Kresge Foundation President and CEO Rip Rapson delivered the following comments at the opening of the “Our Urban Future: The Next Era of Making Change in America’s Cities” symposium at The Icon in Detroit on Sept. 11, 2024.

Good morning, everyone. We could not be more excited to have such an extraordinary group gathered in what is unquestionably the most dynamic city in America.

The Kresge Orientation

One hundred years ago, Sebastian Kresge created a foundation in his name with the mission to promote human progress.

When one’s founding documents allow such sweeping discretion, it’s tempting to cast your net broadly – to sidestep the need to choose among countless worthy causes. It’s tempting but ill-advised. Spreading philanthropic resources too thin causes us to flow, amoeba-like, from one urgency to another. The challenge is to select a point of view to shape where, how, and to what we direct our resources – not just our endowment but our attention, our credibility, and the dedication, learning, and creativity of our people.

Over the eighteen years I’ve had the privilege of serving as president of the foundation, we’ve come to an understanding of how to meet that challenge: engaging tasks that we do well and calling on tools that we use with skill—which we blend, stack, and combine with the freedom that is a unique privilege of philanthropy.

The Crucible That Gave Rise to the Six Roles

Our grant and investment dollars align with, fortify, and give credibility to everything the foundation does. Yet grants alone are insufficient to fully realize our purpose, particularly when viewed in the context of the vast dollars available to the public and private sectors.

If we are to contribute to social progress, therefore, we have to embrace moving into lanes that are difficult, if not impossible, for the private and public sectors to occupy.

That has been demonstrated time and time again as we’ve sought to adapt to the extraordinary cycles of uncertainty and disruption that have washed over Detroit in the last two decades:

• The ravages of the Great Recession and the housing foreclosure crisis of 2008-’09.
• The existential threat posed by the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.
• The wholesale reinvention of neighborhood revitalization tools in the bankruptcy’s aftermath.
• The dizzying dislocations in public health, small business viability, and daily life occasioned by COVID.
• The searing energies of racial justice and reconciliation following the George Floyd murder.

During the depths of Detroit’s challenges, someone sent me a note suggesting I should think hard about whether the following quote reflected the reality facing the city. It read:

“More than any other time in history, humankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to utter despair and hopelessness. . . . The other, to the obliteration of all we hold dear. . . . Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.’

Ouch. I never did figure out who sent it.

Well, we here in Detroit did have the wisdom to choose correctly—not the first path, not the second, but a third premised on the aspiration of reimagination, renewal, and hope.

Six Philanthropic Roles

As we set out on that path, we grounded our work in six roles that have come to define our approach not only in Detroit but also in the other cities in which we are engaged. Here’s a brief word about each.

First, table-setting. We can convene community members around the kind of gnarly, long-term issues the public and private sectors won’t, or can’t, address – helping set a table designed to enable a community to overcome stubbornly resistant civic inertias and cut new channels that give form to systems that didn’t exist before.

Second, capacity-building. We can lend support to the mechanisms by which citizens become well organized where they live – valorizing the power of people, places, and ideas that have been cast to the margins of our economy and politics . . . injecting local voices into processes that are too often hard-wired to marginalize them . . . building new social connective tissue . . . augmenting resident-based planning and investment tools.

Third, risk mitigation. We can peel away the first layer of risk in critical fiscal transactions outside the comfort zone of public and private sector actors. In essence, we can serve as society’s “passing gear” (a phrase coined by the great philanthropoid Paul Ylvisaker), helping to propel society beyond its fixed and safe positions toward enduring long-term social change. When we de-risk transactions, we demonstrate that money can move outside the arteries of an unresponsive market, setting in motion a fly-wheel in which capital flows with a different valence to low-income and low-wealth families and communities.

Fourth, value guarantor. We can underwrite public goods and spaces that signal to private markets that these are places and activities capable of anchoring a community’s sustained long-term health and stability – whether a public market, a riverfront, a light rail line, or a new cradle-to-career educational campus.

Fifth, ground-truthing. We can offer knowledge of the local circumstances to those unfamiliar with the city to help them determine how they might best invest their time, talent, and resources. And we can remind them that the challenges of local change-making are never rooted in a hermetically-sealed, singular set of causes, but instead reflect complex, inter-braided systems ricocheting against one another over the long-term. The challenges are not like an infection cured by an injection, but rather like a persistent condition requiring continual care and management.

And sixth, civic stewardship. We can invest in strengthening and sustaining the fragile civic and cultural ties that help bind a city. This means investing in organizations that serve as our society’s moral thermostats – organizations that activate in the presence of suffering, injustice, or exclusionary behaviors.

