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Michigan Big Brothers Big Sisters Chapters To Merge
Michigan Big Brothers Big Sisters Chapters To Merge

Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) of America is overseeing a merger of two affiliates in Michigan as the sister organizations look to consolidate costs and more efficiently leverage resources.

The merger, which is expected to wrap up this summer, will subsume two affiliates – BBBS of Washtenaw County and BBBS of Metro Detroit – into the newly created BBBS of Southeast Michigan. The newly constituted youth mentoring provider will continue to maintain the two chapters’ current offices in suburban Ypsilanti and in Detroit but will merge their Washtenaw County and Wayne, Oakland and Macomb County service areas into a combined four-county footprint.

Leaders of the two chapters had held off-and-on discussions for several years about merging and agreed the time to do so was right after the Metro Detroit affiliate’s longtime CEO stepped down in May 2022. “We had recently written a planning grant together and in going through the program development process, I believe it just made sense that we could do more together,” said Jennifer Spitler, executive director of the Washtenaw County affiliate. Spitler, who has been doubling as interim CEO of the Metro Detroit chapter, will become CEO of the successor chapter once the ink on the merger agreement is dry. 

The planned merger follows a nationwide decline in volunteerism that began during the pandemic and has yet to fully recover. The decline has notably impacted human services nonprofits like BBBS, which relies almost entirely on volunteers for its mentor recruitment efforts. Volunteers who pass the screening and background checks are then paired up in one-to-one matches with mentees aged 8 to 18 years old.

“COVID has significantly impacted our ability to make new matches. Volunteer recruitment has started to increase again, but we have three years of very little new enrollment” due to the lack of volunteers, according to Spitler.

The decline in volunteers has been reflected in a steady decrease in the number of youths being served by the two chapters, a trend that has occurred nationally at other BBBS affiliates and been further exacerbated by school closures and other pandemic measures limiting in-person contact. Enrollment of mentees at the Washtenaw County affiliate has gone down 37% since COVID, from a pre-pandemic total of 350 to a recent total of 220. The Metro Detroit affiliate has seen an even steeper decline of 64% as its pre- and post-pandemic totals of youth served fell from 700 to 250.

“We’ve been able to maintain community-based matches, but all school and site-based matches closed at the beginning of the pandemic. And making new matches was sporadic during COVID because of the ebbs and flows of community spread,” Spitler said.

Current staffing at the two chapters consists of a combined full-time equivalent of 25 employees, including 11 at the Washtenaw County affiliate and 14 at the Metro Detroit affiliate. Leaders of the newly merged chapter are looking to increase that number to a combined total of 31 full-time employees with which they hope to increase volunteer recruitment, matching and services. “Our goal is to be able to build a staffing structure that will allow us to be most efficient and leverage resources to grow to an agency serving 1,500 youth annually across our four-county footprint within the next couple of years,” according to Spitler.

On the bright side, revenue hasn’t suffered nearly as much as volunteer recruitment. COVID grants and relief, including employer incentives such as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC), helped offset the limited ability to do in-person fundraising and enabled the chapters to maintain most programming and staffing for the youths still being served, Spitler said.

Form 990 tax filings by the two affiliates showed revenue dipping from 2019 to 2020 but picking up again during 2021. Revenue totals for last year aren’t yet available, but previous revenue totals reported by the Washtenaw County affiliate were approximately $600,000 (2019), $410,000 (2020), and $820,000 (2021). The Metro Detroit chapter’s revenue across the same three-year period totaled approximately $1.6 million (2019), $1.4 million (2020), and $1.5 million (2021).

There are no plans at this time to expand beyond the two chapters’ combined four-county footprint but doing so in the future isn’t out of the question, according to Spitler. “I’m unsure if there have been other mergers in Michigan per se, but several organizations have expanded their service community area when a neighboring organization dissolved. I know there have been mergers in the Philadelphia area as well as Wisconsin, as we spoke with those leaders during our due diligence process,” Spitler said.