This commentary was adapted from remarks prepared for “The Intersection of Climate Change and Community Development,” a convening Kresge co-sponsored with the Urban Institute this month.

As some may know, 2024 marks the Kresge Foundation’s centennial. At the risk of being too inward-looking, I want to share how we’re approaching this milestone. What’s a centennial, if not an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve done in the past and to begin to ask how that past work informs the work ahead? To think about not just what we do, but how we do it.

This year, we intend to gather community organizations from various geographies and disciplines to explore how urban communities and their residents can position themselves for a more healthful, sustainable, and equitable future.

We anticipate hearing an enormous diversity of perspectives, tapping a deep reservoir of community wisdom, and exploring powerfully nuanced prescriptions for change. But we also expect to hear some consistent themes. The first:

The connection between climate action and community development.

Kresge has a history of supporting organizations and efforts that thread together climate action and public health. More recently, we’ve expanded our aperture to draw into the mix community development and organizing expertise. The points of overlap and interconnection between community development and climate action are too numerous to count. We turn to community development strategies both to avoid the unmanageable consequences of climate change – think land-use planning oriented around public transit or housing practices centered on energy efficiency – and to manage the unavoidable – think next-generation zoning to prevent development in harm’s way of rising sea levels or untenable risks of wildfire.

And yet, not everyone recognizes this connection. Far too often, we see the fields of climate and community development define their work through different vocabularies . . . adopt strategies that are almost hermetically self-referential . . . and measure impact in a single dimension. This behavior treats the pathway to comprehensive community health and well-being as if we were facing down a single problem, when in fact we are confronting a problem fractal: multiple problems refracted and reframed in an unending series of inextricably interwoven, mutually reinforcing and constantly compounding expressions.

This lack of alignment risks not only fundamentally misreading the nature of the challenges we face but also leaving resources and opportunities on the table. Frankly,  we don’t have time for that. I understand that our friends in government and in the private sector have trouble with this kind of integrative approach to problem-smashing. But those of us in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors shouldn’t, and can’t.

We are in the midst of an investment climate that is unprecedented in its ambition and scope. Through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure bill in particular, the federal government is priming the pump of state and local action and spending at a pace and in orders of magnitude that will fundamentally and perhaps permanently transform climate finance.

The question is how.

Simply putting trillions of dollars in service of received practices will put us on a course that will be catastrophic – more paving, more oil and gas extraction, more misguided land use. That is clearly not the intent of the Biden Administration. But inflecting toward next-generation thinking, policy and implementation will challenge not just our elected officials – focused as they are on the next election cycle – and not just our private sector colleagues – consumed as they are with quarterly profit reports – but all of us: the full spectrum of civil society, equipped with its diverse perspectives, wisdom, and capacities.

That brings me to the second theme that will resonate throughout our year and reverberate in the next:

The need to fortify structures and the process of distributive leadership.

Command and control problem-smashing in the public or private sectors no longer do the trick if they ever did. Civic problem-solving needs to be approached as an exercise in reverse engineering: all sectors of society identifying the right players to adopt the right roles, equipped with the right tools, deployed in the right doses, and sequenced at the right pace.

That mindset and implementation musculature have particular import in shaping new channels of capital distribution.

It’s tempting to default to the ways we’ve grown accustomed to accessing and moving capital – it’s easy, you can deploy money more quickly, and you can rely on systems and networks that are familiar and safe. But, to do that guarantees that we will miss a significant chance to center equity – the imperative to support communities that are most at risk from climate change as they become leaders in mitigating and adapting to its effects.

There is a clear and compelling alternative: we can do it the hard way . . . the creative way . . . the transformational way. By reverse engineering, we start by identifying the equitable outcomes and systems we want and need and then go to work retrofitting, reinventing, or creating systems that will deliver those outcomes.

That ties into the third, related theme of Kresge’s centennial year:

Reparative community development.

The legacies of historical disinvestment and discriminatory practices continue to cast long shadows over Kresge’s hometown of Detroit, Washington, D.C., and the places each of you come from.

All of these places would benefit from focusing on a reparative community development framework that aims to mend the fabric of neighborhoods—and empower residents—harmed by prior major infrastructure construction. This includes everything from highways to railroads to water systems, all of which have climate impacts.

A reparative approach expands traditional community development by acknowledging the historical roots of inequities, centering the voices and needs of marginalized communities, and recognizing that this isn’t simply a question of economics. Climate justice is an indispensable part of the equation – whether relief from flooding, extreme heat, excessive pollution, and countless other climate-related harms that fall disproportionately on low-income and low-wealth communities.

