Meet the Song Foundation: A Michigan Take on Silicon Valley Philanthropy
/
Song Foundation Executive Director Khalilah Burt Gaston speaks at the funder's recent "Joy Report" gathering for grantees. Photo credit: Alejandro Ugalde - Featherstone Moments
Tech philanthropy often carries a geographical association with the California Bay Area, and for good reason. But Silicon Valley isn’t the only place in the U.S. where some of the distinctive patterns of tech giving are showing up. Take the Song Foundation, a relatively new, still relatively small foundation started in 2019 by Ann Arbor power couple Dug and Linh Song, which focuses its funding on southeastern Michigan.
The Song Foundation is notable for several reasons. For one thing, this is a funder that seems deeply committed to making life easier for the grantee partners it serves. Additionally, the foundation is equally focused across several priority areas: tech and entrepreneurship, promoting diversity and youth leadership, and supporting grassroots organizing and movement-building. In other words, it’s a multipurpose funder where both older, established players and newer startup organizations may well find support.
Given the combination of the Songs’ wealth and relative youth — Dug Song, who graduated from the University of Michigan in 1997, sold his cybersecurity company Duo Security for more than $2 billion in 2018 — there’s likely a good deal in store for this regional funder, which is establishing itself as something of a Michigan take on Silicon Valley philanthropy.
A few early moves
The Song Foundation announced its public launch earlier this year, but the funder and its founders were already making a mark on their community well before that. By the time the foundation hired its first executive director, Khalilah Burt Gaston, in 2022, it had reportedly made roughly $2 million in grants, including $1 million in March 2020 to the Washtenaw County Small Business Emergency Relief Fund to support local businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.
Earlier, in 2019, the Songs’ approach to corporate citizenship was illustrated by their founding of the Ann Arbor Entrepreneurs Fund, an initiative managed by the Ann Arbor Community Foundation to promote affordable housing and combat racial disparities in life expectancy. Mirroring the Pledge 1% model, which was spearheaded by Marc Benioff and has achieved significant traction in Silicon Valley philanthropy, member tech companies were required to pledge 1% of their stock and either 1% of their profits or 1% of their staff’s volunteer time to the fund. The Song Foundation continues to support the fund, which was reorganized in 2021 as the Michigan Founder’s Fund.
Linh Song, who along with Dug is one of three members of the foundation’s board, currently serves on the Ann Arbor City Council, as co-chair for Michigan Reproductive Rights for All, and on the boards of nonprofits including the Skillman Foundation. Earlier this year, Linh Song was in the news for donating a year’s worth of her city council salary to striking University of Michigan graduate students.
Poised for growth
There’s a lot that’s yet to be determined about the Song Foundation, which reported net assets of just over $31 million in 2022. But the 2022 hiring of Khalilah Burt Gaston, whose previous work includes managing a $500 million portfolio for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, has certainly set the funder up for growth. For her part, Gaston told an interviewer in 2022 that the chance Song offered her to build its culture from scratch “was too good to pass up.” During a conversation I had with her in May, Gaston said that the combination of her professional experience as someone who had cycled in and out of foundations, coupled with the Songs’ backgrounds, “enables us to be very streamlined and very nimble with our grantmaking process.”
That nimbleness, Gaston said, is reflected in an initial application form that takes roughly five to seven minutes to complete. “We believe in doing our own work” to research potential grantees, she said, which includes using software to scrape the internet for information about nonprofits — to prefill basic information about applicants, essentially — and then giving them the chance to correct any errors rather than having them do a lot of labor upfront. Additionally, she said, when grants are awarded, Song asks grantees when they would like to receive payments. And instead of demanding formal grant reports, earlier this year, Song held a “Joy Report,” a private-retreat-like event for grantees to share what resulted from the money they’d received.
In terms of its current priorities, the Song Foundation website says that it supports “Black, brown, and immigrant-led and -serving organizations in Southeast Michigan,” with its “priority communities” being Flint, Detroit, Dearborn, Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. “That doesn’t mean we aren’t funding organizations that don’t meet that criteria,” Gaston said, “but it does mean that we want to understand how organizations are centering equity in their leadership and their own program delivery.” This is important, she said, because specifically when it comes to southeastern Michigan, “I think people forget that there's a huge disparity between the populations that are served and the leadership of nonprofit organizations. So if anything, we're trying to help correct some inequality versus giving undue or unfair advantages to people.”
Work in progress
A list of the foundation’s current grantees reveals long-established names like the ACLU Fund of Michigan and ProPublica alongside smaller, more local groups. Those include Project Clean Slate, a Detroit city initiative that helps people expunge previous criminal convictions to improve their housing and employment prospects, and Industrial Sewing and Innovation Center (ISAIC), a Detroit nonprofit that trains people in advanced techniques in clothing manufacturing.
That isn’t all the foundation is up to. Current and potential work, Gaston said, includes things like impact investing to support inclusive technology in workforce development, broadband access, supporting grantees’ technology needs, and “demystifying tech and tech as a sector for regular people.” Last spring, Song hosted a series of conversations with tech founders, where the foundation heard that the sector could use more support with issues like the availability of health insurance and opportunities for community-building. Song is also committed to launching a fellowship for its area’s youth leaders, with a timeline for final recommendations set for the spring of 2024.
At the moment, though, Gaston said there haven’t been any decisions about whether, or when, the Song Foundation may expand its endowment or its board and staff. The foundation’s very lean at the moment — both the staff and board are composed of three people apiece, with additional support from a company in Denver that handles the funder’s mail and back-office operations. Decisions about the foundation’s eventual size, and whether or not it will exist in perpetuity or spend down, are still up in the air.
What is certain, Gaston said, is that “Dug and Linh are committed to achieving the greatest impact possible during their lifetime. As a team, we are still listening and learning from our peers — many of whom are currently figuring out how to spend down their endowments — but no final decision has been made.” In the meantime, the Song Foundation is accepting applications from nonprofits that meet its criteria.
