Dan and Jennifer Gilbert

Big blow to the city of Detroit, suffering from a plummet in the population.

And now it’s just 700,000 people.

More people are leaving than are coming in.

And it’s going to take a lot of effort, basically making the city more livable.

The city had been in decline for 60 years almost in every metric you looked at.

Population was reduced significantly.

People didn’t just lose their house.

They didn’t just lose generational wealth. People lost hope.

Dan and I are both from Detroit. He’s fourth. I’m third generation. Our kids are fifth generation, so we’re committed to the city.

Philanthropy at home is the best, I think.

Why not impact the, the city that you’re from.

While a major mortgage company is packing up and heading to downtown Detroit.

Dan’s decision to move to downtown Detroit over 10 years ago was probably one of the biggest ways that we could have possibly had impact on our community.

And so that included things like philanthropic investments to support activations and public spaces, but it also included renovating buildings and investing in businesses so that there were people that could come to those buildings.

You got to look at it as a big bang approach.

So it’s hard to do just little pieces of philanthropy if you’re going to help bring back a city.

You got to have the political connections, you got to have the community connections.

So it’s good to do as much as you can at one time, as hard as that may be.

We look for areas that the business had experience and resources at, and that could impact the city.

Housing was a natural for us, I think, for obvious reasons, and that turned into looking at tax foreclosure issues and looking at blight issues all stem out of housing.

We believe that housing is the foundation of success in every element of our lives.

At the end of the day, we need a safe and stable place to be able to lay our heads.

Housing stability cannot only represent safety and security.

It can also represent an opportunity for generational wealth.

And that’s an opportunity that we believe every Detroit resident should have access to.

We’ve had our for-profit businesses for decades, and we look for a way, how can we combine these together and leverage resources of both sides?

And so we come up with the term “for more than profit”.

The idea is to really recognize that our business and our community are inextricably linked.

We can’t be successful as a business if our community isn’t strong, healthy, and thriving.

Dan Gilbert announces a $500 million investment in the city of Detroit with a portion of that going toward paying off property tax debt to thousands.

And he and Jennifer started the Gilbert Family Foundation committing $500 million, and they went through and found 12,000 families who were being current on their property taxes, but had a debt hanging over them that was in jeopardizing their situation.

And they went and paid off the back taxes of those 12,000 people.

Before the $500 million commitment, we were doing the work in the city and, you know, I think it was based on the progress that we were seeing, and we wanted to double down.

Dan and Jennifer made the $500 million commitment.

That program by itself saved a lot of people from losing their homes, and that has now since built a ripple effect in neighborhoods across the city where our philanthropy is really leading.

If you want to solve a problem, you have to ask the people that you’re solving the problem for.

We talk to a lot of community members and leaders and organizations.

We work with residents. We have conversations with people all the time. We are fully integrated into the community in a way that I don’t think most foundations have been.

It really is very rewarding and it keeps getting more so because the more you see, the more you want to do.

In the last 5, 10 years, we see families staying now and they have reasons to stay.

Crime is significantly down. Blight is is significantly down. Literally, the population has grown in Detroit.

If you’ve mentioned that to somebody 10, 15 years ago that that would happen, they would look at you like you’re crazy.

There’s been significant change, not only in the downtown financial area, but in the cultural area, arts, in the neighborhoods.

And again, like Dan said, young professionals are moving, families are moving, and they’re investing in their communities.

To this day, we’re trying to recruit other businesses that have high employee or high headcounts.

The human capital you may have in those companies is a huge advantage.

It becomes way more impactful than writing a check. The real value is the knowledge, experience that you’ve had from business that makes the difference.

I always wondered why certain people hold back because they’re actually robbing themselves of the feelings of impact that you can make.

And there’s no better feeling, really, than that.