Cleveland Guardians Charities Snapshot

Volatility as a structure.

Staying in the AL Central and moving to the Cleveland Guardians Charities. This snapshot connects with an earlier post about the MLB Legacy Initiative tied to the All-Star game and its host organization. In 2019, Cleveland served as the host, and the data shows the impact that this had on CGC's impact that year.

While I don't have the 2018 data in my data set, a quick look at their 990 that year shows it is more like 2020 than 2019, and confirms that there is a status quo baseline that sets the floor for the organization, but there are spikes in certain years when they undertake major projects.

For example, the All-Star game in 2019 and the associated Legacy Initiative led to a significantly increased investment. But what about 2023? That definitely wasn't tied to the All-Star game. What I discovered is another long-term signature project - the Fields of the Future program. The program renovates and builds baseball and softball fields for youth across Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, with the most recent one being Jose Ramirez Park, which opened in 2023. To date, the program has funded six projects since 2015, and is in addition to CGC's Diamond Improvement Grant program that has provided $5K to 45 leagues and communities.

To be honest, when compared to other teams near them in IMPACT+, they have a more robust set of programs and history. If they could keep up the same funding year over year, they would score much better. As of now, they raise money for a few years, make a big investment through the Fields of the Future program, with the other 25% going to the community through grantmaking. In the "off years", nearly three-quarters goes to grantmaking. It's a totally defensible structure, and one that clearly has impact, but perhaps an increased focus on fundraising could allow them to scale up the grants side while still making these capital investments. And they should not be limited by their market. There are clubs' foundations in similar markets that bring in more revenue annually, such as the Reds ($3.7M) and Royals ($5M).

Of course, this is easier said than done. In this case, since CGC files a 990-PF, they disclose all donors of $5K+, so we can see exactly who is contributing. In 2019, they received a $820K gift from the City of Cleveland, most likely as part of the MLB All-Star Game Legacy Initiative. If you remove that, they received approximately $240K from other direct contributions. This tracks with the rest of the data (removing 2020 due to the impact of COVID), which shows between $300-400K from 15-30 disclosed donors in all other years. Some are from individuals outside of the organization or players/managers like Jose Ramirez and Terry Francona, and some are from corporate sponsors like Nike. It's not a deep pipeline of prospects, but it shows stagnation rather than growth. There is likely a universe of lifelong Guardians fans, other sponsors, players, members of the ownership group, and executives the CGC could approach, not to mention local and national foundations that focus on access to sports programs/facilities. It's just a matter of whether they want to make an investment in that area.