Centennial year national convening focused on themes including economic equity, racial repair, and climate action

This September, the Kresge Foundation hosted more than 300 people from 12 locations across the United States for Our Urban Future: The Next Era of Making Change in America’s Cities, the largest of Kresge’s convening centennial series.

Gathering in a sunlit room in The ICON building on the Detroit RiverWalk — revitalized, in part through Kresge’s leadership and support — the setting was a fitting emblem of the focus on justice-oriented urban reimagination. The convening focused broadly on five themes: reparative community development, climate action, economic equity, and culture and community power building, with a steady undercurrent of the importance of place.

Day 1

After a video focusing on community change across Kresge’s four focus cities—Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, and Fresno—Kresge Foundation CEO and President Rip Rapson offered opening remarks, articulating a vision “premised on the aspiration of reimagination, renewal, and hope.” Rapson emphasized people-centered, place-based work to forge new solutions to the deeply entrenched challenges facing America’s cities.

Striking a hopeful tone, Rapson posited, “we need a new municipal pluralism — in which the community’s impulses toward opportunity, healing, and justice are translated and animated by distributive authorities and responsibilities.”

Kresge Foundation American Cities Managing Director Chantel Rush Tebbe then moderated a fireside chat with Heather McGhee, author of “The Sum of Us.”

The conversation, “Examining the Past and Reimagining the Future,” focused on the necessary building blocks for equitable economic advancement and the hurdles that get in the way. Multiracial coalition-building and civic engagement — such as that embodied by the Louisville Tenants’ Union — emerged as keystones.

Taking the exclusionary and racist practices of U.S. housing policies as an example, McGhee emphasized the importance of digging deep to understand the root causes of unjust policies and called on more foundations to follow Kresge’s lead in continuing to address injustice.

Arts and culture were deeply situated throughout the convening as an important and engaged mode of resistance that can support community change.

Vibrant jazz, gospel, and spoken-word performances — from Tariq Gardner, Straight Ahead, Urban Art Orchestra, and Granville and the Freedom Singers featuring St.Courts — punctuated the sessions, reminding participants that pleasure, beauty, and joy are key elements of justice work.

One example of this was the spoken-word performance by Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes, who spoke of the deep and wide chasms that can separate our desires and intentions from our realities.

“The tongue, like the heart, gets tired,” she said. But “justice is getting restless in its chains.”

Citing the trials of her home city of New Orleans, Ecclesiastes urged the audience to imagine a world we cannot yet see, one in which these chasms have been bridged, where urban and rural and global futures offer mutual support and nourishment, where land and water and energy represent possibility rather than climate crisis.

The first panel discussion was titled “Repairing Neighborhoods: Healing Wounds to Achieve Health and Spatial Equity.” It featured Leona Medley (Joe Louis Greenway Partnership), Mikeya Griffin (Rondo Community Land Trust), and Scott Kratz (Building Bridges across the River). It was moderated by Marian Liou (Smart Growth America). These speakers lead projects that are designed to reconnect communities that have been fractured by infrastructure like highways.

While speaking of the importance of place-based reparative work, Medley also emphasized that “there is a psychological healing that has to happen beyond the pavement, playground, and greenway.” In describing the systemic and generational harms that they are working to untangle, Griffin described the pain of feeling like despite doing everything “right,” stability and prosperity remain out of reach for too many. Finally, building trust by carrying out plans emerged as an important component of community change, as did youth engagement.

Next, in a panel, “Questions You Wish Someone Would Ask,” speakers Toni L. Griffin (urbanAC) and Elwood Hopkins (Emerging Markets) explored how real estate investment that can, under usual circumstances, produce negative consequences that accompany gentrification might be leveraged for community strengthening by directing capital flows to support cultural preservation and making sure that the market meets the needs of residents.

Toni Griffin proposed that rather than urban planning, practitioners engage in community planning and shared that to do so, they must build and mobilize trust-based multiracial coalitions centered around shared values.

Together, Toni Griffin and Hopkins encouraged people to imagine something they’ve never seen, which systems have long told them is impossible.

The focus then shifted to climate justice with a video underscoring the disproportionate effects of climate change on vulnerable communities — not in the future, but right now.

The theme was taken up by a panel titled “Place-Based Climate Action and Advocacy,” featuring Lara Hansen (EcoAdapt), Chandra Farley (City of Atlanta), and Dr. Angela Chalk (Healthy Community Services, New Orleans), and moderated by Shamar Bibbins (Kresge Foundation).

Hansen noted four takeaways that city leaders should understand about climate change:

1. Climate change is connected to everything and is a problem for everyone to solve;
2. We need to focus on climate mitigation and adaptation because climate change is already taking place;
3. All generations need to be involved in addressing climate change, and;
4. Cities are part of a broader and deeply intertwined ecosystem connected to changes occurring at a national and international levels.

