Q&A with Joe Kiser, president of Old National Bank Foundation
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In September, Evansville-based Old National Bancorp named Joe Kiser as president of the Old National Bank Foundation. The position had been open since former president Amy Casavant passed away in April.
Kiser’s past positions with Old National include community development manager for the northern Indiana and Michigan markets and community relations manager for the western Michigan market. He’s also served on the foundation’s board of directors.
Kiser spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the foundation’s mission and how nonprofit organizations can apply for grants.
Tell me about your history with Old National Bank.
I first learned of Old National Bank in 2013 when Old National acquired 24 banking centers and about 100 team members from Bank of America in the southwest Michigan and northern Indiana regions. That’s when I joined the family.
I grew up in retail banking. I started as a teller in 1999, and I did all the positions in retail like lending and opening new accounts and things like that. When we were acquired, I was a banking center manager at the time.
One of the things I love about Old National is its community commitment. They really encouraged us to have an entrepreneurial mindset as a banking center manager. Think of it as your own small business. Go out in your community. They said you should be spending most of your time outside of your office building relationships. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what I am good at.
I started to build a niche with nonprofits, and then I started to serve on some boards, something a manager at Old National encouraged me to do. Then Old National had a job opening for a community relations manager. That was the first time I exited retail banking and went into the world of community development. A lot of events and event planning, things like that. I did that for about six years.
What’s the mission of the Old National Bank Foundation?
The mission of the Old National Bank Foundation is to make sure that the communities we serve are strengthened and thrive because of our involvement there. Specifically, our foundation exists to fund nonprofit organizations in the communities we serve. We focus on nonprofits who work on initiatives like economic development, affordable housing and workforce development.
Why is philanthropy important to Old National Bank?
Number one, it’s the law. All banks have a regulation called the Community Reinvestment Act or CRA, and that’s a law that’s near and dear to my heart and most bankers’ hearts. It’s designed to counteract the effects of the discrimination that banks did in the past, such as redline lending. Banks did a lot of harm to communities in the past with discrimination.
The Old National Bank Foundation is not required. Philanthropy is required, but the foundation is Old National going above and beyond. We always go above and beyond our regulatory commitments, which I’m really proud of.
What types of organizations can apply for these grants?
Any 501 nonprofit organization can apply. Think Habitat for Humanity. That’s a universally known nonprofit that exists in pretty much every market that we serve. That’s a nonprofit working to make more homeowners in a community and exactly the type of nonprofit that our foundation would support.
Nonprofits working to either make more homeowners or keep people in their homes through home repairs, critical home repairs. Nonprofits that focus on low to moderate-income individuals. That’s a very important metric that’s different in each of our markets.
Also, nonprofits that put people back to work. Think of Goodwill, that’s in a lot of our areas. We don’t necessarily support every area of Goodwill, but the area that provides jobs to people and job training, that’s what we want to do. It all revolves around wealth and wealth creation. How do we make people wealthier?
What’s the process for an organization to apply for a grant?
We have an online portal that’s open three times per year in 30-day increments. The next window will open on January 2, 2024. It’ll be open until the end of January, then our foundation board will meet to decide all of those grants and then we’ll repeat that process two more times in April and July.
How does the foundation decide which organizations get funding?
We have a rubric, and there’s a point system that I’ll use to go through and score and assign points to organizations based on how some of those questions are answered. Then we will talk as a foundation team about how that looks and call each market individually. I’ve been part of these calls for several years in the past. The foundation staff will have a deep conversation about every application that’s come in and how it’s scored versus what the market thinks.
Then there will be a recommendation put forth, either of approval or decline. We get our foundation board together three times per year, which consists mostly of team members from Old National across our footprint, intentionally geographically and role-diverse. And they make the final decisions on the grants.
We probably get about 120 applications per cycle, and we might have to turn down a third. So that doesn’t feel good. Part of my job is, do we need to take a look at that? We’re going to be doing some strategic planning in 2024.
A decline is not simply, “Sorry, we can’t help you.” It’s, “Sorry, we can’t help you, but here’s a local representative in your market who may have other resources.” I’d also like to be able to learn about other foundations and where I can refer nonprofits to.
Some of the 2023 grant cycles were canceled to redirect funds in light of April’s mass shooting at ONB in downtown Louisville. Tell me about that.
We made a million-dollar donation that we call Love for Louisville, and the majority of that went to a survivors fund for the survivors of the shooting. We donated money to the Louisville Police Department, the first responders fund and the American Red Cross. And we held some blood drives throughout our footprint.
Our foundation president also passed away within two weeks of the shooting. She was a phenomenal person. Those two [unrelated] events happening so close together really made the decision that we would take the money that we would normally fund cycles two and three with and donate it all to Love for Louisville.
What are your short-term goals as president of the foundation?
Continue to operate in an environment of excellence. The foundation is one of the best, well-run departments at Old National Bank. It’s an honor to be part of that. It’s a small operation. It’s me and Linda Ford. She’s our foundation program administrator. She has a ton of knowledge, so learning from her in the short term is important. I spent a week in Evansville with Linda, learning about what she does and where we keep things on the drives.
I want to modernize a bit to ensure that if Linda and I are not here, the foundation can keep going in the short term. And I want to make sure I can execute three perfect grant cycles in 2024.
What are your long-term goals as president of the foundation?
My long-term goals include taking a look at our funding priorities, making sure those are still in line with what we want to do. I have a deep interest in racial equity, and that’s currently not part of our funding priorities. I’d like to do some work with our board around antiracism and try to incorporate as many tenets of trust-based philanthropy into the world of corporate philanthropy, which can sometimes feel a little transactional. I want it to be more relational.
Trust-based philanthropy says you have to cut down on the forms and the work that your nonprofit is doing because they should be helping the community rather than spending eight hours on your grant. One of the easy things we can do is probably eliminate the final report and turn it into a Zoom call with an automated report. I think nonprofits would welcome that.