Rosanne Potter was unfamiliar with The Cleveland Foundation before being contacted by a recruiter to interview for the top finance seat about a decade ago, she said.
However, Potter, a financial executive whose expertise spans corporate finance, treasury and investment management, is married to a native Clevelander. When she mentioned the opportunity, her spouse told her that while many of the people in the city might be familiar with her employer at the time — the Eaton Corporation, where she served as a senior manager of pension management — “‘there's not a Clevelander who doesn't know about the Cleveland Foundation, and when they call you, you go,’” she told CFO Dive of the conversation.
During her decade in the top finance seat for the non-profit — the oldest community foundation in the U.S. — Potter has been able to put her treasury and investment skills to use to help bring the foundation to a “different level,” she said. She took the essential skills learned in past roles, and “I amplified them to now instead of creating shareholder value, community value,” Potter said.
Tapping essential skills
Potter stepped into the foundation’s top finance seat in April 2016, and added the title of chief growth officer to her remit in 2023, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Founded in 1914 by Frederick Harris Goff — a lawyer and banker at the Cleveland Trust Company — the community foundation’s stated goal is to enhance the lives of the city’s residents through grants, investments and collaborations with other organizations throughout the city, according to a page on its website.
The foundation gives out over $170 million annually to other non-profits in the Greater Cleveland area, making it one of the largest contributors to non-profits in the state of Ohio, Potter said.
The foundation has helped with the revitalization of the city’s theater district, and supported scholarships as well as grants, according to a timeline of its history.
As CFO, Potter has been able to “make transformative change and use the knowledge that I've had to accelerate the growth of this organization,” she said, noting it didn’t take her long to fall in love with the foundation and the work.
“It's changed me as a human being,” she said. “It's opened my eyes to the needs of Cleveland and the community and the residents.”
During her decade-long tenure in the finance chair, the Cleveland Foundation has seen its endowed asset investments double from about $2.1 billion when she first joined to $4.2 billion. Meanwhile, its assets under management, about 40% of which are managed in house and include its “mission-related assets” spanning real estate, endowment and local asset pools, have jumped from about $106 million as of December 2016 to $700.7 million as of June 30 this year, according to data shared with CFO Dive.
Potter’s past expertise in corporate finance and treasury, especially her investment experience, have helped her shepherd the non-profit’s growth, she said.
“I've been able to artfully negotiate on behalf of the Cleveland Foundation to protect our assets and to make sure that our exposure is as minimized as possible through those negotiations,” she said.
Before joining the foundation, she served as a senior manager, pension management for the Eaton Corporation, a multinational power management company, where she was responsible for the management of $10 billion of retirement assets, according to her LinkedIn. She also served as treasurer for the Lubrizol Corporation and as treasurer for RTI International Metals, among others.
“I can tell you firsthand from my experience of being corporate treasurers of five publicly held companies, we are as complicated or more than a manufacturing corporation,” she said of the non-profit.
Fostering local investment opportunity
One innovation Potter has spearheaded in recent years at the foundation is the Impact Cleveland Investment Pool, a “place-based” investment fund which enables donors to invest directly into top regional companies and localized investments.
Launched in October 2024 with a pool of 21 regional companies, the pool’s returns are then used to benefit Cleveland-based organizations through grants made by the foundation, according to an article by Crain’s at the time.
For Potter, the idea for the pool grew from examining the “significant outperformance” of the top 25 Northeast Ohio companies compared to the broader S&P 500 — which represented an opportunity for the foundation’s investors, she said, describing her review of the index as an “aha moment.
“I rushed back and talked with our corporate treasurer and said we have to get this up and running,” she said.
The pool began with $30 million of capital from the Cleveland Foundation, Potter said, and has seen rapid growth in the two years since its launch. As of June 30, the AUM included in that pool have grown to about $75 million, and had a one-year return of 25%.
“I don’t think you can beat that,” Potter said.
