Kresge Foundation President and CEO Rip Rapson delivered the following comments at the announcement of Kresge’s new $180 million investment in Northwest Detroit neighborhoods and plans to move the foundation’s headquarters to the Marygrove Conservancy Campus at an event on the campus in Detroit on Sept. 12, 2025.

Good morning, everyone. What a pleasure it is to have you join us on this glorious campus, in almost the exact spot on which The Kresge Foundation will soon build its new headquarters.

Over the course of its one-hundred-year history, Kresge has sought to honor our founder Sebastian’s Kresge’s mission of “promoting the well-being of mankind” by evolving with the continually changing needs and opportunities of community life. For many years, that involved providing support for nonprofit capital campaigns. More recently, we have pivoted to fortifying the building blocks of opportunity and equity in American cities. But we have always been anchored by – and have never wavered from – an abiding commitment to the great City of Detroit, our home.

It is a commitment that can be measured in dollars invested – over $1 billion. . . Or it can measured in terms of our contributions to establishing iconic municipal infrastructure – whether the riverfront, or Campus Martius, or a streetcar . . . Or in our creation of essential supports for children and families – for example, the Hope Starts Here early childhood initiative . . . Or in our ability to help the city navigate dark times – whether through the Grand Bargain that helped the city exit bankruptcy or the Detroit Future City plan that laid out a roadmap for the reclamation of blighted land.

You can measure Kresge’s commitment in many ways. But at its heart, it is a commitment rooted in the people of this city, a commitment to put in place and strengthen the opportunities for Detroiters to lead healthful, productive, and fulfilling lives.

Nowhere is that commitment more evident than on this cradle-through-career educational campus. You may remember the age-old set-up for a joke that goes: “so, a rabbi, a pastor, and priest walk into a bar” — well, our version of that … except it is anything but a joke — is: “So, a group of nuns, a public school superintendent, a dean of a university’s school of education, and a philanthropist walk into a conference room.” Well, you’re seeing all around you this morning exactly what happens – and did happen – when those people walked out of a conference room.

Because seven years ago, almost exactly to this day, that group joined with others on the steps of the Liberal Arts Building right behind you to announce the creation of a cradle-to-career educational campus that would bring students of all ages back to this historic campus. It was an extraordinary, unprecedented act of collaboration among the University of Michigan, the Detroit Public Schools Community District, Starfish Family Services, the Marygrove Conservancy, and Kresge.

Consider for a moment what has crystalized in a scant seven years. Because in that short time, we have seen emerge a magical, inspirational, transformational constellation of people, ideas, and activities that have placed families and children at the very center of daily life in Northwest Detroit.

Our partners have forged an environment in which kindergarteners and University of Michigan students learn together . . . in which high-schoolers dive headfirst into solving contemporary challenges with a curriculum focused on engineering and social justice . . . in which at any one time you can hear toddlers playing, a youth choir practicing, an author lecturing, or a Shakespearean theater rehearsing.

Our work on this campus has proceeded in parallel with our growing body of investments facilitated by the Live6 Alliance, some $200 million thus far — in housing, open space, small business development, the arts, early childhood development, kindergarten through college education. Those investments have unambiguously underscored that if Kresge is to relocate to its historical home of Detroit — and it must — that home needs to be in this very special geography.

Hence, the decision to relocate our headquarters on campus . . . Hence, the decision to work with the Marygrove Conservancy to reimagine how these grounds can be transformed into beautiful and accessible public gardens less beholden to concrete and cars . . . Hence, the decision to intensify our financial investments in the building blocks of neighborhood stability, health, and vitality.

All told, these aspirations translate into an investment of $180 million over the next five years.

We will — working with our design team of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, led by partner Liz Diller, and with our local architects Hannah-Neuman/Smith, led by partner Beverly Hannah Jones — build a headquarters facility that is both home to Kresge’s 130 employees and a magnet for uses identified by the community.

We will — working with the Conservancy and our landscape architect, Hood Design Studios, led by partner Walter Hood — create and implement a vision for the campus that is grounded in natural beauty, public accessibility, improved pedestrian circulation, and environmental conservation.

And we will — working alongside neighborhood residents and community partners — invest in housing stabilization, home ownership, commercial corridor revitalization, small business support, public spaces enhancement, and financial assistance to residents in the Fitzgerald, Bagley, University District and Martin Park neighborhoods.

Detroit embodies the story of cities in America. Twenty years ago, people would have scoffed at that idea. But today, they don’t. And it’s not just because of the progress in downtown and Midtown, the Train Station and the riverfront. It’s also in the emerging energies of neighborhoods like those in Northwest Detroit. Indeed, preserving and enhancing places of historic identity . . . social connectivity . . . learning and culture . . . and resident ownership — places just like where we stand today — is what make cities places where people want to stay . . . put down roots . . . and hold and steward.

Indeed, places like this suggest a path forward for the American city of tomorrow — a path that underscores just how transformational it can be when we collectively commit — when the public, private, nonprofit, philanthropic, academic, and civic sectors commit — to an audacious and creative problem-solving that calls on community wisdom and voice, intergenerational exchange, courageous leadership, and an abiding embrace of equity and opportunity.

This neighborhood fits that bill to a “T.” It can, and will, serve as an illustration of what is possible when we “grab the web whole” — when we sight against the promise of positive futures, not the failures and limitations of the past — building trust neighbor-by-neighbor, block-by-block, shopkeeper-by-shopkeeper, institution-by-institution. Marygrove and the neighborhoods of Livernois-McNichols have already begun to illuminate the soaring possibilities of such a vision. Today, we embrace what it means to fully realize them.