While other foundations with permanent endowments can take more time to figure out their strategies up front, the Wilson foundation can't take that time, said David Egner, its president and CEO.

"If we spend three to five years building strategies, we'll have less than 15 years left to deploy," he said. "We have to learn while we grant."

The foundation's board made $60 million in legacy grants in 2015 to organizations Wilson supported during his lifetime, both in his native metro Detroit and in eight counties in his adopted western New York.

"The beauty of the trustees paying out $60 million in year one was there was no payout requirement" that first year, Egner said. So the foundation was already ahead of Internal Revenue Service rules requiring private foundations to pay out, on average, 5 percent of their assets each year.

With 10 of 17 programmatic and administrative staff members hired so far, the foundation has committed an additional $41 million this year to nonprofits in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Monroe, Washtenaw, St. Clair and Livingston counties. Those "shovel-ready" grants fit into its core funding areas:

Children and youth: early childhood initiatives, sports and youth development, after-school programs and post-K-12 efforts to provide more pathways to success.

Young adults and working-class families: skills training and education.

Caregiving: education, resources and respite for volunteer and paid caregivers of both the young and old.

Healthy communities: community design, including access to spaces and programs that support healthy living; improving nonprofit capacity and innovation and economic development.

Grants this year have supported organizations including Playworks, a national nonprofit that works with urban schools to provide safe and inclusive play during recess; Detroit's public-private summer youth program Grow Detroit's Young Talent; and the New Economy Initiative, a foundation-led economic development initiative that Egner previously led.

The launch of the foundation's online grant application marks its transition into strategic giving, Egner said.

Where it can, it's collaborating with established foundations already working in its core funding areas to inform its early grants. And it is funding studies to determine the current systems and gaps in those areas, as needed, to inform its future grant making and share that information with the community as a whole.

In youth sports and recreation opportunities, the foundation has made grants totaling $300,000 to the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan and its western New York peer organizations as fiduciaries for Aspen Institute to scan existing structures and gaps.

It plans to convene a task force in each market that will include funders, people working in youth sports and recreation and youth representatives. Each task force will help guide Aspen Institute on the front end of the scans and help make recommendations from the findings that will be shared with both communities when completed next year.

The foundation plans to do the same type of scan with caregivers in both regions, focused initially on elderly caregivers to inform the grants it makes to nonprofits to provide more support for them, Egner said. And it will learn from an early childhood study commissioned previously by the Troy-based Kresge Foundation and the Battle Creek-based W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

The Wilson foundation's second phase of grants will be characterized by funding in the $3 million to $5 million range.

Egner likened it to a funnel approach, with many programs — including experimental or pilot ones — funded at the beginning and a narrowed scope in the foundation's later years as it learns more about the gaps and the impact of its funding.

In its final years, the foundation will make more grants where it's seeing impact, Egner said, making "large bets" marked by $10 million to $15 million grants.

It will also look for ways to ensure that the work it is funding lives on, such as funding endowments or seeding leadership programs.

"We have a shelf life, but our work shouldn't," Egner said.