A Message for Our Grantees

Much like you, at the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, we are closely monitoring the development of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

We are working by the hour to equip ourselves and our partners with accurate, up-to-date information and responding as quickly and effectively as possible.

In brief, here are a few key responses to common questions from our grantees that we wish to share:

• If you have an open grant from CFSEM and have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to your program officer. We are standing by ready to be as flexible as possible.
• We are happy to extend grant report deadlines if needed.
• We are available to discuss changes to your grant budgets if needed.
• We are planning to pay all grants on schedule.

Meanwhile, as the crisis evolves in southeast Michigan, we are asking you, our grantee partners for help.

We know our grantees are the eyes and ears of our community, so we are asking you to share with us both the long and short term needs you see arising within your organizations and communities. While we cannot support all needs, hearing from you does help us to direct donors and others to things most pressing.

We strongly encourage you to share those needs with us through our website. We will continuously update the list of needs as we collect more information. Feel free to respond more than once over the coming weeks as you see new needs emerge.

You will find a summary of the issues we have collected so far at this link. We are updating this daily.

Amidst office and school closures, event cancellations, and the shutdown of small businesses, we want to stay abreast of the issues and better understand how and where we can be effective.

As we learn how best to address this evolving pandemic, the impact of regional collaboration and local contributions has never been more apparent.  As such, we launched a COVID-19 Fund to respond to some of the emerging issues you are telling us about.  We wanted to provide a tool to our donors and partners who want to give.

We are identifying issue areas, informed by what we are hearing from you, of where the limited funds we have raised can be targeted to make a difference.   At this time, we will have an invitation-only process for the COVID funds, as we don’t want you spending time on applying unless we know we have funds to address your areas of need.

Please know that once we identify a targeted area that we believe we have meaningful funds to support, we will contact organizations that work in that area to provide input into our grantmaking strategy.

Our first wave of grants were for support of immediate health care needs.   We anticipate additional waves of grants in the weeks to come for other areas as well.

Thank you for all you do every day to support residents in southeast Michigan. Together, we will get through this challenging time. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to one of us if something is on your mind.

Subscribe to COVID-19 Updates for Grantees

Sincerely,
Katie Brisson
Vice President, Program