Chalk focused on community leadership and youth engagement — with academics and government leaders listening and following. Farley brought a governmental perspective and discussed the importance of cross-agency collaboration in climate adaptation.

The session concluded with a standing ovation for Lois R. DeBacker, managing director of the Kresge Foundation’s Environment program, who retires this week. DeBacker has been a staunch advocate of climate justice programs for decades.

The next session shifted focus to public health with a discussion between Dr. Judith Monroe (CDC Foundation) and Monica Valdes Lupi (Kresge Foundation). The issue of trust was paramount. Monroe and Valdes Lupi discussed the erosion of public trust in health institutions, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Monroe highlighted four key factors for rebuilding trust: humanity, transparency, reliability, and capability. Public health, she argued, cannot function effectively without community involvement. Resources are also at play.

Monroe said, “If we think about public health 50 years out, you can’t separate humanity and equity and the flow of dollars.”

The discussion stressed the importance of breaking down silos in health care and integrating services across sectors to better serve communities.

Following this session, Dr. Michael McAfee, president and CEO of PolicyLink, gave an inspiring and motivating speech titled “Meeting the Moment of 2024: The Future of Opportunity & Equity.”

“Equity is soul work,” he said. “You can’t diminish our souls. It’s not an initiative, it’s not a project, it’s not going anywhere.”

He proposed a thought experiment to the audience, asking them what it would look like to be founders of a nation yet to be born. How do you think big while also holding onto the particular? Urging leaders to move from ideas to action, he galvanized the audience with his remarks: “Don’t be afraid, don’t look for a silver bullet. You are the liberators we have been waiting for.” He shared that organizing is key to a thriving democracy and successful transformation.

The afternoon featured numerous breakout sessions. The “Community Capital Ecosystems” session discussed how banks, government, and philanthropy can play important and complementary roles in bringing sustainable funding to community projects.

“Breaking the Doom Loop: Equitable Development for All,” emphasized that now is the time to address poverty, inequality, and segregation by promoting regional prosperity through hyperlocal initiatives and dismantling racist structures and connecting neighborhoods through community-centered social inclusion.

“Organizing for Civic Problem-Smashing” focused on the importance of balancing financial investments with relational trust in community development projects.

“Building a Local Collaborative Network to Promote and Take Climate Action” used case studies in Miami and Detroit to describe the importance of community engagement in climate programs—not only when making decisions but also when designing and implementing and troubleshooting programs.

Finally, “Community Development v.2: Aligning the Interests of Local Residents and Big Investors” explored how to move beyond traditional community development programs to ensure that they offer stable housing solutions while incorporating wealth-building opportunities.

Following the breakout sessions, participants were invited to join site visits to areas of historical, cultural, environmental, economic, and technological significance to Detroit:

• The Livernois-McNichols District: Commercial corridor and neighborhood development without displacement.
• Midtown and Woodward Corridor: Connecting anchor institution investments to small business, housing and placemaking.
• Eastside Community Network: Neighborhood hub focused on climate resilience, health and wellbeing.
• Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition: Addressing the intersection of infrastructure, health equity and environmental justice.
• Detroit Black Food Sovereignty Network and The People’s Food Co-Op: Building self-reliance, food security, and justice in neighborhoods.
• Civilla: Human-centered design tour at a Detroit-based tech nonprofit partnering with public-serving institutions to remove barriers to service access.
• Black Scroll Network History & Tours: History tour on African American history in Detroit.

Overall, the day’s themes centered on the power of organizing, the importance of youth involvement, and the key vehicle of trust to successful and equitable urban reimagination. That reimagination must include multisectoral tables that address climate justice, economic opportunity, health equity, and place-based arts and culture.

Day 2

The next day began with a video introduction to the theme of economic justice, emphasizing that the current capitalist logic helps only some, resulting in a concentration of power in the hands of the few and the normalization of poverty and inequity.

Gospel music by Granville and the Freedom Singers, featuring St.Courts, set a tone of joy, justice, and love before John Simpkins (MDC) introduced and moderated a two-part panel. The first part, “Working Locally,” included speakers Mauricio Calvo (Latino Memphis), Jesús Gerena (Uptogether), and Felipe Pinzon (Hispanic Unity of Florida).

Simpkins opened with a call to action regarding the South, the fastest-growing region in the country. Despite this growth, one in three Southerners lives below 200% of the poverty line, and economic mobility remains a distant promise for many.

Gerena spoke of overcoming the scarcity mentality, advocating for strength-based approaches that start with the community’s capabilities. The panel was a reminder of the importance of comprehensive structural change in order to achieve individual and communal equity; as Gerena put it, “Our economic position is not dictated by the people, but by the systems.”