These six roles have become far more than a neat and tidy rubric capable of housing the wide spectrum of Kresge activities during a tumultuous period of Detroit’s history. They have instead redefined what we seek to accomplish wherever we worked – and how.

Our experience, moreover, underscores that these roles activate with greatest potency when deployed in combination. Mixing and matching . . . blending and layering . . . proportioning and sequencing according to circumstance.

It is, in essence, reverse engineering: clarifying what we want to accomplish, then working backward to identify, assemble, and coordinate the right players equipped with the right tools . . . applied in the right doses . . . in the right order . . . and at the right pace.

Only then do we forge a truly effective, equitable, and accountable civic problem-smashing machinery. A machinery that embraces, but is not limited to, the prerogatives of our friends in City Hall or State government . . . that is not subordinated to the private interests of corporations . . . that is not unduly dependent on a philanthropic sector with only the most tenuous claims to democratic legitimacy.

Instead, it is a machinery drawing strength from all parts of civil society, working in a mutually reinforcing way to advance the common good.

Centennial Convenings

It’s in this spirit that The Kresge Foundation’s Centennial both impels us to reflect on the path we’ve traveled and invites us to interrogate how best to move forward. As Shakespeare reminds us, “The past is prologue.”

The centennial has been anchored by a series of convenings that have sought to build to this summit: convenings about the intersection of community development, health, and climate action . . . about prioritizing environmental health and racial equity in transportation infrastructure investments . . . about positioning equity-based strategies at the core of statewide economic development . . . about national models of cradle-to-career education.

These convenings have made clear that philanthropy’s role is not to stand outside the fence-line of civic decision-making waiting for the perfect, safe moment to deploy our resources. It is instead to get into the mix:

• Embracing our uniqueness while recognizing our limitations.
• Working in an integrative, cross-disciplinary way without becoming paralyzed by complexity.
• Recognizing the imperative of patiently chipping away at the intractable without avoiding the urgent.
• Becoming comfortable with change that is organic, but that can lead to “trigger points” that enable qualitative leaps forward by inspiring a wholesale rethinking of urban systems.

This Summit

That’s all a bit high-level. That’s why we’ve structured the conversations over the next couple of days to take a bead on four overarching and wickedly complex issues that cities of all shapes and sizes will have to mud-wrestle if they’re going to make the kind of progress to which we all aspire.

First is racial equity and reparative community development.

In our first plenary, our speakers will excavate past injustices that continue to shape our cities today and discuss vehicles for advancing genuine healing through greater spatial, social, and economic equity.

Second is climate change’s centrality to every dimension of urban life.

Our second plenary will reflect on the intersection of environmental resilience, health, and community development.

Third is people-centered urban economies.

The third plenary will explore about how cities can usher in people-centered economies, equitable wealth creation, and multi-generational economic mobility.

And fourth is the power of cultural placekeeping and placemaking.

Our final plenary will invite us to consider how arts, culture, and design can tap the power of a creative problem-solving that calls on community wisdom, intergenerational exchange, and respect for difference.

A Provocation

Before I turn you over to these themes, though, I’d like to offer a provocation.

In a brief twelve-year span at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, our country saw the emergence of eight technologies that altered the fundamental arc of urban America: indoor plumbing, central heating systems, electrical generators, steel-frame construction, elevators, telephones, automobiles, and subways.

One could certainly argue that one-hundred years or so on, electronic, digital, and machine learning revolutions have given that arc one more dramatic upward pull.

But what would happen if we superimposed a lens that had to do more with the software than the hardware – more to do with the social determinants of change than with the technological determinants of change?

As we contemplate what we learned about how the pandemic strained the essential fabric of a society that needs to be held together by caring and compassion . . . how the economic downturn cast in bright relief implications of unforgivably vast wealth inequities . . . how the persistent drumbeat of racial violence reset the terms of engagement around issues of reparative racial justice and healing . . . . how a changing climate unmasked the existential crisis that too many are content to shove into a closet for consideration sometime later, but not now . . .
As we contemplate those tectonic forces, it becomes clear that perhaps the innovation in thinking and acting that we truly require lies in people solutions, not technocratic ones.

Because below the surface of the challenges that cities face lies a complex mosaic of hopes, ideas, skills, and assets that continues to shape the conditions for re-imagination: diverse subcultures, historical legacies, and future aspirations colliding and recombining in infinitely varied and imaginative ways to redefine and recast a new arc of equity and justice.

