American Cities
Practice Overview
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 Practice 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.
