Community: The City of Kalamazoo
Population: 10,000+
The City of Kalamazoo and Kalamazoo Foundation for Excellence (FFE) are proud of our work to address the COVID-19 pandemic. We worked with local partners to make a direct impact on our community and its residents – students, families, local businesses and non-profits – as early as March 2020. Our Disaster Relief Fund ensured our non-profit partners had access to resources to meet increased demand. Our Small Business Loan Fund allowed our business community – with special emphasis on BIPOC and women-owned businesses – to keep doors open and lights on. Together, our Digital Access for All program and Learning Hubs supported local students as they adapted to learning remotely. By the end of 2020, the City and FFE have allocated more than $2.64 million to this work. We moved quickly, created specific and targeted responses, developed strong partnerships, and helped our community through a time of crisis. That work continues today.
Replicability:
Kalamazoo has developed and supported a strong network of partnerships -- local schools, businesses, the United Way, colleges, and non-profits. Our response to COVID-19 was successful BECAUSE of those strong partnerships. We were able to mobilize and creatively respond to challenges because we had those relationships. The Kalamazoo Foundation for Excellence (a foundation which exists to support the City of Kalamazoo) also allowed us to have those unrestricted resources necessary to be nimble and quick in responding -- this was essential to our success.
Creativity and Originality:
The Kalamazoo Foundation for Excellence is a unique creation of our local community to allow us to respond to community needs -- like the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to allowing us to quickly respond in creative and unique ways to community challenges, the Foundation provides significant budget stability and is utilized to reduce property taxes, incentivizing residents and businesses to join the Kalamazoo community. In this particular situation, the Kalamazoo Foundation for Excellence allowed us to mobilize millions of dollars within weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing immediate relief and filling gaps in federal relief programs.
Community Impact:
As a result of the four projects described here Kalamazoo was able to respond to COVID-19 and ensure that our local small businesses had the immediate resources they needed to stay open, our students had access to the technology and supports they needed to participate in remote education throughout the 2020-2021 school year (Kalamazoo Public Schools was remote all year), and our non-profits had access to additional, local resources to meet the increased need which arose almost immediately as the pandemic hit.
