The Sprout Fund: Banking on Community-Changing Ideas

Clearly, this is not your typical grant foundation, not here on the emerging Penn Avenue Arts Corridor, in a cool little storefront – and how much is that doggy in the window? Sassy, for Sassafras, a peaceful pooch, tells you everything you need to know about the Sprout Fund, cheek-by-jowl with the Quiet Storm Café and EDGE Studio.

Down home not Downtown, it’s low-key, grassroots -- “deliberately so,” co-founder and executive director Cathy Lewis Long says.

Long is the daughter of the late Ed Lewis, founder of Oxford Development, creator of One Oxford Centre and numerous other landmarks. Eight years ago, at the turn of the new century, the Carnegie Mellon grad who is Coro Center-trained, worked in then-County Executive Jim Roddey’s New Idea Factory, a mini think-tank looking to generate civic participation, to get things moving from the bottom up. “The whole idea was to bring new people to the table thinking creatively about Pittsburgh,” Long recalls.

Wanting to “create a mechanism to support emerging ideas,” Long says, she and co-worker Matt Hannigan (Indiana-born, with Carnegie Mellon and George Washington sheepskins) created Sprout, a seed award program that makes small catalytic grants “to support local culture which will make the city more interesting,” Long says.

Within two years Sprout was on its own and searching for somewhere to do business.  First, Long and Hannigan looked at the logical place, where all the non-profits meet, the Regional Enterprise Tower. They shook their heads. A different breed of cat – or dog, in this case – needs a different space. Setting up shop in a neighborhood, first Long’s Shadyside home (she, her husband, and 1.5 children now live in Squirrel Hill), they quickly moved to the seam between Garfield, Friendship (where Hannigan lives), and East Liberty. “We come to people at their level,” Hannigan says.

A different way of grant-making
With Sprout grants generally aimed at 18-40-year-olds, the team looks at a “broad spectrum of different types of projects,” Long says. “Different” meaning alternative energies to environmental concerns, off-beat arts endeavors to plays and music and murals. “This is a different way of grant-making,” she says.

Sprout grants, Hannigan says, go to “committed community folks,” people doing interesting stuff that will -- in the short- or long-term – add significantly to the community.

“By enabling people to become civically involved,” Long says, “we invest in what’s important to them. We invest in their ideas to change communities.” She pauses. “We’re trying to create changemakers.”

Doling out small grants, $500 to $10,000, the Sprout criteria generally focuses on greater community visibility and involvement. One spectacular success has been the three dozen-odd murals around town, North Side to East Liberty, The Two Andys on Smithfield Street (Warhol and Carnegie in hair dryers) to A Tribute to [1948 Olympic medalist] Herbert Douglas, Hazelwood. A project like this, Hannigan says, “significantly improves the way communities think about themselves. These murals are visually compelling articulations of a community’s self-image through an artist’s eyes.”

“The main thing I like about them,” says muralist Brian Holderman, whose  Futuristic City is at Seventh & Liberty, “is that they’ve made it so that everyday artists have access a lot more simply and frequently. They’re so supportive; they help artists be productive in the community.”

Adds board member and Headwater Films head Henry Simonds, “Sprout’s the coolest thing on the planet. It’s one of the only organizations in town that’s put together a new paradigm for non-profits, bringing people to the table.”

“This is a city where you can have an idea and make it happen,” says Danielle Crumrine of Friends of the Pittsburgh Urban Forest. “Sprout facilitates that. Anyone can have an idea and submit it -- because Sprout takes risks on people. This organization sees value where others see things as too out-of-the-ordinary, or don’t see a direct benefit. Like the Zany Umbrella Circus -- a few guys who travel around and put on a circus. Sprout gave them money to purchase their own tent. Who’s going to give guys money to buy a circus tent?”

Celebrate what they care about
Then came Pittsburgh 250, and the question how to bring the 14 metro counties into the mix, to celebrate what might otherwise have been seen as a local city affair. When the Allegheny Conference asked Long, Leadership Pittsburgh’s Aradhna Dhanda, and WQED’s George Miles to take a look, they handed the baton to Sprout.

Sprout’s answer was so simple it was profound – and may have enormous implications for the region’s future. “If you want people to care,” Long said, “you need to invest in them. How do we get 14 counties to care about Pittsburgh 250? Let’s celebrate what they care about.”

Fanning out into the hinterlands, Sprout reps convened local groups, empowering them, saying it was Cambria County’s decision, for example, how to spend its piece of the Pittsburgh 250 $1 million grant money. “Yes, we wanted to get people civically involved,” Long says, “but we were shocked at how many people were not the usual suspects. Grass-roots marketing brought in a lot of new people to the process.”

Adds project coordinator Dustin Stiver, “there were plenty of introductions between people that had never met before. They were geographically and culturally diverse.”

Communities, like city neighborhoods, started to ask what was important, how could they leverage an attribute into an asset? How can this bike trail, say, be an engine for economic development?

“Sprout was really wonderful,” recalls Family Communications’ Margy Whitmer, who led a Celebration of Fred Rogers’ birthday. “First-time people like me had a fair shot at getting their projects looked at. Funding small community-oriented projects gives people buy-in to the future of this area.”

As Long says, “The thread is civic engagement. We learned that people are poised to think regionally, to build on a network of equity at a grassroots level. It’s momentum for the future.

“For us,” she adds, “it took Sprout to the next level. We’ve propagated democratic decision-making, that’s both progressive and different from the past.”

“We are starting to ask ourselves where do we go from here?” Hannigan says. “How do we continue to find meaningful ways to chart a course for the future? Through Pittsburgh 250 we’ve seen that one way is to connect small-scale activities to larger regional issues.”

“Constant and continued investments in small-scale projects,” Long says, “will change the landscape.”

Like Cheryl Capezzuti’s lint puppets. “Sprout made three projects possible for me,” she says. “They found a way to make something impossible possible. I think that’s a big value to the Pittsburgh community. Lint in the Laundromat – puppets made of dry lint -- that’s the kind of wacky project I do. They saw it as a way to make Pittsburgh a more interesting place. Puppets for Pittsburgh -- a giant puppet lending library. They continue to be very supportive of my work.” Capezzuti pauses. “They have this huge sense of trust. To see a crazy project come to life because of their trust is just great.”

In the city’s Lemington neighborhood, Sprout helped fund a group called Fisherman’s Tail, three dozen men fishing and talking about it. “This engenders intergenerational connections and stories,” Long says. “It’s not a typical investment.”

“Right,” Hannigan nods. “Traditional foundations generally don’t have bait as a line item.”

Don't miss one the hottest parties of the season as Sprout hosts its sixth annual Hothouse event, a benefit party and showcase of recently supported projects, on Saturday, August 23, 2008 at The Union Trust Building in Downtown Pittsburgh.  For tickets and more information visit http://www.hothouse.sproutfund.org.

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Abby Mendelson’s latest book, End of the Road, a collection of short short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.

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Pictured at top, the Sprout team, l to r:  Curt Gettman, Matt Hanigan, Ryan Coon, Cathy Lewis Long, Dustin Stiver, Mac Howison, Timothy Blevins

Photographs copyright Brian Cohen