Perspectives

Why Equity Matters to Us

Equity has been an important part of the conversation in The Kresge Foundation boardroom since I joined the board in 2004. As I look back, I find that as trustees we have not been outwardly vocal about equity, but it has indeed – in my recollection – always played a central role as we determine how best to fulfill our duties. All the while, foundation staff have gravitated with determination to address equity as a core principle and have demonstrated that in their fine work, day in and day out. As we consider the environment today in which federal, state and local policy decisions traced to race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality continue to deepen disparities in health, wealth, education and safety, I feel compelled to declare where our board stands and to discuss our work and how it matters.

Kresge’s focus and reach have completely transformed since I joined the board. For the 80 years following Sebastian S. Kresge’s generous mandate to “promote human progress,” the foundation issued capital challenge grants to help countless institutions and organizations across the U.S. build and expand their physical plants to serve public needs such as health care services, education and the arts. In the mid-2000s, we began using our resources in much more direct ways. Today’s work is incredibly complex and intricate, fully aimed at tearing down barriers and replacing them with enablers that increase opportunities for people to enter and thrive in the economic mainstream.

Although still firmly seeded in our founder’s mission, this new way of working forced our trustees — willingly — to establish a framework to ensure that each of the hundreds of unique grants and investments awarded by the foundation each year is keenly focused on an overarching goal.

As this strategy was taking shape, our reflections and deliberations were difficult: We knew the vision we sought would take time, involve risk and test every facet of the organization. Through much individual and group soul-searching, guided by our incredibly insightful President and CEO, Rip Rapson, the board adopted the “urban opportunity framework” as our north star. It was — and remains — rooted in the aspiration that American cities grow more inclusively so that disparities among their residents are eliminated and all have full access to the building blocks of just and equitable life opportunities. More simply: to expand opportunity for people with low incomes in America’s cities.

To consider our framework is to deal head-on with issues of equity. We constantly ask ourselves how we might demonstrate our commitment to help ensure that status at birth does not equal destiny. We ask how we might support our grantees as they confront bias and constraint. And we ask each other if we are truly advancing equity.

The lived experience of inequality in our country is well documented. