of New York ($1 million), FlintNOW Foundation ($10 million), Ford Foundation ($1 million), the Hagerman Foundation ($1 million), the Kresge Foundation (up to $2.5 million), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($1 million), Ruth Mott Foundation ($1 million), Skillman Foundation ($500,000 immediately, with up to an additional $1.5 million in the future) and W.K. Kellogg Foundation (up to $5 million).

Additional partners are expected to announce their support soon, organizers said.

“Quite honestly, we felt like this was a crisis in our backyard and we had a civic and moral responsibility to respond to support the residents in Flint,” Tonya Allen, Skillman’s president and CEO, said in an interview.

Overall, foundation leaders identified six areas where they believe their funds can help: ensuring safe drinking water; meeting health needs; supporting early education; building a robust non-profit sector; promoting community engagement and revitalizing the city’s ailing economy.

As one part, there will be a dollar-for-dollar match of up to $5 million on donations made to the Flint Child Health & Development Fundthrough Dec. “This is a tremendous effort by organizations well known for their philanthropic support of communities and people around the state.”

In some ways, the joint philanthropic effort appears to echo the kind of coalition behind the so-called grand bargain assembled to speed Detroit’s exit from municipal bankruptcy.

The centerpiece of Detroit’s bankruptcy blueprint was an $816 million investment by the State of Michigan, some of the nation’s leading foundations and the Detroit Institute of Arts to preserve the city-owned art museum collection in exchange for helping to pay down the city’s crushing employee pension debt.

“I can’t say that the grand bargain was something that I didn’t think about as we started to have these conversations,” White said of Mott’s effort to bring together the group of foundations. It’s not trying to replace what government should do.”

The cash infusion from the collection of foundations for Flint, a poverty-stricken city long suffering from population loss and disinvestment, is not meant to replace government funds that have been proposed to replace lead pipes and provide basic health care, according to foundation leaders.

Instead, the funding is designed to augment funding that philanthropic officials argue should be provided quickly.

Elected leaders “need to respond and they need to respond immediately,” said La June Montgomery Tabron, president and CEO of the Kellogg Foundation, which committed up to $5 million over the next year to support children’s education, health and well-being in Flint. But the body has yet to approve the bulk of the nearly $200-million aid package proposed by Snyder earlier this year.

The Legislature approved $9.3 million in October to help Flint reconnect to the Detroit water and sewerage system, $28 million in January for a variety of services and $30 million in February to help pay for water bills for residents who were being charged for water that they couldn’t drink because of lead contamination.
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