How This Dedicated Cleveland Funder Is Backing the City’s Cultural Institutions

Cleveland, Ohio. Vuelo Aerial Media/shutterstock

Earlier this year, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation announced a $3 million grant to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to support the development of a new community space and to provide free admission every Sunday to residents.

The gift, which is part of the museum’s $150 million expansion project, suggests that maybe — just maybe — museums are turning a corner. Instead of contemplating pandemic-induced existential threats to the field, perhaps we can finally get back to the business of debating how donors can best support thriving cultural institutions, including the fruits of their efforts to boost access and the risks of big capital projects.

At the same time, the announcement, which came six months after the foundation gave the Cleveland Orchestra $50 million, called to mind an important lesson we learned from the depths of the pandemic, one that may serve philanthropy well in the future — that is, the importance of humble, place-based funders whose workman-like support has sustained local organizations throughout the ongoing crisis.

The Mandel Foundation falls squarely into that category. It may not be a household name, but it’s been a major player in the Cleveland region for close to 70 years, focusing on areas like leadership development, management of nonprofits, higher education, Jewish education and urban renewal. It disbursed approximately $110 million in support in 2021, almost evenly split between the U.S. and Israel.

As an operating foundation, Mandel runs its own programs and services, like the Mandel Center for Leadership Excellence and Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, rather than soliciting and evaluating and grant applications from nonprofits in a structured manner. President and CEO Dr. Jehuda Reinharz told me that this approach “gives us the opportunity to make sure our programs operate in the spirit of the mission of the foundation.” As we’ll see, the foundation also partners with universities and organizations in fields like healthcare and the humanities to “change the way a particular institution works for the better,” Reinharz said.

An auto parts fortune

In 1940, three brothers — Jack, Joe and Mort Mandel — founded the Premier Automotive Supply Company, which later became one of the world’s leading industrial parts and electronic components distributors. In 1953, they established the Mandel Foundation with the mission of contributing to the “flourishing of the United States and Israel as just, inclusive, compassionate and democratic societies, and to improve the quality of life of all citizens in both countries.” In 1990, the foundation launched the Mandel Foundation-Israel.

Reinharz was born in Haifa, in what is now Israel, in 1944. He earned his master’s degree in medieval Jewish history from Harvard University in 1968 and his Ph.D. in modern Jewish history from Brandeis University in 1972. He went on to teach and hold the title of provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Brandeis before becoming its president in 1994. It was around this time that Reinharz became acquainted with Morton Mandel.

Reinharz joined the Mandel Foundation board of trustees in 2005. Four years later, Reinharz announced he’d step down as president of Brandeis. In 2010, the Mandel Foundation named him as its new president. Reinharz assumed the role on January 1, 2011.

Leadership development and the humanities

Reinharz walked me through the board’s interest in boosting the effectiveness of an institution’s operations and how it plays out in one of its priority areas, leadership development.

He noted that when a leader steps down from a role, their superiors usually conduct an expensive national or international search for a replacement, given the lack of suitable in-house candidates. When this search drags on in fields like healthcare, it can lead to adverse patient outcomes. “Many people in the health field aren’t trained to be leaders,” Reinharz said. “How do you run a department? How do you hire people? How do you manage the day-to-day operations? Many hospitals don’t train professionals from within.” 

To close this gap, the foundation gave $23 million to the Cleveland Clinic’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Global Leadership and Learning Institute to prepare leaders from around the world to solve future healthcare delivery issues. The gift also created the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Global Leadership and Learning Pathway, a training initiative housed within the Mandel Institute that supports top-performing Cleveland Clinic caregivers and cultivates them for future executive leadership roles.

The foundation’s other big priority is to advance the humanities. Back in 2015, it gave the American Academy of Arts & Sciences a $5.6 million gift to establish the Morton L. Mandel Program for Civic Discourse and Membership Engagement. The gift, which aimed to provide more opportunities in which fellows could exchange knowledge and advance new ideas, was the largest in the academy’s 235-year history. “A lot of the world is interested in science, which is obviously very important,” Reinharz said, “but we feel that without humanities, regardless of what field you’re in, you will never be fully successful.”

Gauging impact

Reinharz told me the board’s decision to partner with an institution often hinges on the strength of that institution’s leadership. “It’s almost an unwritten law,” he said. “We have to trust the leadership to not only communicate what we are interested in, but also to make it happen on their campuses.” In order to ensure maximal impact, foundation staff conducts on-site visits and speaks with the institution’s leaders and those doing the work. Institutions are also required to submit annual reports.

Like other funders working in the field, Reinharz acknowledges that the humanities can be “a much more complicated field to evaluate with absolute certainty.” As a result, Reinharz and his team hold in-depth discussions with leaders of partner institutions to determine the effectiveness of a program, looking at how the money was spent and the extent to which the intended audiences benefited.

Let’s say a student participated in one of the foundation’s scholars programs and said the experience changed his or her life. Reinarz and his team are equally concerned with what comes next. “What did you do with it?” he said. “How did you use the knowledge you gained? What is the difference in what you did, compared to what existed before?” He called this process “messy,” “time-consuming,” and “subjective,” but also absolutely critical in helping staff determine the value of its programs and identify areas of improvement.

Recent big gifts

All of which brings me back to the foundation’s $3 million gift to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Scheduled to open in 2024, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Community Space will be located in the museum’s new education wing and will provide “a first-of-its-kind facility and museum experience that centers the visitor and illustrates biological and planetary processes in a dynamic, nonlinear, and immersive way.”

Reinharz told me the museum approached the foundation for support. Given the foundation’s longstanding interest in the humanities, he noted that readers may find it strange that the board made a grant to advance the sciences. But the gift dovetailed with the foundation’s mission in two key ways.

First, naturally, the museum is based in Cleveland. In addition, the grant, which also bankrolled free admission for Cleveland and East Cleveland residents beginning in January, aligns with the foundation’s urban engagement work. “We insisted that approximately a third would be used to afford free entrance to the museum for the next three years, to see how it works,” Reinharz said. “It’s part of our interest in having an educated population.” He noted that attendance has “jumped dramatically” since the policy was enacted in January.

Reinharz mentioned two other gifts that may not appear to align with the foundation’s mission. The first was the $50 million gift to the Cleveland Orchestra. The orchestra “is considered one of the best orchestras in the country, and probably one of the best in the world, but it has a very small endowment,” he said. And so the foundation earmarked $31.5 million of last year’s $50 million grant—the largest in the orchestra’s 104-year history—for endowment purposes. The remaining support aligned with its urban engagement work by bankrolling and expanding the orchestra’s programs and partnerships.

And last July, the foundation gave DigitalC, a nonprofit wireless internet provider, $18 million to close the digital divide by providing internet access to households in disadvantaged communities throughout Cleveland. “We felt it was important to build an educated citizenry, because when families don’t have internet access, especially during COVID, their children can’t keep up with school work and parents can’t hold jobs,” Reinharz said.

Advice for nonprofit leaders

Reinharz encourages leaders to articulate a path toward self-sufficiency in their discussions with funders. He provided a hypothetical example whereby Mandel Foundation would commit to a six-year grant with the condition that after year four, the organization begins to start paying for some of the program’s expenses and becomes fully self-sufficient when the grant expires. 

He also acknowledges that this approach may not be feasible for every nonprofit organization during a global pandemic. That said, the idea of getting organizations to stand on their own two feet resonates with the foundation’s board. “No foundation that I’m aware of — and I admit, there may be exceptions — wants to fund a particular entity forever,” he said. “It’s much more interesting for us if we can help an organization turn its trajectory around and flourish on its own.”