News & Insights
From grantmaking updates to sharing what we’re learning from our community, grantee partners, and peers, we invite you to learn more about our ongoing work here.
McGregor Fund Names Nikia Washington to New Director of Engagement & Communications Position
The McGregor Fund’s trustees and staff are delighted to welcome Nikia Washington, who will serve as our inaugural Director of Engagement & Communications.
News & Insights
From grantmaking updates to sharing what we’re learning from our community, grantee partners, and peers, we invite you to learn more about our ongoing work here.
McGregor Fund Names Nikia Washington to New Director of Engagement & Communications Position
The McGregor Fund’s trustees and staff are delighted to welcome Nikia Washington, who will serve as our inaugural Director of Engagement & Communications.
Highlighting the Work of Our Grant Partners
The McGregor Fund’s recent Basic Needs & Housing grants, for food, shelter, and other necessities essential for day-to-day living, also included the following grant partners:
📌 Accounting Aid Society
📌 American Indian Health and Family Services
📌 Bailey Park Neighborhood Development Corporation Baileyparkndc
📌 Coalition on Temporary Shelter (COTS)
📌 Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH)
📌 GenesisHOPE Community Development
📌 Here to Help Foundation/Returning Hope to Returning Citizens
The McGregor Fund is delighted to announce $6.3 million in grants awarded to 23 area nonprofit organizations in the second half of 2024.
Basic Needs & Housing grants, totaling $2.5 million, for food, shelter, and other necessities essential for day-to-day living, were approved for eight grant partners, including:
A grant for $750,000 to Keep Growing Detroit, in support of its general operations as it expands programming and builds out new projects in a continuously evolving food ecosystem.
🌱 KGD supports a growing network of Detroit residential gardeners, improving food security, increasing access to fresh produce, and advancing a shared community vision of food sovereignty.
🌻 KGD will continue to expand gardening access through its Garden Resource Program, invest in farm infrastructure projects, combat systemic inequities, and grow its education and resource availability.
🍅 Its new family foodways programming and narrative power training will celebrate cultural practices and individuals' experiences around food cultivation.
💧KGD is also increasing its support for the Michigan Water Source Pilot Program to expand reliable access to water and reduce water-related costs for growers.
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A Letter from McGregor Fund President Kate Levin Markel:
Dear Friends,
A year ago, I wrote about the burdens uniquely born by leaders of color and the Fund’s commitment to support their leadership and well-being. I also restated our commitment to learn alongside and seek guidance from partners who are closest to community and leading justice-oriented work. As we head into 2025, these commitments continue to drive what we do.
The social sector workforce remains in a well-documented crisis of burnout, uncompetitive compensation, and overall vulnerability to breakdown, with huge challenges on the horizon. Our grant partners speak to these conditions in our recently released biennial report, calling for more rest and wellness resources.
As funders, we simply must understand our part in contributing to these unsustainable conditions, and our responsibility to do things differently. This is perhaps philanthropy’s most difficult work, because it requires us to seek out blunt critiques of how we show up, to engage in honest self-examination, and to upend many of our entrenched processes and assumptions.
At the McGregor Fund, we believe that foundations should be accountable to the communities we purport to serve and support. In this spirit, we are trying out new practices to demonstrate this belief. We’ve continued to reduce burden in the application and reporting processes. Recent grants include investments in community expertise and vision, in thought- and practice leaders pursuing multiple domains of justice, and in some big-dream projects that center community thriving. We are truly excited about the ongoing evolution of how we work and what we support.
As always, I must end by thanking our exceptionally talented team whose big hearts guide everything they do, and our clear-eyed, values-driven board who bring out the best in us.
With wishes for a joyful holiday season and solidarity in the new year,
Kate Levin Markel
President
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📖 What we're reading: Model D's interview with Camille Proctor, Founder & Executive Director of The Color of Autism Foundation, a McGregor Fund grant partner. Camille is also part of our 2024 Miller Fellow cohort.
Camille founded The Color of Autism in 2009, after her son was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and she discovered that "finding culturally competent resources was far from easy."
“I would go to support groups, but no one looked like me,” Proctor says. “No one understood some of the complex things that happen in communities of color in regards to interactions with the police and just how we access services, as well as the disparity of information.”
Read more at the link.
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Wishing you and your beloveds rest, joy and peace this holiday season.
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"I think a lot of people might look at someone homeless and think that they're not trying to do anything to change their situation. I've seen people homeless, but they still had jobs. I've seen people living in their cars and just pretty much doing whatever they could to survive, but they only lacked that one thing, which was a home. I've been homeless with a job before. I've been homeless with a car, and people look at you different when you don't have somewhere to live."
- Detroit resident Jahnisa Briggs, who experienced homelessness in 2017 and again in 2019
This Model D story is part of a series that highlights the challenges and solutions around housing in Detroit and is made possible through underwriting support from the Detroit (Region O) Regional Housing Partnership and the McGregor Fund.
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McGregor Fund Founders
More than 100 years ago, the McGregors devoted their lives to community service – Tracy as an agency founder and social entrepreneur ending homelessness and unemployment for Detroit men, and Katherine as the founder and benefactor of an orphanage in Highland Park. Their proximity to people experiencing hardship and trauma informed their charitable giving and Tracy’s role as a civic leader.
McGregor Fund Founders
More than 100 years ago, the McGregors devoted their lives to community service – Tracy as an agency founder and social entrepreneur ending homelessness and unemployment for Detroit men, and Katherine as the founder and benefactor of an orphanage in Highland Park. Their proximity to people experiencing hardship and trauma informed their charitable giving and Tracy’s role as a civic leader.
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We are so grateful for your support of our vital work. Thank you and congratulations to our fellow grantees.