A Veteran Fund Raiser Makes a Transition to Grant Maker

When Douglas Bitonti Stewart got his first job in fund raising, as an 18-year-old

conducting research on potential donors for Michigan State University’s capital campaign, he was just a college student looking for some extra money to help pay for his education.

“There was really no purpose behind it,” he says. “But that’s when I found out it was a profession, something I could do for a living.”

Today, after devoting all of his adult years to working as a fund raiser, Mr. Stewart, now 37, is embarking on a second career as a grant maker. He is now the executive director of the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation, in Southfield, Mich., and is the fund’s first full-time employee. To take the new job, he left his position as director of development for children’s and women’s health at the University of Michigan Health System, in Ann Arbor.

“People have asked what it feels like to be on the other side of the table,” says Mr. Stewart. “I tell them I don’t feel like I’m on the other side of the table. I feel like I’m just around the corner of the table.”

Such a low-key, approachable demeanor, honed during his years soliciting gifts and cultivating donors on behalf of hospitals and other organizations, serves him well at the family foundation, says Julie Fisher Cummings, managing trustee of the grant maker and a daughter of its founders. “He’s very diligent and accessible,” she adds.

Although his new job as a grant maker puts him in a position of power, Mr. Stewart wants to create strong, balanced relationships with grant seekers.

“Now that I’ve become a foundation person, I have a different relationship with all my fund-raising colleagues that I’ve been shoulder-to-shoulder with all these years,” he says. “I really want to help bridge that gap.”

The difference between those who need money and those who have it is not confined to the foundation world; in the Fisher Foundation’s home state of Michigan, income disparity gapes wide among the residents of Detroit.

Max Fisher, the oil magnate who endowed the foundation with $250-million at his death in 2005, made serving the city’s poor residents part of his philanthropic mission — he co-founded the urban-revitalization organizations Detroit Renaissance and New Detroit, and donated $10-million to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra to help build a music center.

Although the foundation was incorporated in 1955, Mr. Fisher and his wife, Marjorie, had used the foundation simply as a conduit for their annual giving. When he died, the rest of the family realized that the sudden influx of money meant the organization needed to build a formal structure — and get some outside help.

The new foundation executive has a knack for working with families, says Ms. Cummings, and has done an excellent job of “finding common ground for all of us” — no easy task, considering that the Fisher family’s philanthropic interests run the gamut, such as studying ancient cultures and the arts, preventing and treating HIV/AIDS, and helping young people.

“The one mandate that my father gave us was to try to reach consensus,” says Ms. Cummings. “Doug has been able to help us do that.”

The foundation plans to open its doors this fall; until then, Mr. Stewart and the board — made up of Marjorie Fisher and her five children — are keeping quiet about their plans. Mr. Stewart says that besides supporting organizations in Michigan, the foundation’s giving may also focus on Florida groups, and on causes in Africa and Israel.

In an interview, he discussed his new career path:

How did you get into the nonprofit world?

When I went into college, my whole thought was to become a physician. That’s what I’d always thought I was going to be. When I got into college, things changed for me. Medicine wasn’t something I think academically I could do; at least I wasn’t focused enough as an 18-, 19-year-old kid to get it done. Fund raising became a way to work with people and have them accomplish things that they couldn’t accomplish on their own, that they had to link up with nonprofits to accomplish. There is this wonderful role in between, of the fund raiser, to make that all happen. So I thought, this could be my way to work for hospitals and do extraordinary things, but not be a physician. But I could work and help fuel their efforts and fuel their research.

How did you make the transition into grant making from fund raising?

It took a long time for me to make the decision to make the move because I’d never considered it before. My love in fund raising has always been personal giving — some people call it major gifts, I call it “personal giving” to distinguish it from corporate giving. It’s working with families, with the older generation about their legacy, working with their children to help continue that legacy.

It took me a while to come around to the fact that I could work with one singular family and help develop and extend, in this case, their father’s legacy, and husband’s legacy, and do some extraordinary things with them to synergise their gifts. I thought, I know I enjoy myself the most when I’m sitting with donors. It wasn’t working on the strategy and all of that, it was when I was sitting with them. In this job — though I still need to learn a great deal about how to run a foundation — my true strength is uncovering people’s passions. I could use that here like I couldn’t use it any other place — really digging deep with some very interesting donors.

What was the move like from a large, more bureaucratic organization to a family foundation?

I guess the way I view it is that although I’ve worked in very complex organizations, my focus had always been on the donors and working with them. When you’re working with donors, it always comes down to family systems. Making decisions comes down to the wife talking with the husband, talking with the kids, so I always felt like I was in the family environment from the start.

The only thing I had to reconcile was that I was going to come into this office and there wasn’t going to be a whole IT team that would sit down and say, “What do you need?” and the whole thing would be running. Rather, it was coming into the office where no one had been in this chair before, physically and symbolically.

Right now I’m making my way into both leading this family and, at the same time, serving it in this philanthropic way. I really see it as very much of a servant-leader.