Written by Jennifer Bartenbach, CEO of Central Indiana Community Foundation
In 2023, the Indy metro area not only led our state in its rate of population growth, it also led regional peer metros like Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, and Louisville.
That year, we also discovered that the Indy metro area had also outpaced every other Midwest metro in GDP growth from 2019 to 2022—some of the toughest years in our history.
That growth promises great benefits for our region, but only insofar as the benefits accrue to every Central Indiana county, town, neighborhood, and doorstep.
Today, that is too seldom the case in areas like northeast Boone and northwest Hamilton counties, where half of all households in the 46069 zip code falls below the ALICE threshold (Asset-Limited, Income Constrained, and Employed); or in Hancock County, where a shortage of licensed childcare is only able to serve 46% of children; or in Shelbyville, where a growing senior population contends with limited food access; or the far east and far west sides of Indianapolis, where renters face some of the highest eviction rates in America.
Central Indiana Community Foundation is committed to a broad Central Indiana region where growth is good news for every household.
To help achieve this, we embarked on a tour of community foundations that take a regional approach to their work. To make the most of these trips, we were grateful to be able to bring along leadership from Central Indiana community foundations beyond Marion and Hamilton counties.
Across three tour stops, three main ideas took shape:
- Be bold to start.
- Regional partnerships attract more funding (and new sources of funding) than individual community efforts.
- Gather as much data as possible to inform and assess your impact.
The tour began at the Collaboratory (previously the Southwest Florida Community Foundation). Founded nearly 60 years ago, this foundation dramatically revamped its mission in 2021, pledging nothing less than “solving all of Southwest Florida’s social problems by 2040.”
That bold declaration included massively upscaling educational attainment to allow more economic mobility as well as confronting a receding coastline and increasingly deadly hurricanes. (In fact, our visit took place in the handful of days between hurricanes Helene and Milton.)
The Collaboratory wanted more than a simple re-brand. They dedicated themselves to the premise that no problem—or community—exists in isolation. Weather events link to tourism which links to poverty which links to domestic violence which links to healthcare. Using NASA’s historic moonshot for inspiration, the Collaboratory is combining a bold mission with a broad-reaching coalition of multi-county stakeholders.
Our next stop was the San Diego Foundation (SDF), which serves communities throughout San Diego County—an area similar in size to the multi-county Indy metro area but with over a million more residents.
While vast distances separate these communities, leaders realized how much stronger they are when they collaborated. In 2021, SDF partnered with the Brookings Institution to create the San Diego Regional Policy & Innovation Center. This first-of-its-kind partnership benefits communities of every size, harnessing the expertise of a globally recognized think tank for grant writing, fundraising, and data analysis.
Finally, we visited the Boston Foundation. Given its location, it’s no surprise this foundation relies on a wealth of university partnerships (along with in-house experts at Boston Indicators) to record data that measures and amplifies their impact.
Years of that approach have given the foundation a deep well of information to exploit. For instance, though the area’s housing costs are notoriously high, innovative and cost-effective new approaches have emerged based on decades of research, unlocking underutilized public land for housing and incentivizing smaller home-builds for Boston’s growing population of older residents.
Central Indiana has a unique chance to seize on our recent growth to fuel a broad-based community of opportunity for urban, suburban, and rural areas. Though respective approaches and strategies will surely differ among different populations, two common themes will remain:
- To be prosperous, every Central Indiana community needs affordable housing, access to healthy food, and pathways to greater economic mobility, especially for low-income residents.
- To achieve the above, nonprofits need sustainable sources of funding as well as access to data that can help strengthen their approach, bolster grant requests, and measure their impact.
Right now, regions across the country are collaborating on strategies to improve their housing, workforce, and quality-of-life. Our ability to compete by “out-collaborating” them is not only within our grasp, it is embedded in our Central Indiana DNA. In the coming months, CICF will lay out our strategy for bold and effective regional collaboration, putting our biggest ideas up against our biggest challenges.
By empowering bold, visionary leadership throughout our region, we will create a community of opportunity for everyone.
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