Our founders Tracy McGregor and Katherine Whitney met at the turn of the last century, most likely in one of the residential charities where they both volunteered – available documents do not reveal exactly how they initially met. At the time, Tracy was continuing his father’s legacy, building a mission to provide home, work and belonging for homeless men. Katherine was the philanthropic-minded heiress of one of Detroit’s most well-known and wealthiest families. Their shared love for humankind sparked a deep and mutual affection for each other, and they married in 1901.

The McGregors lived out their calling through human relationships with people at society’s margins. Whether tending to the spiritual needs of the men at the Mission or playing with children residing at the Home for Orphaned Children founded by Katherine, they embodied real, radical love in action.

In 1925, they formally committed their wealth to serving Detroiters through the McGregor Fund. This was one of the earliest expressions of institutional philanthropy via an independent, non-family foundation seen in Detroit, with The Kresge Foundation established just a year prior by retail magnate Sebastian S. Kresge. We continue the McGregors’ founding mission today: to relieve the misfortunes and promote the well-being of humankind.

Tracy and Katherine birthed far more than relief funding. Their work was an intentional, progressive, and yes, loving decision to truthfully name and confront the social issues causing destitution and despair in their time. A century later, we are leaning ever more deeply into the work they gave us by putting radical love into action.

The McGregor Fund’s pathway to the work of housing justice began with Tracy McGregor’s own embrace of strangers as neighbors. From his boyhood in Ohio, he had watched his father pour himself into the work of caring for those without a foothold in society. When Tracy took over the Mission for Homeless Men after his father’s passing, he continued building it as a home filled with love, sustenance and long-term care.

Over a century of work, the Fund has increasingly extended its philanthropic commitments beyond meeting basic needs. Supporting access to dignified housing and healthy food remains a fundamental mission for the Fund, and we’ve learned that loving, wraparound, human-centered care for individuals and families is just as important.

Our founders made a clear moral claim about the worth of human beings, delivered through the material vehicle of housing. As our philosophy has continued to evolve over time, we’ve supported holistic approaches to homelessness and partners who walk with our neighbors as they move toward stability and thriving.

We’ve learned so much about this work from our partners over the decades and we will continue to call out systems and structures that stand in the way of what we know to be true: That every person deserves both shelter and a life of stability, community and the freedom to love, create and experience joy.

To Tracy, the men who arrived at the Mission door were human beings with dignity — fathers, sons, workers and dreamers with stories and hopes for the future. The McGregors modeled love in proximity — in the Mission and through social enterprise — leading to the creation of the McGregor Fund as a commitment to long-term well-being.

The McGregors’ devotion to the whole person and to “relieving misfortune” is revealed through the Fund’s lifelong history of emergency response for those who find themselves critically impacted by life circumstances. The first-ever designation from the Fund, recorded in 1931, was to the "Detroit Emergency Relief Committee" to support Detroit's unemployed and unhoused who were experiencing hardship and extreme need during a particularly hard, Depression-era winter. This pattern continued across decades as the Fund responded to societal and local disruptions to civil life. During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and since, emergency funding has become a frequent focus of our grantmaking.

While the Fund’s grant priorities over the years have ebbed and flowed, today we align primarily with partners whose work supports people who are overcoming life challenges compounded by social marginalization and economic oppression. Our grant partners’ missions support mental health and belonging, stability, meaningful work opportunities, and pathways to long-term self-sufficiency and community engagement – work that promotes self-agency and builds power.

We know these are freedoms each person deserves, and we are called to challenge the systems that deny this truth. This is radical love in action.

This loving commitment to well-being is also threaded through our support for individuals leading work across the sector. It inspired the Fund’s renowned sabbatical program, the Eugene A. Miller Fellowship, which launched in 2012. We know that the fruits of well-being — autonomy, choice, access to rest, and the opportunity to realize one's identity and purpose — are meant to be enjoyed by all. We're uplifting rest as a matter of justice – beginning with the leaders of our partner organizations.

Though homelessness and human dignity have remained a throughline for the McGregor Fund across the last century, our work has wandered, stretched and evolved alongside the changing realities of people and place.

After Tracy McGregor’s death in 1936, the Fund continued to expand beyond the work that first defined it, as the Fund’s leadership felt a social responsibility to contribute broadly to civic matters.

Across its first half century, the Fund made grants locally, nationally and internationally, investing in education, health, science, religion, arts and culture, civic life, women’s and children’s services, emergency relief and basic needs.

Over time, the Fund returned more intentionally toward place-based work and social services, recognizing that Detroiters deserved institutions deeply rooted in everyday realities. As the Fund’s priorities shifted, curiosity endured. The work continued to ask: What does it truly mean for a person, a family, a neighborhood or a city to experience well-being?

Today, our understanding continues to expand. Well-being now asks us to consider racial and economic justice, the health of democracy, belonging, safety, imagination and the future itself. We are learning from organizers, residents, artists, healers and advocates, as well as from partners whose work stretches beyond conventional categories and toward more liberatory possibilities for community.

Our partners teach us how to grow. To remain curious and experiment is to resist becoming fixed and to believe a better future is possible. To expand one’s understanding of care, again and again across generations, one of the deepest expressions of love we can offer each other.

Love cannot remain still.

The McGregor Fund continuously aspires to become a more faithful reflection of the communities we serve, by honoring who Detroiters have been, who we are in the present, and who we are becoming.

Through our grant partners’ wisdom and in the imagination and resilience of people who shape their neighborhoods every day, we are offered glimpses of what lies ahead. We’ve learned the future speaks through community long before institutions learn how to listen.

Our founders, Tracy and Katherine, were indeed ahead of their time, and their foresight has guided the Fund for a hundred years. Now we are turning toward deeper questions about the responsibility we hold as an elder institution of philanthropy, including how we return wealth, share power, and reimagine our original charge. Today, our mission finds us working to embed the visions of Detroiters into our ethos, so the Fund’s resources, our influence, and our capacities are clear, undeniable reflections of our community.

One hundred years later, McGregor Fund still stands rooted in love, guided by compassion, and committed to the enduring work of caring for one another.

Katherine Whitney was the youngest of four children, and as some histories report, had a close bond with her father, David Whitney, Jr. While her other siblings were situated within the Whitney family’s social and elite lineage, Katherine cared little for social position. Instead, she found her passion in charitable and church-based activities and volunteered at the McGregor Institute (Tracy’s mission) via her affiliation with the First Presbyterian Church. It is through her charitable engagements where Katherine and Tracy came to know one another.

In the Fund’s first annual report, its president, Henry S. Helbert, wrote “With trusty Scotch reticence, she gave quietly, without ostentation, being concerned chiefly in helping people to help themselves.”

In her late twenties, Katherine took on the work of caring for orphans, at first serving as a benefactress for children placed in homes throughout Detroit and eventually herself opening a small home for children. In the early 1900s, Katherine opened the McGregor Home in Highland Park, where “a score of children, many of whom knew no other home, were housed, fed, clothed and educated, and where every energy was directed toward inculcating in the children a spirit of independence and a realization that their future depended on their own efforts.”

From the letters in the McGregors’ archive, we see signs of her concerns for well-being, as she often doted on Tracy’s health and expressed concern about his overworking. Her sensitivity to exhaustion for those who take on the social challenges of society feels subtly connected to our current work around rest and well-being for nonprofit sector leaders.

Very few photos of Katherine exist, as she had many destroyed in her later years. The photo here is one of a few that remain.