After Tops, the Buffalo Together fund seeks long-term solutions

And that means thinking long term.

Aside from more than $650,000 in grants awarded in the months immediately following the May 14, 2022, racist shooting at the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue, the fund has not spent any of its $6 million in funds.

Instead, fund officials studied how other communities have addressed the same type of stubborn social and economic problems facing the neighborhoods around Jefferson Avenue and other low-income communities. And they hope to share details of their plan to address these same issues in Buffalo this summer.

The mission of the fund, created in the wake of the attack that killed 10 Black people, is to create a more equitable community and address issues of structural racism and disinvestment that have harmed Buffalo’s East Side and d other low-income communities.

The fund stands at just over $6 million. But this amount does not reflect the scale of its projects.

“We view the $6 million as sort of seed money to get us started on our investment strategy, certainly to bring in additional resources,” said Thomas Beauford Jr., president and CEO of the Buffalo Urban League. He serves as co-chair of the fund’s steering committee with LaVonne Ansari, CEO and executive director of the Community Health Center of Buffalo.

“There is no blueprint for what we do,” he said. “If it was an easy job, if it was a job that could be solved in two years, we would think there would have been a way to do it.”

Beauford said the Buffalo Together fund is not looking for silver bullet answers, but rather long-term solutions.

“This fund is still intact,” he said. “We have not used any of that funding, and that has been very deliberate.”

A separate fund collected and distributed donations to those affected by the supermarket attack. Unlike the 5/14 Survivors Fund, the Buffalo Together fund “was never intended to be an expense,” Beauford said.

“This was always intended to be the spark for additional funding and to help the work that builds on all the research, to move things forward,” he said.

The Buffalo Together Fund is a collaboration of 14 funding organizations, coordinated by the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo and United Way of Buffalo & Erie County. The fund works with Rainbow Research, a Black-led consulting firm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to help identify priorities and develop a community investment strategy.

Over the past year, the steering committee has studied approaches taken by other communities:

• Committee members toured infill housing and community development initiatives in Syracuse neighborhoods. The nonprofit helps people living in low-income areas become homeowners.

• Committee members participated in a virtual presentation with the nonprofit CHN Housing Partners in Cleveland, an affordable housing developer and housing services provider.

• Members were given a virtual introduction to Nourish + Bloom Market, a Black-owned grocery business based in Georgia. The company has AI-powered stores that can be set up in neighborhoods using shipping containers, to bring healthy food into communities. Some members traveled to Atlanta to visit a store.

• The steering committee also received presentations from Black-led foundations in Pittsburgh and Minnesota.

The tours and presentations gave steering committee members insight into best practices in similar communities in Buffalo. The idea was not to replicate what is being done in other communities, but to learn more about what is being tried and what could be applied here, said Garnell Whitfield Jr., a member of the steering committee.

“This community has been disenfranchised and disinvested for generations,” Whitfield said. “We have a myriad of issues that we need to solve collectively, and this is our hope to do so.”

The costs of working with Rainbow Research and travel for steering committee members were covered by other funding sources, Beauford said.

And the work the steering committee does touches the community, Beauford said. Whitfield’s mother, Ruth, was among 10 people killed in the attack.

“This is our daily experience as well, as we try to get through this and get corrections,” Beauford said. “We don’t do this from the outside.”

The Buffalo Together Fund plans to launch its community investment strategy this summer.

“What we will have is some sort of defined solutions,” Beauford said. “It will be a multi-faceted solution. It will encompass things we can do along a continuum – some things to start immediately, others that will be illuminated over time.”

Whitfield said the strategy “is going to help build trust, within the community and within the community as a whole, to see something tangible and to see how thoughtful the work has been so far “.

Even as the strategy is launched, Beauford stressed that the steering committee is only part of the process and does not claim to have all the answers.

“In no way does this steering committee consider itself the voice of the community,” he said. “We see ourselves as amplifying the community’s voice. There will always be community input.”

In 2022, the Buffalo Together Fund distributed approximately $655,000 in grants to 86 Black-led organizations working on the front lines following the massacre. But the fund’s total has climbed back above the $6 million mark, due to the high interest rate environment, Beauford said.

Beauford said the Buffalo Together fund will use a concept called “targeted universalism,” meaning that if something is good for the East Side, it could be good for all of Buffalo and New York state .

“When you uplift the most deprived communities or when you strengthen that infrastructure, it will have a resounding impact on the community as a whole, on Buffalo as a whole,” he said.