As in many sessions, the themes of trust, youth engagement, and community voice were powerful throughlines.

The second part of the panel, again moderated by Simpkins, zoomed out to focus on Shifting National Policy. Speakers Peggy Bailey (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) and Donovan Duncan (Urban Strategies Inc.) examined how federal policy can better reflect the lived experiences of marginalized communities.

Bailey argued that current systems, built to serve elite interests, are exclusionary by design. Her organization works to actively include community members, paying them for their time and offering background learning sessions to level the playing field in decision-making.

Duncan presented the idea of “capitalistic love,” advocating for a model of capitalism that offers healthy opportunities for all. He noted that America’s democracy is intertwined with its capitalist system and suggested that the country could ensure a more equitable distribution of benefits by shifting how resources are deployed. Both panelists underscored the importance of breaking down silos and making sure everyone affected is part of the conversation — because, as Duncan observed, “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”

A second round of breakout sessions were: “Leveraging Climate Action for Job Creation,” “What’s Next in Federal Funding Flows,” ”Landing Greenhouse Gas Reduction Funds in Place,” “Advancing Racial Equity Now,” “Innovative Financing for Neighborhood Anchors: A Marygrove Case Study,” and “Building and Sustaining Urban Higher Education Ecosystems for Regional Prosperity.”

The session on climate action for job creation emphasized that just because we are in a climate crisis doesn’t mean that we should compromise job quality. Keeping equity, justice, and sustainability always at the forefront is important.

In the session on racial equity, leaders from Dallas and ThirdSpace Action Lab discussed how cities can confront racial disparities head-on, even when faced with opposition.

The session on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund discussed the complexities of securing funds from the $27 billion Fund and also noted that these funds will not automatically reach vulnerable communities without intentional action.

Panelists who discussed the Marygrove case study described the varied interests that brought partners together to secure creative financing to launch a high-quality, accessible, inclusive education model to center neighborhoods as inspiring places to learn and connect across racial, generational, social and economic lines.

Finally, panelists at the session on urban higher education ecosystems for regional prosperity explored how to connect higher education to high-quality, sustainable career paths.

Speakers across the board emphasized the importance of community engagement and trust-building, especially in historically marginalized areas, where stakeholders must be involved from the ground up

The closing plenary featured two discussions. The first, a conversation between Jessica Paz-Cedillos (Mexican Heritage Plaza) and Candice Kita (Kresge Foundation), emphasized how arts and culture can be powerful tools for community development. Paz-Cedillos shared how, during COVID-19, the Plaza transformed into a true community center, doubling its service capacity at a time when other institutions were closing. In a community that has suffered from redlining and other unethical policies, the Plaza became a place where people felt a sense of pride, ownership, and belonging.

Still, there is a risk that arts and culture institutions could inadvertently contribute to gentrification without policies that ensure long-term benefits for residents. As Kita said, “Unless we are boldly leaning into the built environment, we can be the cause of gentrification. We have the responsibility to inform who makes investments in our community. So, we have to lean into policy.”

The second part of the session was titled “Culture and Community Power.” Nia Evans (Boston Ujima Project) and Justin Merrick (Center for Transforming Communities, Memphis) were in conversation with moderators Aviva Kapust and Erik Takeshita (Culture and Community Power Fund).

Kapust emphasized the importance of deepening and adding nuance to our understanding of what arts and culture is and can be, to see it as both a driver and outcome of genuine community building. Evans proposed radical imagination to reconsider what is normal and what is possible. She said, “We want to create the air we are breathing.” The session also focused on engagement and embodiment, where engagement is building power alongside others, and embodiment is bringing our full selves to a space.

The day concluded with remarks from Chantel Rush Tebbe (Kresge), who synthesized the themes from the convening and described the event as bringing “solace, refreshment, happiness, and joy.”

She reminded attendees that we are starting where we are — and that reality is not easy. But imagining new systems, creating new physical spaces, establishing new forms of economic opportunity and governance — that is possible, and it is happening, thanks to powerful community leadership and a deep commitment to values.

Rush Tebbe reminded people not to simply accept systems as they are, but rather to think differently about capital, climate, and coalitions.

She noted that the Kresge Foundation would be using the insights from this convening to inform their strategic directions in the future. Continuing the thread of arts and culture as a vehicle for social change, jazz music by the group Straight Ahead brought the symposium to an end as participants prepared to take the lessons from the convening to their home communities.

As the convening reminded us, nobody can sit this one out.

Kelly Spence is a principal and co-founder of Four Corners Global Consulting Group, a social impact consulting firm working at the nexus of evaluation and strategy. Kresge supported this event as part of its suite of centennial activities. Learn more at kresge.org/centennial/.