A few months ago, I went to a feedback dinner at the Rhode Island Foundation, along with about 30 other people from all walks of life. The food was great. The only catch was, they wanted to know what we thought could be better in the state of Rhode Island. I remember one of the other attendees quipping, “They’re feeding us, just to hear us complain?” Well, yes, they were.
That feedback went into a five-year action plan masterminded by David Cicilline. The former PVD mayor and recent RI State Rep returned from Washington DC to take over the reigns of RI’s largest and longest-standing charitable foundation. With about $1.5 Billion in assets and over 100 years under its belt, the organization makes a huge, sometimes unheralded impact on the local non-profit landscape. We were able to get a few minutes with Cicilline to find out what the action plan, inspired by 18 months of feedback from over 2,000 Rhode Islanders, means for the state. We talk about each of its six key issue areas: housing & economic mobility, climate action, arts and culture, healthy communities, and education, all tied together by fostering diverse and equitable community cohesion.
Mike Ryan (Motif): Tell us about the new report Five-Year Action Plan that will take the Foundation through 2029.
David Cicilline: What was very important to me in this process was that when I arrived here, I recognized that it was a good time to do an action plan. Even though this place is filled with incredibly talented, smart, really well-informed people, it was very important to me, and to the Foundation, to be sure that what we developed really came from the community. It took us 18 months: A year and a half of really intense engagement with the community, so that we could be certain that what we were building responded to their greatest challenges. We did that in a variety of different ways – we wanted to create spaces where people would feel comfortable sharing their views and their thoughts. We did community dinners where we invited 50 random people to come and just talk about things that were important in their lives and important in our state. We did focus groups, we did individual interviews, we did some polling. We did some online collection of information. We heard from over 2000 Rhode Islanders in this process, which I think gives us a good sample of the state. And I hope that people, when they saw the five-year action plan, saw their voices in it, because this really came from Rhode Islanders. We heard a lot of support for the work that we’ve been doing in the areas of education, healthcare, and economic opportunity. But we also heard, repeatedly, requests for the Foundation to continue to play a strong role in the issue of housing and housing challenges. We heard a lot about, not economic opportunities in the traditional sense, but about helping to build generational wealth and dealing with historic inequities. Another big issue was climate action. People realize, as the Ocean State, that we have big challenges in responding to the climate crisis. Could we play more of a role in helping to quarterback folks working on this?
The final area is called “Civic and Cultural Life.” Supporting arts and cultural organizations is obviously very important. But also, a lot of Rhode Islanders are asking if we can do more to help bring them together and to bridge some of the deep divisions in our state. That’s sort of our business. We’re a community foundation. Shared arts and cultural experiences can be enjoyable for people who may have completely different views about everything else in life. They can sit through a performance or through a concert in the park, and in that moment, recognize their common humanity. The kind of overriding, important part of this continues to be addressing issues of inequity, to make sure that all the work that we’re doing reaches all Rhode Islanders. Whether you think about the progress you’re trying to make in education, or in healthcare, or in housing, if we don’t address the systemic inequities that have existed and persisted for so long, we’re never going to achieve what we want to achieve as a state, as a country.
MR: You’ve spent a lot of your career gathering information from Rhode Islanders. Was there anything in this set of information that surprised you?
DC: That’s a great question. No. I mean, I wasn’t surprised completely, but I was really pleased that Rhode Islanders recognized that we were in a difficult moment in terms of divisions, and that they were expressing an interest in, “How do we bring people back together to treat each other as neighbors and develop a shared sense of wellbeing?” That made me proud, because I’ve always thought that about Rhode Island. But in these difficult times, you wonder, you know. So I was happy to hear that.
MR: I think that’s one of the interesting characteristics of Rhode Island. We’re all one degree separated.
DC: And the Foundation is as well.
MR: Just the educational seminars that you guys do. Every non-profit board has one member who will say, “We’ve got to send someone to the Rhode Island Foundation,” and they all end up in the same room, getting the same training, networking with each other.
