Kresge Foundation President and CEO Rip Rapson delivered the following comments at the Strengthening Whole Child Communities: Raising the Bar from Cradle to Career Summit hosted by the U.S. Department of Education at The School at Marygrove in Detroit on August 1, 2024.  

Thank you, Assistant Secretary Roberto Rodriguez and White House Domestic Policy Council Director Neera Tanden. It is a deep pleasure to have you in Detroit. The thoughtfulness of your remarks are potent reminders of just how much visionary, principled leadership matters.

And thanks to our philanthropic co-hosts: the Ballmer Group, the Stuart Foundation, and the Raikes Foundation. These foundations have been leaders in investing in place-based strategies that situate education at the center of community development.

• Kresge in Memphis, New Orleans, Fresno, and here in Detroit.
• Ballmer across the country, as well as in the regions on which it focuses: Washington State, Los Angeles, and, again, here in Southeast Michigan.
• Stuart and Raikes in several West Coast communities and across the country.

You’ve heard from our federal colleagues that this conference seeks to illuminate the potency of having the public, private, nonprofit, philanthropic and civic sectors work together to generate neighborhood-based, creative and comprehensive cradle-to-career educational opportunities for children and families.

Just a further word about why we’ve convened here.

For more than one hundred years, Marygrove College set thousands of this city’s residents on the path to careers in social work, nursing and teaching. And it served as a powerful community anchor in this quadrant of the city – its programming, activities and ties to the neighborhood an invaluable source of stability, vitality and identity for one of the city’s most diverse communities.

Eight years ago, however, Marygrove College came to the excruciatingly painful conclusion that its business model couldn’t support its continued existence. The College’s founders – the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary – approached Kresge to see whether there might be some way to honor the college’s educational legacy in slightly different form.

The result is the constellation of activities we now see on campus:

• A state-of-the-art early childhood development center operated by Starfish Family Services.
• The School at Marygrove, a K-12 partnership between the University of Michigan’s Marsal Family School of Education and the Detroit Public Schools Community District.
• The presence, as of this fall, of 40 School of Education students living in newly-refurbished dormitories on campus.
• Northwest Detroit’s arts and cultural hub, housing the Detroit Youth Choir, a literary arts program, a dance studio, painting and ceramics studios, and theater programs.
• The Marygrove Conservancy, which oversees the entire campus and the multifold arts, cultural and community activities contained in it.

The educational programming and related activities at Marygrove have cast in bright relief just how central a cradle-to-career campus can be in stabilizing neighborhood residential patterns, driving localized economic opportunity and fortifying community social capital.

It is increasingly reshaping the calculus of families’ decisions to stay and raise a family in Northwest Detroit . . . to move here . . . to start and build a business here . . . to weave networks of social connection and mutual support here.

Our conversations over the course of the day will underscore the self-explanatory, but nevertheless important, reality that not all P-20 efforts look alike . . . are constituted alike . . . or behave alike. And certainly, not all P-20 efforts will have the same impact.

That makes it important, it seems to me, to understand the uniqueness of the Marygrove experience:

• It is a school whose curriculum was co-developed by a public school district and a world-class university’s school of education.
• It is a school designed to thread together the educational experiences of a child from the time she enters pre-school to the time she matriculates to postsecondary education.
• It is a school that draws its students, its families, its identity and its energies from the surrounding community.
• It is a school focused on the entirety of the needs and life circumstances of a student and her family – from pre-natal health screening to wrap-around support services . . . and from academic supports to recreational programming.
• And it is a school nested within a comprehensive framework of neighborhood economic and community development investments – from housing stabilization to commercial corridor revitalization . . . and from the enhancement of environmental and open space amenities to the exploration of family asset building strategies.

That child-centered, place-based approach to a continuum of educational opportunity has come to define how the City of Detroit thinks about children and families beyond the borders of this campus, or even this neighborhood. For example:

• Under the leadership of Superintendent Vitti, the Detroit Public Schools Community District has launched Health Hubs in each of its neighborhood high schools, helping to integrate the health, human services, housing and other services for students and their families.
• The City of Detroit’s planning and economic development departments are pursuing revitalization strategies that are kid-centric: streetscapes that are safe and walkable . . . parks and recreation centers that promote youth engagement . . . transit that enables kids to get not only to school, but also to out-of-school time programming . . .
• Neighborhood-led community development organizations like the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation, whom you’ll hear from this week, are increasingly serving as connective tissue between schools and those public systems so essential to helping families achieve economic and social stability and mobility.

In a nutshell: Marygrove is indeed a unicorn, but one that invites adaptation and translation to other places in other contexts. Picking up that thread will be one of the many exciting aspects of your two days together.

Thank you again for coming. And thank you even more for your commitment to the health, well-being and vitality of our children. I hope that your couple of days in Detroit are every bit as thought-provoking and productive as they promise to be.