Inside the Max and Marjorie Fisher Foundation’s Multigenerational Giving
Born in 1908 in Pittsburgh to Russian Jewish immigrants who passed through Ellis Island, Max Fisher grew up in Ohio, ended up at Ohio State on a football scholarship, and then headed to Detroit to work in the refinery oil business. He went on to found Aurora Gasoline, among the largest independent oil companies in the Midwest, operating nearly 700 Speedway gas stations. He served as chairman of the company until 1959, when it was bought out by Marathon Oil Company. Max then invested his fortune in real estate — and started ramping up his involvement in philanthropic and civic life alongside his wife of 52 years, Marjorie.
The Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation, based in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, traces its roots back to 1955. It currently focuses on five core impact areas: Jewish causes, early childhood, arts and culture, impact investing and legacy grants. Over the decades, the Fishers raised millions for Jewish causes and backed the Max M. Fisher College of Business at Ohio State. When Max passed away in 2005, the foundation created a permanent endowment to power its grantmaking work, with Majorie becoming founding chair.
The second generation, including daughter Julie Fisher Cummings, were quickly brought on board. And today, third- and fourth-generation family members are involved with the foundation through committee and board roles. The Fisher Foundation is a good example of a family philanthropy that has evolved greatly through the years, while also being intentional about bringing new voices into the fore. Executive Director Doug Bitonti Stewart told me this is something that matriarch Marjorie, who passed away in 2016 at 92, and second-generation family members like Julie Fisher Cummings sought to ensure.
But how do the Fishers weigh and manage so many different voices in the room? What energy and priorities are next-generation family members bringing to the table? And where is the Fisher Foundation heading from here? To find out the answers to these questions and more, I spoke with Julie Fisher Cummings, Doug Bitonti Stewart, third-generation family member Alissandra Aronow Fisher and Sonya Hickey, founder of Fisher grantee Village of Shiny Stars (VOSS) Childcare Center.
The beginnings of the Fishers’ philanthropy in the Motor City
Julie Fisher Cummings, current chair of the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation, considers herself a lifelong Detroiter. But when the family were living in Salem, Ohio, while her father Max Fisher was growing up, they were one of a handful of Jewish families in the entire community.
Julie recalls Marjorie talking about their Jewish faith. In addition to the concept of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”), which many Jewish philanthropists reference as a major driving force, Julie also mentioned the tzedakah box as part of this spirit of giving. “In Jewish philanthropy, even the poorest people give back. And they [Marjorie’s family] used to collect coins, leftover coins on Friday when they had the Sabbath, in this box… even though they may not have had much, you always share what you have,” Julie said.
When he was in his 50s, Max decided to retire, believing that he had made enough money and wanting to start giving back formally. He did that in multiple ways, including through philanthropy, political involvement (Julie calls him a “moderate Republican”), and Israel-related work.
In the early days, starting in 1955, the Fisher Foundation served as a mechanism for the couple to engage in individual giving without a formal staff. “My dad gave with the head and my mother always started with her heart. Their giving styles were very different but complementary,” Julie said. Max was keen on building up institutions, including the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, home to the Max M. & Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center.
After the 1967 Detroit riot, Max helped found New Detroit, an organization dedicated to improving public education and race relations in the region. “They called him the quiet diplomat. He didn’t talk very much. He listened a great deal… a lot of his personal philanthropy had to do with Israel, but also he would help people with their education,” Julie said.
Julie remembers a time growing up when she was in an elevator with her mother, Marjorie, and she saw her take off her brand-new shoes, giving them to someone in need and going home barefoot.
Much later on, Julie also recalls that Marjorie got involved with the local Boys and Girls Club in West Palm Beach after her mother’s massage therapist — who doubled as a basketball coach — introduced her. After a tour of the grounds, including its old computer labs, Marjorie was quick to act. “So we walk out of the club, and she turns to me and looks up to the woman who’s running the Boys and Girls Club and goes ‘I’m building you a new club,’” Julie said.