A reparative approach adopts strategies to rebuild the residential and commercial wealth and deep neighborhood identity of places obliterated by urban renewal, safeguarding people’s health and communities’ sustainability and long-term survival.

So that is, briefly, the “What” of many of our public-facing events in the centennial year. I want to take a brief minute to describe the “How”—how we at Kresge activate in these areas. I believe private philanthropy like Kresge can play this handful of roles when connecting climate and community development.

Five Roles of Philanthropy

ROLE #1: SETTING THE TABLE FOR DIFFICULT CIVIC CONVERSATIONS

Philanthropy has the enormous privilege of taking a long-term, integrated view, enabling us to set the table for conversations that, because of their political sensitivity or operational complexity, neither the public nor private sectors are willing – or can effectively – take on.

Take, for example, a conversation in Detroit about the inequities of flood mitigation and adaptation and how to interweave revisions in zoning and land use, take practical steps to move homes and businesses out of harm’s way, force changes in insurance practices, and any number of steps that require a fair broker able to involve the full spectrum of civic voices necessary to tackle these issues in their full complexity and impact.

ROLE #2: FORTIFYING COMMUNITY CAPACITY

Private philanthropy can help build the civic implementation capacity necessary to animate the distributive leadership structures I noted earlier.

The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the $27 billion commitment from the Environmental Protection Agency, is a perfect example of the kind of investments we’ll need to see if we are to build the ability of community organizations to absorb and deploy capital at ground level to those who have traditionally been frozen out of capital investments. There is enormous potential – evidenced in the EPA’s allocation of some $2 billion last week to a consortium led by Enterprise, LISC, and others to start redesigning capital channels to ensure access by communities of color to solar installation and storage, community wind projects, and multiple forms of adaptation.

That suggests how important private philanthropy is, and will increasingly be, to support trusted technical assistance providers, predevelopment capital, project equity, and other resources to ensure that projects are both shovel-worthy and shovel-ready.

ROLE #3: PEELING AWAY THE FIRST LAYERS OF RISK

People around the country are trying to do something that we have not done before. They’re working at warp speed while maintaining equity at the forefront, conforming to both federal rules and community priorities, and changing the planet’s climate while working at the neighborhood scale.

And working without precedent means there is risk involved. Things will not go as planned.

Given the certainty of failure, we need to think hard about risk. Who will be willing to shoulder the possibility of non-performance? That seems like a good job description for philanthropy.

Take the loan guarantees that Kresge provided to Collective Energy and RE-volv, who will extend credit to federally qualified health centers and houses of worship to install solar and solar storage units. If the community organizations repay the loans, Collective Energy and RE-volv can recycle the monies and expand their scale. If the community organizations can’t repay the loans, Kresge will.

ROLE #4: ACTING AS A SHEPHERD

Philanthropy is well-suited to connecting communities with external resources, such as capital, technical assistance, or connections to networks engaged in similar work.

For example, Kresge has invested in the Justice40 Accelerator. The Accelerator is a collaboration between Partnership for Southern Equity and four core partners that helps position community-based organizations to be more competitive in accessing federal, state, local, and philanthropic funding. It has already helped community-based organizations secure over $15 million in funding.

ROLE #5: SERVING AS A LONG-TERM PARTNER

Kresge is better able to sight against a more distant horizon line than the public or private sectors, cultivating the patience required to chip away systematically over time at seemingly intractable issues.

Too often, we in philanthropy touch down briefly and then exit relatively quickly. It is one thing to provide essential immediate assistance in the aftermath of a community disaster. Still, quite another to remain with a challenge, an opportunity, or a community in ways commensurate with the situation’s nature and magnitude.

We have been building connective tissue between climate activism and other disciplines for a decade, starting in 2014 with our Climate Resilience and Urban Opportunity initiative, which has evolved into our Climate Change and Health Equity or CCHE initiative, which will continue through this year.

Climate and community development issues matter to us at Kresge. Meaningful change in both domains takes time, and we are in this for the long term. We will use our full suite of tools and roles to strengthen each discipline and support connections and intertwining where it needs to happen.

Together, we can take advantage of the moment. We can examine public policy and community practice to determine how they accelerate, deepen, and render more equitable the battle to mitigate and adapt to climate change. We must weave the threads of public health, community development, and climate activism into a single tapestry of equity, opportunity, and justice.

By “we,” I mean all of Kresge’s partners. They have illuminated the path we need to follow. I appreciate them for setting an example in communities across the country of what our nation needs to seize the moment.

I look forward to learning from and alongside them throughout this centennial year.

Thank you.