for the 2023-24 year. That’s after its 2022-23 fund balance was at 3.8%. One year below 5% raises concerns; two sets off alarms. The ideal is 15%.
To fix this, the district chopped $20.4 million out of its 2024-25 budget largely by eliminating 141 jobs. Social media and school board meetings are flooded these days with angry parents and teachers blaming every shortcoming, relevant or not, on the cuts.
Meanwhile, in the 2022-23 year, Detroit Public Schools had an impressive general fund balance of 59%, according to state data. Things aren’t perfect by any stretch — that bubble of COVID funds has subsided — but nobody is looking at Detroit for examples of districts in financial crisis. Ann Arbor, though, is a statewide example of mismanagement.
How does that happen? Both districts suffered significant enrollment losses during the 2020-21 school year as many alarmed parents moved their kids to private or charter schools that were significantly quicker to return to in-person class. When enrollment drops, so, too, does the per-pupil funding provided by the state, and that’s the vast majority of any district’s budget.
In Detroit, administrators understood those defections as a long-term problem that required careful budgeting and planned as the federal aid from COVID relief measures ran out to cut positions. Ann Arbor, meanwhile, lost more than 1,000 students from 2020 to 2022 but behaved as though it were a temporary blip.
“The COVID money really helped boost the savings accounts of several districts, most notably Detroit,” says Craig Thiel, research director for the Citizens Research Council, a nonpartisan organization based in Lansing. “In Ann Arbor, you had an administration that really didn’t want to rightsize the budget and was just saying yes to everybody and everything.”
Detroit received an eye-popping sum of $1.27 billion, or roughly $26,700 per student; Ann Arbor got just $27.2 million, or about $1,500 per student. That’s because Congress allotted more based on district size and the percentage of students who qualified for free lunch.
Still, Thiel says Detroit did something clever: It used the federal money, which had to be allocated by September 2024, for its normal operations and put the state money it received into its reserves. That made the transition out of that era of funding easier and could pay dividends for years to come, as the district now has $700 million stashed away for an ambitious districtwide building renovations project.
While Detroit received an unprecedented windfall and made long-term plans to optimize its use, Ann Arbor appeared to be in denial about the damage COVID had wrought. “Ann Arbor was dealing with a stagnant to declining student enrollment leading into the pandemic,” Thiel says. “That trend sped up. A lot of families left the district and took the state money with them. When those kids left, Ann Arbor continued to offer the same programs and services at the same staffing levels. That was the pinch point for budget challenges.”
Former AAPS board trustee Jeff Gaynor, who stepped down at the end of his term last year, lays the blame on the former superintendent, Jeanice Kerr Swift, who he says told the board not to sweat the low fund balances and insisted enrollment would rebound. (Swift resigned in 2023 amid an unrelated scandal and was not on the job when the funding crunch became apparent.)
“Because she had done this in the past, we didn’t have any reason to not believe her,” Gaynor says. “What we didn’t do at the time was ask exactly how. If there was a plan, we didn’t know it. In the past, she sold property; she found ways to get the balance back up. We assumed she would. But it turns out, according to the forensic audit, the numbers we were given were not legitimate.” Swift did not respond to Hour Detroit’s requests for a comment.
The report Gaynor references conducted by Plante Moran found that about three months before the 2023-24 budget was adopted, the board approved 2% raises for school employees, amounting to an additional $12 million in costs, which would have required 1,100 additional students to enroll for the school year.
Swift told auditors that, at the time, she informed board members “there would need to be reductions in the cost structure” in the next fiscal year to offset the budget increase. The report concludes that “the original budget presented was improbable without significant expenditure reductions. The obvious red flags should have been identified by management and the Board for which responsibility for the current situation is shared.”
There’s no end in sight for AAPS’s budget challenges. While the COVID funds weren’t as plentiful for AAPS, they did allow the district to offer $10,000 bonuses to teachers in hard-to-fill positions, including special education and speech therapy. When those went away, so did the district’s ability to fully staff those critical posts. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” Gaynor says.
This story originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on March. 10
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