This year marks a momentous milestone for The Kresge Foundation: our Centennial — a century dedicated to fostering opportunities and advancing equity across the United States and the world. This letter from Kresge Board Chair Cecilia Muñoz is featured in our special centennial edition of our annual report.

A centennial is an irresistible opportunity for celebration and reflection. It provides a great yardstick for measuring progress, celebrating impact, and, since The Kresge Foundation was set up to operate in perpetuity, recommitting ourselves to the work of the century ahead. It’s also an excellent excuse to look back into history and examine how much has — and hasn’t — changed.

When Sebastian Kresge launched his namesake foundation, the country was living through the period that is frequently called the “Roaring Twenties” for its great economic prosperity. That prosperity, it turns out, was enjoyed by only a tiny portion of the country’s population. In fact, about 60% of American families lived on less than $2,000 a year, which is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics described at the time as the minimum liveable income for a family of five. W.E.B. Du Bois observed in an essay when The Kresge Foundation was two years old that, “We have today in the United States, cheek by jowl, Prosperity and Depression.” The 1920s are also the decade most associated with the launch of the Great Migration, the period during which millions of African Americans moved to cities in the North in search of safety from the terror and violence of the Jim Crow South, as well as job opportunities in a growing industrial sector.

We made progress in the 1920s: the movement to expand access to a high school education grew substantially in the years that Sebastian Kresge was building his company, and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which recognized the right of women to vote, was only four years old when he launched his foundation in 1924. But that’s also the year that Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which established immigration quotas explicitly designed to advance notions of “racial homogeneity,” drawing immigrants from Northern Europe, limiting what were considered “less desirable” immigrants from other parts of Europe, and excluding people from Asia altogether.

You can see where I’m heading; while we have made enormous progress in the United States in the last century, the challenges we faced then have a lot in common with the ones we face now. I firmly believe that our progress as a nation, and the foundation’s role in advancing that progress, is well worth celebrating. We should take inspiration from the fact that Americans have engaged our young democracy in a way that has allowed us to make progress toward becoming a more perfect union and that a good number of the institutions that have contributed to that progress have benefitted from our grantmaking.

And yet, every one of the things our nation struggled with a century ago — from economic inequality to fully realizing the rights of African Americans, women and so many others in our society — still challenge us today. While we rightfully take inspiration from what we have achieved, a centennial is also an opportunity to take a clear-eyed look at the work ahead.

This is what excites me about this moment; it’s an opportunity to reflect, learn and rededicate ourselves. Having built an extraordinary legacy that can literally be seen and felt all around the country at institutions that received capital and challenge grants, this foundation has contributed mightily to Americans’ health, education, culture and more. And as our understanding of the complexity of the challenges our nation — and our planet — face, our work has evolved in its focus and sophistication. We work on expanding equity and opportunity in America’s cities, and the range of tools that we use goes well beyond grantmaking. We also use social investments, our convening power, the extraordinary expertise of our team, and our deep commitment to listening and working in partnership with local communities and their leaders to help them make change. You can see the effects in our hometown of Detroit, as well as Memphis, New Orleans, Fresno and a host of other American cities. We live in challenging times, to be sure, but our capacity to do our part to meet the moment has grown considerably over 100 years.

As we embark on our second century, we have a strong foundation to build upon. Our journey thus far, marked by a willingness to take calculated risks, to invest in areas often overlooked by others, to continually refine our tools, and to steadfastly pursue equity, is a testament to our unwavering commitment to understanding our times and serving humanity, as Sebastian Kresge envisioned a century ago.

So, as we celebrate how far we have come, here’s to the work ahead of us. Onward!

Explore our 2023 Kresge Annual Report and our Centennial page.