In 2008, Marjorie made a $2 million donation to what is now known as the Marjorie S. Fisher Boys & Girls Club of West Palm Beach. Initially, she didn’t want public fanfare, but she eventually agreed to the name change after Julie insisted it would galvanize others in the community to give.
New generations step in at the Fisher Foundation
In March 2005, Max Fisher passed away at 96, setting off a transition for the foundation. It established a permanent endowment and Marjorie assumed the role of chair. Julie, along with her younger sister, Marjorie M. Fisher, and step siblings Mary, Philip and Jane Fisher Sherman, came in as directors on the board that year.
But according to Julie, the elder Marjorie now wanted these next-generation family members to lead. “She didn’t care, she had her own money… power was not her thing,” Julie said. Together, they all sat down, agreed on different impact areas, and brought in Bitonti Stewart as executive director two years later, formally kicking off a new iteration of the Fisher Foundation.
Bitonti Stewart explained that Max Fisher left behind a letter with explicit instructions about how much money would be set aside for the foundation. But he also left a lot of latitude as far as the causes the foundation would support. The letter also directed his children — at the time ranging from their 40s to late 60s — to work collectively.
A few years later, Marjorie also wanted to get the third and fourth generations involved. But in the realm of family philanthropy, this isn’t always an easy transition. (Julie mentioned with a laugh that she had a friend who was on a junior board until she was in her sixties.) But Marjorie pressed the issue, initially leading Julie and her siblings to give the third generation a small allocation of money to learn how to spend it. This became a pathway for board membership, a shift that the second generation all eventually embraced. “We have come to learn that they have much more wisdom than we do, probably, and they are completely capable of leading the organization,” she said.
The next shift at the foundation happened in 2011, when Marjorie stepped down as chair of the board, allowing the eldest of the second generation, Jane, to become chair first. The plan was that they would then go down the line, with each sibling serving three years as chair — with the exception of Julie, who is not the youngest, but is the last to serve. Notably, Marjorie remained a relatively healthy woman in her late 80s when she made this decision, knowing it was important to chart out a succession plan. “She was really open to that. She used to say, ‘when I go to Tahiti’ — instead of saying ‘when I die,’” Bitonti Stewart said. And as soon as this plan was charted out, Bitonti Stewart said, Marjorie stepped down as chair that day.
In terms of how she and the family weigh all the different voices in the room, Julie goes back to the early lessons her father imparted. When Max Fisher was stuck in a business stalemate, he always sat everyone down at the boardroom table to try to find some consensus. This is also what Max envisioned for his family foundation. “He used to say, ‘If everyone’s a little unhappy, then it’s the right decision,’” Julie said.
How third-generation family member Alissandra Aronow got involved
The foundation has now had four generations involved to date, including third-gen board member Alissandra Aronow, Julie’s niece, who is in her early 30s and has helped push the foundation into impact investing. A former international ice dancer and University of Michigan alumna, Alissandra remembers having a sense of the foundation’s significance during her childhood. Later, around 2014, she and her cousins were first encouraged to get involved with the foundation, two years before Marjorie passed away. Alissandra learned to read grant proposals, make decisions together with her cousins and overall learn the inner workings of the family foundation.
“We were taught to be flexible, to always listen and ask what the need was. To never make assumptions or place our opinions at the forefront when it comes to what we thought was needed,” Alissandra said. “I think that’s something that our grandmother, especially, taught us,”
Overall, she says she and the rest of the third generation feel like they are stewards of this money, rather than its owners. Their job, she went on, is to best facilitate the work of organizations on the ground. As Julie related, Alissandra first served on a next-generation family member committee, where she learned to give away smaller amounts of money. She then applied to be on the main family board — where currently five family members in the third and fourth generations sit.
Initially, Alissandra was drawn to the Fisher Foundation’s early childhood impact area, which focuses on children ages zero to eight and their families, including via the arts. The foundation provided her many opportunities, she says, to visit grantees and see their work up close — helping her get the lay of the land. “It gave me an appreciation for, especially, the early childhood caregivers,” she said.