DC: That work we describe as capacity building. I think one of the most effective strategies we have to measure progress on all six of the Community Priorities we’ve developed, is making sure the nonprofits have the ability to accelerate that work. And the best way to do that is to invest in the leadership of those organizations, whether it’s the board, the executive director, or the staff. Because the better they are at doing their work, the more likely we all are to achieve real progress in all of those six areas.
MR: I have seen you at so many arts events around Rhode Island over the years and recently. I know you walk the walk in terms of arts support. What do the arts mean to you personally?
DC: One of the most exciting things for me about coming back home and leaving Washington was that I got to immediately become a subscriber to some of the great performing arts venues in our state, which I didn’t get to do as much when I was in DC. The arts have been a source of enormous pleasure for me personally. I love going to events and artistic performances. In this moment, more than ever, when there’s so much controversy, unpleasantness, and division, arts are places – performances are places – where you could be sitting next to people or meeting people you don’t know at all, but they’re just there to see the same performance. When you see a piece of art, whether it’s a visual art, a painting, or listening to a poem, or going to a performance, that changes you in some way. I consider it to be an important part of being a citizen – to expose yourself to the arts so that you can continue to grow and learn and be a caring, empathetic part of the community.
MR: I remember having an in-depth conversation with you, maybe 25 years ago, when you were running for mayor, and you had that same approach to the arts.
DC: Then it led to the creation of the Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism. I think we were one of the first cities to have a cabinet-level position in government that does that. And, I always tell people, and I still believe this, the difference between kind-of-good cities and great cities is the presence of a rich arts and cultural community. I would say the same thing about states. And Rhode Island has always had a significantly larger arts and cultural community than people expect for a state our size. I don’t really know the reason for it. I mean, I have a theory that it’s, you know, it’s our scrappy way that Rhode Island, since its founding, was fiercely independent and kind of creative. And then you think of the presence of places like the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University. And, you know, Senator Pell was the founder of the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s a long part of our history. I remember when I was mayor, other mayors would come to Providence and ask, “How can I recreate this?” Like they thought it was something you could just make up in your city. You can encourage it, you can nurture it, but some of it is about the people that are there and the institutions that are there, and the kind of culture around the tradition of valuing it. Here it’s so embedded in who we are, which I think is great.
MR: That scrappiness, though, is, I suspect, one of your challenges.
DC: Yeah, it’s funny. I was visiting a grantee of ours the other day, who has also worked in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and she was saying, “Rhode Island is different. There’s lots of opportunities for organizations to collaborate more closely, and everyone kind of has their own way of doing it.” I think it’s a Rhode Island characteristic. Unfortunately, the moment we’re in is going to cause organizations to be really thinking carefully about collaboration. I guess this is maybe one good thing that will come out of many bad things. There will be opportunities for people to think about, “How do we collaborate better? How do we work more closely? How do we align some of what we’re doing?” Because I do think there’s a lot of anxiety about the funding cuts that Washington is proposing and what it’s going to mean. One of the things we’re doing in our new grant program is to try to incentivize organizations to think about, “Who could we partner with to have an even greater impact?” To encourage that, we created a program that’s going to be a multiyear commitment – the idea is to think creatively, be really impactful, and think about new partners.
MR: You take a longer-term perspective on some of these issues. In politics, people have election cycles to deal with and most of the non-profits I know, their concern is, how do we survive for the next few years, and how do we pursue our mission in the short run, not the long term. I think this sets the Rhode Island Foundation apart a little bit. You just gave me one example: How does that change your approach to some of the fundamental challenges that you’re facing?
