At a stuffy Detroit Public Schools warehouse east of downtown, up to 20 Quicken Loans employees are rifling through old records four mornings a week to help the city's school system digitize decades of student records.

It's an example of an effort coordinated by a team of Rock Ventures employees with backgrounds in philanthropy and government exploring new ways to work "upstream" in fixing Detroit's most vexing problems — from preventing further blight to creating jobs for Detroiters outside of their own company.

They're operating a small under-the-radar think tank of sorts, trying to find ways to go beyond the $17 million Dan Gilbert's family of companies plans to spend on philanthropy in Detroit this year.

The group is treading far outside of the sphere of selling mortgages, managing downtown properties and writing checks to local charities.

"We have a different DNA. It's not your traditional corporate philanthropy," said Chris Uhl, vice president of community initiatives at Rock Ventures.

Uhl's group is working on a proposal to change the way municipal government is financed and has hired an outside firm to study whether investors would buy social impact bonds to fund blight prevention initiatives in Detroit.

Social impact bonds have been used in Britain, Australia and Massachusetts to fund social programs and the savings to government is returned to investors.

"We've got a lot of people who are problem solvers looking at how do we build a better Detroit," Uhl said. "And in that case, one of our core pieces working on neighborhood stability is blight removal."

Since moving Quicken to Detroit from the suburbs in 2010, Gilbert has spent more than $2 billion of his wealth gobbling up 95 downtown Detroit properties, quickly becoming the largest landlord and employer with 17,000 workers.

But as the billionaire mortgage impresario has built a downtown business empire, his companies have become increasingly focused on playing a bigger role in fixing what ails one of the poorest big cities in America.

"You can't just build this gilded central city and forget about the rest of the people," said Uhl, who came to Rock Ventures from the Skillman Foundation.

The community initiatives and activation division at Rock Ventures is driven by a "for more than profit" mission that mixes Gilbert's big bet on Detroit with a "moral imperative" to reverse decades of decline, said Helen Davis Johnson, vice president of community activation at Rock Ventures.

Johnson's group toggles between projects aimed at boosting tourism to Detroit by 1 million visits this year and programs that help local entrepreneurs launch or expand small businesses.

"We're adamant that's important to restarting the wealth engine," said Johnson, who previously worked at the Kresge Foundation.