Let me suggest just two examples of how those energies might contribute to a new people-centered urban operating code.

First, the emergence of a reimagined municipal pluralism

Our elected officials hold the legitimacy that comes with an election certificate and legally-prescribed mechanisms of accountability. And yet – given all the forces I ticked off a moment ago – that means something quite different in 2024 from what it did in 1990 or even 2010.

Let me be clear that we simply cannot do without an able, committed public sector, no matter its shortcomings. In even the worst of cases, we cannot relinquish the expectation that our elected representatives will crystalize and articulate public priorities and pursue responsible and responsive public spending.

But . . .

Yogi Berra once observed, “Even Napoleon had his Watergate.”

Now I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I think it has some bearing on this issue.

Actually, I think what it might mean is that the basic civic calculus falls apart if people start believing that government is bogarting its power and that it is no longer working in the broad interest of society.

In the eyes of too many citizens, budgets are forged based on the convenience of short-term transactionalism, not on the long-term imperatives of civic good . . . thoughtful discourse is being strangled by incessant and petty partisan bickering . . . and the necessity of facing down difficult decision-making is being subverted by opportunistic gesture politics.

That suggests that in order to activate community priorities, 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.

Think CDFI’s, civic conservancies, community development organizations, nonprofit service providers, block clubs, mutual assistance associations. A network of capacities and relationships designed to ensure that residents can participate meaningfully in the decisions and resource allocations that shape daily life in the nation’s neighborhoods.

An American Ownership Society

A second element of that new human-centered municipal operating code will be a reimagination of community ownership structures.

The construct is certainly not new. Indeed, American democracy has from its inception assumed that citizens who are property owners would be likely to participate more fully in the maintenance and perfection of our democracy. Unfortunately, of course, that mandate has – for the better part of 300 years – failed utterly as applied to non-white Americans.

And yet, despite the extraordinary challenges people with low-incomes face in securing the capital to invest in long-term wealth building, we’ve witnessed remarkable innovation:  community land trusts, commercial cooperatives, property ownership by neighborhood residents, and other devices.

It’s long past time that community ownership migrates to its next generation of scale and impact. In the words of Elwood Hopkins, from whom we’ll hear in a few minutes, the time has come to build an American Ownership Society.

We can start by building on what we have: expanding the reach of the land trusts, the commercial cooperatives, and the neighborhood entrepreneurs.

But we can bridge to something even more ambitious and potentially far-reaching. Consider, for a moment, the enormous collective potential lodged in trusted civic players able to aggregate small investments from their neighbors into a neighborhood investment trust.

For example, if a network of Detroit churches with 10,000 members raised $500 from each of their congregants, they might use that $5 million to purchase properties and give each of those 10,000 residents fractional ownership of an entire district—an ownership interest that would grow wealth over time.

The path is clear. We can move from boutique practice to accelerated adoption, translating experiences from one community to another through national networks and communities of practice.

A Message of Hope

There’s a traditional Asian saying, “Everything rests on the tip of intention.” It implies a very close relationship between outcome and motivation. I’ve always thought that this applies not only to individuals but also to institutions.

In the world of community service, all our institutional values and principles grow directly out of our fundamental intention to advance the health and well-being of others. We shift and adjust . . . we expand and contract . . . we assess and respond — but we always keep our original intention in clear view, spurring our dreams of new and better ways to serve.

When President Obama spoke with me at our Kresge Centennial in June, he observed that younger generations of leaders today possess a tremendous sense of social responsibility and an intense commitment to advancing racial equity, economic justice, and environmental sustainability. But he also expressed deep concern that this idealism—this dream of new and better ways to serve—paradoxically rides side-by-side with an absence of hope, a lost excitement about the art of the possible.

It would be sadly ironic if those of us gathered today – those of us who consider ourselves to be urban practitioners – were to lose our own sense of visionary idealism.

I hope the conversations over the next few days will serve to underscore that we have a vital role to play in addressing President Obama’s concern: That we can affect whether the landscape we bequeath to our children will be based on impulses of compassion and service or constructs of narrow self-interest . . . Whether it will usher rhythms of equity, fair play, and opportunity or fall back on the halting steps of differential treatment and privilege for the few . . . Whether it will look toward enlightened stewardship of the public commons or fuel a feverish rush to privatize and individualize our shared heritage.

In a word, let’s use our time together to fire our imagination to conceive of a bolder, more equitable urban trajectory. I am optimistic that we can do that. . . .

And, under the circumstances, being anything other than an optimist strikes me as a profoundly unproductive use of our time.

Thank you. Let’s go be productive.