Today, she’s primarily focused on impact investing and chairs the foundation’s impact investment committee. Alissandra believes that impact investing allows funders to be more creative with their resources and makes the point that it can also help encourage interest in the family’s philanthropy among more business-minded family members.
The impact investing committee she chairs focuses mostly on program-related investments, including working with community development financial institutions (CDFIs). In one case, a CDFI was able to clear its loan debt with the Fisher Foundation’s help, and then put those loans back on its balance sheet. She says it’s a good example that people and institutions who are deemed high risk often aren’t.
The foundation is also working on aligning its entire endowment toward its mission. “Right now, we have about half of our endowment aligned that we know is doing no harm and contributing in some way toward some of the themes we selected,” Alissandra said.
Alissandra also focuses on anti-trafficking work, spurred on by Julie, and racial justice. She believes a lot of that justice work was baked into the foundation before, but that her generation has been more overt about naming it and confronting their own unconscious biases. Overall, she says that her generation is much more hands-on. If Marjorie Fisher believed that all giving starts with your heart, and Max with your head, their generation, she believes, added “with your hands” to the mantra.
Funding on the ground in Detroit and looking ahead
Fisher Foundation Executive Director Doug Bitonti Stewart initially wanted to be a physician but ended up working as a professional fundraiser for nearly two decades, including at the University of Michigan Health System.
When the revamped foundation first kicked off, Doug said it began with what the family knew: Initially that was working with youth in Israel, global development work in Zambia, which has since shuttered (Julie’s stepsister Mary Fisher is a worldwide AIDS activist), and then returning to focus on Detroit. “As the family looked at Detroit… they knew they wanted it to be something that wasn’t just spreading peanut butter over the whole city. They started focusing in on education,” he said.
In order to get the lay of the land, the Fisher family started touring different neighborhoods, trying to be sensitive as a white Jewish family as they worked in a majority Black city — to the tune of 80 to 85%. “While the family is from Detroit, they’re not from these neighborhoods. So how do we do this with respect?” he said.
With the help of the Skillman Foundation, they found six neighborhoods where the Fishers felt they could build long-term relationships. One of those neighborhoods, Brightmoor, stood out and became the site of much of the foundation’s early childhood work, supporting community nonprofits and their leaders.
One of those leaders is veteran educator Sonya Hickey, founder and director of Village of Shiny Stars (VOSS) Childcare Center. Her father owned a building in Brightmoor and was initially considering starting a laundromat, but Hickey suggested an early childcare center. She said she first connected with the Fisher Foundation around 2009. “We were originally [were] a part of the Skillman Foundation… after they left, Fisher Foundation actually took it over and became a partner with us,” Hickey said.
She said that Fisher made it clear that they weren’t trying to be “helicopter” funders. Instead, folks from the foundation asked Hickey and her team how they could best facilitate their work. “They came in asking, ‘what do you need?’” Hickey calls the partnership “awesome,” as the nonprofit turned a modest pantry into a full-fledged classroom and, through foundation support, purchased more equipment for children.
What’s the plan for the Fisher Foundation going forward? In the next few years, Julie Fisher anticipates stepping down as chair of the foundation. In fact, just this last December, the board passed new bylaws and elected David Sherman as vice chair for 2025; he will become the first third-generation chair in 2026. Looking back at all her years in giving, Julie is proud of all the changes the foundation has made through the years, including easing the reporting burden for grantees and actively soliciting feedback from the organizations they support.
She’s also proud of a new community program that allows local Detroiters to decide how basic needs are distributed. This is part of the Fisher Foundation’s larger goal, she said, of not just sharing resources, but sharing actual power. “You’re always going to have this inequity… [But] you want to make it as easy as possible… We consider [grantees] partners. Like I said at the beginning — they allow us to be in their lives and we have to respect them.”