The Covid-19 Response Initiative: Two Foundations Team Up to Parry the Blow

By Sylvia Whitman

The coronavirus has delivered its one-two punch hard and fast. A health crisis with an indeterminate timetable is creating an economic slump likely to linger for years. Local foundations immediately recognized that dire times require dramatic measures. 

“Typically, when we set up a disaster response, it’s for a quick-hitting event like a hurricane,” says Mark Pritchett, CEO of Gulf Coast Community Foundation. “What we had in the box on the shelf wasn’t going to work. We had to think: what are the critically important things we can do to respond quickly to the community to address needs?”

The answer was the Covid-19 Response Initiative, a partnership between Gulf Coast and the Charles & Margery Barancik Foundation. 

Pritchett and his team realized that local nonprofits on the front lines of social service needed immediate support. The usual grant-and-loan process was going to take too much time, especially amidst the abrupt transition across the nation from workplaces to home offices connected online. So Pritchett rallied his board behind a nimble initiative and reached out to the Barancik Foundation. Within a day, Barancik CEO Teri A. Hansen cleared the proposal with her board and pledged $500,000 in matching funds.

On March 24—little more than a week after President Trump declared a national emergency, with federal and local social distancing guidelines growing more rigorous—the two foundations announced their joint initiative. By April 7, they were reporting the first 11 grants.

In health care, for instance, the initiative awarded CenterPlace Health $20,000 to continue primary care for the underserved and uninsured through virtual telehealth visits. To meet basic needs, Family Promise of South Sarasota County received $25,000 for rent assistance for low-income families who have recently overcome homelessness. On the financial front, as the economy continues to shed jobs, the Capital Good Fund has used $30,000 from the Covid-19 Response Initiative to launch a crisis relief loan program to protect families from predatory lenders. And to lighten the load on first responders, $40,000 has enabled the Boys & Girls Clubs of Sarasota County to provide free childcare to medical personnel, law enforcement officers, and fire fighters.

Requests come in, suggestions go out, and money moves quickly into the community—far faster than in pre-virus times and far faster than the aid promised in the federal CARES Act. “This is not business as usual,” Pritchett says. The Covid-19 Response Initiative has rocketed to the top of Gulf Coast’s priority list. 

The Power of Existing Relationships

The foundations’ wide and deeps roots in the community have made this extraordinary collaboration possible. 

According to Hansen, six local foundations—Barancik, Gulf Coast, The Patterson Foundation, Selby Foundation, Community Foundation of Sarasota County (CFSC), and Manatee Community Foundation—participate in a weekly phone call to pool information and coordinate response. For instance, by design, the Covid-19 Initiative bolsters nonprofits, complementing the Season of Sharing fund for individuals reactivated by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and CFSC.

The particularly close ties between Gulf Coast and Barancik enabled the lightning launch of the shared initiative, a creative collaboration of community and private foundations. Hansen headed Gulf Coast for more than a dozen years, hiring Pritchett before joining the Barancik Foundation in 2015. “My DNA is in that organization. Its DNA is in me,” she says. The two CEOs understand each other. 

“Teri is very strategic,” says Pritchett. “She likes results quickly.” 

He knew that the plan to help vital agencies stay afloat—and retool their services to accommodate social distancing rules—would appeal to what Hansen calls her “systems focused” approach to philanthropy. The matching grant structure also made perfect sense. “Any time we can leverage our funds, we want to do that,” says Hansen. “People like that,” knowing their gift gets multiplied. 

Gulf Coast Community Foundation’s strong connections with its donors also kick-started the initiative. Pritchett phoned, emailed, and video-conferenced with potential funders, who fell into three camps. One group opened their wallets instantly. Another group needed to wait and see the financial fallout from the pandemic. A third group said they can’t even contemplate another request at this moment of overwhelming family and job stress. Pritchett says he appreciates all these positions. Major corporations, from FCCI Insurance Group to Truist Bank and Bank of America, have also stepped up—confident, says Pritchett, that Gulf Coast and Barancik Foundation know what the community needs and which nonprofits can deliver.

Even in these difficult circumstances, the initiative will likely have distributed close to $1 million by the end of April.

Finally, the trust between Gulf Coast and local nonprofits, built over years, means that money can move with minimal vetting and maximum efficiency during this emergency. Jon Thaxton, Senior Vice President for Community Investment at Gulf Coast, points to the foundation’s “very tight” relationship with All Faiths Food Bank. For five years, the foundation has helped underwrite the food bank’s successful summer feeding program, so it’s an easy pivot to support All Faiths as it delivers nutritious meals to kids locked down at home this spring without the same access to schools’ free and reduced-fee meals.

Right now, the first goal is to make sure that nonprofits survive, figure out how to operate with social distancing, and redirect their services to those who need help most. Recovery comes next, and then economic rebuilding, which may take years. 

The Angels in the Details

The Covid-19 Response Initiative relies on open dialogue and an entrepreneurial model that “enables us to take some calculated risks—and be remarkably responsive in terms of time,” says Thaxton. As a result, the initiative can move beyond response to “a great deal of proactive engagement.”  

Two staffers from Gulf Coast and two from Barancik Foundation evaluate requests for funding and pass them to the CEOs for a decision. “We can have an idea come in at 8 or 9 a.m. and have approval before 5 p.m., with checks being processed the very next day,” says Thaxton, half of Gulf Coast’s vetting squad. But the foundations, like the nonprofits they underwrite, have had to figure out new office procedures. “The logistics are pretty fascinating to watch,” says Thaxton.

Thaxton likens the initiative to triage. Right now, the first goal is to make sure that nonprofits survive, figure out how to operate with social distancing, and redirect their services to those who need help most. Recovery comes next, and then economic rebuilding, which may take years. None of the problems Gulf Coast has been addressing is going away, and the sudden job loss in this pandemic may erase previous gains the foundation and its partners had achieved on long-standing community issues.

Take homelessness, linked to this area’s high housing costs. “BC-19,” as Thaxton refers to pre-pandemic times, more than 60,000 Sarasota County households—about a third—spent more than 30% of their income on housing, an unsustainable amount over time. About 17,500 spent more than 50%. Most of those households were within $750 of losing the roof over their heads. 

For about six years, Gulf Coast has been investing in the creation of a homeless services network—for children and families, youth, and the chronically homeless adult population. The multi-agency efforts have succeeded in stabilizing some families, although parents often work two or three or even four jobs to make rent or mortgage payments—washing dishes, cleaning hotel rooms, and the like. 

The first economic casualty of the pandemic response? Service jobs. The coronavirus double-whammy is disproportionately hitting the region’s most vulnerable residents, adding urgency to the response.

“Crisis—it’s all about resilience,” says Pritchett. Just as Gulf Coast Community Foundation has reconfigured fundraising and granting, the nonprofits in its network have to be agile and inventive to meet the novel demands created by this unexpected crisis. 

The Covid-19 Response Initiative plans to sustain these organizations through “the long slog ahead,” says Hansen, and to serve as a model for other foundations across the country. “Everything we do, we’d like to have it be replicable by others.”

“Leaders take risks,” Pritchett told his motivated staff. “As we innovate, we’re going to make mistakes. We’ll learn as we go along. But we’re the leaders everyone is watching.”