DC: I would say you’re right that we do have a long view, because we’re a community foundation. We’ve been here for 109 years and we plan on another 109 and beyond. The whole model of a community foundation is an enduring presence with the resources to meet whatever the challenges of the moment are, because they’ll change over time. But the other half of our responsibility is to deal with the current challenges. So while we have a long-standing presence, and while we have resources that will ensure that we remain a community foundation for a very long time, everyone who works here understands the urgency of all six of our Community Priorities. These are urgent issues, whether it’s doing everything we can to improve public education or addressing the serious housing crisis, or improving the civic health of our communities. All of the work is urgent. But because we have long-term thinking, we realize that these issues are not going to be solved with, like, one program and one grant. They’re systemic, and they’re going to require really big change, and that might take some time, but we also see them as urgent.
MR: I think that takes us to homelessness, which is one of the things, before this year, I really hadn’t associated with the Rhode Island Foundation. But it’s a major priority for you this year, and I think for the state. The numbers have, I think, gone up 35% just in the past year. How did homelessness work its way into your priorities and what does that mean?
DC: We led the effort some years ago to get a better understanding of what was driving the absence of housing availability. We worked in partnership with Blue Cross Blue Shield and some others to fund a detailed analysis of, “What’s the problem here?” The Boston Consulting Group did a great report to address that, and two things stuck with me still to this day: They found that RI produced the lowest number of housing units of any state in the country, two or three years in a row; and that we were the third-most highly regulated housing market in America, after New York and San Francisco. That second fact is a product of a lot of local governments creating obstacles to getting any housing produced, period. The General Assembly has done a lot of good work to respond to that, but this is a real crisis. And housing is at the heart of everything. Whether you can go to school, often relates to whether you have a place to live; whether you can get and maintain a job; whether you can deal with an issue like addiction. Housing is fundamental to all of that. So when we did the five-year action plan, we heard that. To your point, we did a lot of work on it before, but it wasn’t well-known or visible. We put it right there in that community priority – “housing and economic mobility” – because we wanted to raise the profile in our work. So we have been developing specific strategies to invest in that will make a real difference. We led the effort to pass the $120 million housing bond, which will bring more resources to produce housing. We’re working with the new state Housing Secretary. I sit on the legislative commission on housing affordability, to work together on strategies that we can support to help produce more housing. And we’ve been doing an increased amount of what we’re calling “impact investing.” I think you’ll see us do more of that as those opportunities become available. It’s an urgent issue. The good news is everyone, I think, has recognized we’re in an emergency. So hopefully we can begin to make progress. I think we’re making some. We have to make a lot more.
MR: I want to ask about fentanyl, because that’s a big topic right now. If you think of addiction as a mental illness that makes it a larger contributing factor. Does any of the plan address that? DC: Yeah, our Healthy and Strong Communities Community Priority. Obviously, one aspect of healthy communities is supporting people who free themselves from addiction and drug abuse. We have supported and will continue to support organizations that are doing some really good work on the front lines of the opioid crisis. It’s hard to find a Rhode Islander who hasn’t had, unfortunately, either a family member or a friend who has lost their battle with addiction.
MR: We’re almost out of time. Do you have anything else you want to share about this plan? DC: I would like to talk about what we do as a community foundation, because a lot of people don’t actually know how community foundations work, or know that first, we’re a public charity, where people bring their philanthropic resources. We take those resources and we invest them in an endowment. Then every year we use a responsible percentage of that investment, and award grants to nonprofits working to address all the priorities for our state. We’re doing that so that we can be there in perpetuity, sustainably. We do our grant-making, our community investments, but I think the superpower of the Rhode Island Foundation is our ability to bring people together over issues that are complicated and hard and to create a space to really develop good solutions. I think you’ll see more of this. We’re going to be very strategic about advocating for change. We can often test something, prove the concept, and have big systems change. You’ll see that capacity building – we invest a lot in making sure organizations are primed for success, so that they can make even more progress on the issues. The point is, we do all these things, but we can only be successful at each of them, if we’re doing all of them.
MR: One last question. What’s the reaction been so far?
DC: Great! •
