American Cities

More than 80 percent of Americans – and more than 80 percent of Americans with low incomes – live in metropolitan areas. At the same time, there is a continuing trend towards urbanization.

This puts American cities on the frontline of our nation’s most pressing challenges: Whether we can drive lasting prosperity. Whether we close the widening gap between rich and poor. Whether we can promote equality and expand opportunity.

Fortunately, American cities have much to offer to the challenges at hand. It is in cities that we find the critical mass of people, ideas, energy and institutions necessary to bring about change.

America’s urban centers have the potential to become accelerators of opportunity for people with low incomes, providing residents with access to jobs, education, housing, human-serving systems, city services and quality public spaces.

Kresge’s American Cities Program is committed to supporting this transformation.

We leverage the breadth of the foundation’s national grantmaking programs and the depth of the foundation’s experience built from our work in Detroit.

We emphasize on-the-ground practice. We focus on catalyzing meaningful improvement in communities to advance opportunity for people with low incomes.

We invest in three areas

1. Knowledge exchange

We develop and fund research, thought leadership and convenings that have the potential to improve the effectiveness and inclusiveness of place-based community development practice. We seek to promote the transfer of ideas across urban practitioners including philanthropy, business, community organizations, municipal government and cross-sector partnerships. This includes:

• Funding research on how community development practitioners can work effectively in place;
• Capturing, sharing and facilitating exchange of best practices and new ideas for working in cities and neighborhoods; and
• Bringing practitioners who work in cities together to share ideas and develop networks.

2. Surfacing, seeding and scaling effective and/or new approaches to community development

We support multicity community development initiatives aimed at piloting, testing and scaling effective and inclusive urban practice. In this area we support projects such as Working Cities Challenge and Reimagining the Civic Commons, which utilize creative approaches to strengthen low-income communities.

We also support community development organizations of national scale that work in cities (e.g., Living Cities and Local Initiatives Support Corporation).

3. Place-based work in Memphis and New Orleans

We steward the foundation’s city-centered grantmaking in Memphis and New Orleans, including community development grantmaking inspired by our work in Detroit.

We look for efforts that:

• Will result in expanded opportunity for city residents, with a particular emphasis on the city’s low-income residents;
• Engage the community in a real and meaningful way;
• Have potential for long-term sustainability or community impact; and
• Have potential for scalability or translation to other neighborhoods, communities or cities.

We generally do not fund:

• Single-site initiatives outside of Memphis and New Orleans
• Research, convening or knowledge exchange that is not focused on places, or for urban practitioners.

We use a full array of funding and investment tools to foster change, including project grants, operating support, planning grants and program-related investments. Program-related investments may take the form of direct loans, guarantees that provide credit support to borrowers or linked deposits. (Learn more about our social investing.)

Most of our grants span one to three years. We also use resources to convene partners to learn and lead. And, in certain situations, when project proposals offer opportunities to advance the goals of multiple teams, those teams will jointly fund the proposal.

We seek potential partners and new funding opportunities through our involvement in meetings and conferences and with partner organizations, institutions and fellow foundations.

You may stay in touch by subscribing to email alerts or an RSS feed, or by following @kresgfdn on Twitter. You can also email us through the Contact form, but please know that due to the high volume of emails, we cannot reply to all messages.