The Zilber Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Zilber Property Group, has a new leader in Lianna Bishop.
Bishop joined Zilber Family Foundation in 2021 as operations director and will now be the executive director of the organization on February 14.
Last year the organization distributed $13 million in grants.
Bishop is succeeding Gina Stilp, who has been executive director for six years, who is taking a position with a nonprofit in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Prior to joining Zilber Family Foundation, Bishop, a Brookfield native who got both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Marquette University, worked AmeriCorps in Montana helping farmers provide food to universities and build a sustainable food system.
“It was everything I wanted to do. It was that passion work,” Bishop said. “And I wasn’t in Milwaukee doing it. So, I said I want to do this work in Milwaukee.”
Bishop came back to Milwaukee to work for the Center for Resilient Cities, focusing primarily in the Lindsey Heights neighborhood and building infrastructure in Johnson Park and Alice’s Garden to “activate that space” for residents.
She also worked with the Urban Ecology Center focusing on development, fundraising and communications. Bishop then moved on to work with the Dohmen Company Foundation.
During her time with Zilber Family Foundation, Bishop led the development of the foundation’s partnership with The Bridge Project, Milwaukee’s first unconditional cash transfer program providing direct cash assistance to 122 mothers for three years.
The Zilber Family Foundation is a private independent grantmaking institution which supports organizations that enhancing the well-being of individuals, families, and neighborhoods by supporting nonprofits to address basic needs and personal safety, increase access to social and economic opportunity, and improve the quality of life in neighborhoods.
Here is a Q&A with Bishop and Stilp on the change in leadership, edited for clarity:
Why take this job?
Bishop: Prior (to working here) I worked at nonprofits that were funded by the foundation, I was just always impressed and moved by the transformative change that can happen when philanthropy and community work together.
Being able to step into a greater leadership role felt right and I’m extremely humbled that Gina and the board elevated me to this position.
Is there any target or issue that you really want to take on?
Bishop: We just completed a five year, refreshed, strategic plan that we’ll start to share with our partners and have already started to share with our partners. There are some slight tweaks from the last five years, which really narrowed our focus on housing and urban development, and we’ll continue many of the things that we’ve been funding. But we’ve had some lessons learned from some of our most recent investments around unconditional cash and guaranteed income.
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So we’re building a slightly new portfolio called “cash and capital.” We’re still learning and defining but that has all been work that the board and staff have collectively done. I’m excited to implement that work.
So many nonprofits receive funding for a specific thing like hiring workers, but there are things like rent, utilities, supplies that need that funding. How important is that to have unrestricted funding to provide to non-profits?
Bishop: It’s a core tenant of how we provide funding, multi-year unrestricted funding, and knowing that just as a business needs working capital, so do nonprofits. And it’s more than funding one position to do “a thing,” we know that it takes a healthy working organization to be able to implement that work.
That’s something Zilber has led on and will continue to implement moving forward.
You have a lot of experience on the nonprofit side, now you’re on the receiving end of those requests. Would you say you need to be a bit more selective as to where funding goes?
Bishop: Yes especially with our focus areas, there are organizations that are, while they’re doing great work, just might not align with our focus at the time.
It’s not fun to say “no.” I wish we could fund everything, but I think what we’ve learned over the last 15 years staying with organizations for the long run, making bigger gifts so that that those organizations can have a greater impact versus lots of small gifts across a lot of issue areas. While those small gifts are still impactful, going deep, from what we’ve learned, is the direction we’re going.
What’s next for Zilber Family Foundation?
Bishop: I am excited to be able to share this next iteration of our strategic plan which continues to focus on partnerships and authentic relationships. And funding around affordable housing and what we’re calling, economic stability work, which includes affordable housing and cash and capital. As well as basic needs.
We are interested in moving the needle and taking some big risks or bets but also sustaining and understanding that needs still need to be met. And we’ll continue to fund in that way.
When you look back at your time here, what do you take away from this experience?
Stilp: I’ve learned an incredible amount. The Zilber Family Foundation has carved out a important place in Milwaukee’s nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. We are, I truly believe, committed to partnership. We’re not in it for name recognition. We’re in it because we want to make the city a better place particularly for communities that have been marginalized or left out of a lot of the opportunity and development that we see here.
Is there a project or campaign that you’re proud of during your tenure?
Stilp: The foundation made an initial investment of $1 million into Acts Housing for an acquisition fund. Those funds were restricted, at their request, to having capital available to purchase homes that would have been purchased by investor owners and to reserve those homes for owner/occupants who had gone through Acts Housing home buyer counseling. It was the first of its kind to pool capital in order for a nonprofit to buy off the market.
So the risk element there was high and a big unknown about whether we would be successful in competing against private equity. It was a great leap of faith for our board to trust us, that we had deep partnerships in the affordable housing space here and we had done the due diligence that we needed to do in order to make it work.
And today it has now grown to an almost $8 million fund and we’re acquiring homes in Milwaukee to make sure they’re reserved as affordable homeownership opportunities for first time home buyers, particularly Black and Hispanic homebuyers.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Zilber Family Foundation names Lianna Bishop executive director