Metro Roundup: Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham works to unify Jefferson County

Jefferson County has 35 municipalities across its geographical area, and while 22 of those cities previously signed a “no-poaching” agreement with each other, agreeing not to take businesses from other cities in the county, Chris Nanni says more can be done to make the county unified.

“We are the most fragmented community in the Southeast,” said Nanni, CEO of the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham, during a speech to the Vestavia Hills Chamber of Commerce.

More unified regions perform better across the board, Nanni said. The region needs to have someone speaking for them and needs to lift up the county as a whole, not just select cities, he added.

To that end, Nanni shared three projects the foundation, which provides grants to organizations across the county, helps manage donor’s personal philanthropy and has assets of about $265 million, is working on in the greater Birmingham area.

The first is Birmingham On-Demand, a transit service that is similar to Uber and Lyft but one that uses six-passenger vans that goes to different zones within the city. The move comes as leaders work to find a way to provide public transit services for residents, whether it’s to work, school or other needs, Nanni said. Alabama is one of four states in the United States that does not provide state funding for public transit, he said.

After the foundation began funding the service in December 2019, Nanni said they were averaging 1,000 rides per week within a month. The most popular destination is the downtown Publix and the second most popular is another area supermarket.

“It’s really meeting a need,” Nanni said.

Nanni said the foundation is considering expanding the service to other zones, including Vestavia Hills and Hoover, and they have held conversations with the Birmingham Jefferson County Transit Authority and Vestavia Mayor Ashley Curry.

Secondly, the foundation is studying a way to improve the county’s jail situation. Among the 35 municipalities, there are 22 police departments with 18 municipal jails and two county jails. Those jails are often under capacity, not able to be maintained, and present liabilities to the municipality or the county which oversees them, Nanni said. Along with that, there are 15 911 systems and they do not speak to one another, Nanni said.

The foundation funded a study to examine what other regions across the country do, which may include consolidating the jail system. The cities, as it stands right now, cannot maintain the jail system, Nanni said. The results of the study were recently released in January, Nanni said. One of the options to resolve the issue include smaller cities using other cities’ jails, and paying a per diem charge for each inmate, but the long-term solution is to build a county jail to service the entire county, but that is not likely to happen until 2024, Nanni said, due to the price of such a project.

Lastly, the foundation is working to help minority businesses, specifically Black-owned businesses, Nanni said. The foundation recently awarded the largest grant in its history, valued at $1.5 million, to minority businesses in the greater Birmingham area. The foundation, he said, is looking to fund Black businesses and has reserved $500,000 for technical assistance for those businesses. They are helping them by awarding grants to lending partners, who then provide the money as a loan to the businesses, who pay the lending partner back, Nanni said.

Any nonprofit can apply for a grant with the foundation, Nanni said.

For more information, visit cfbham.org.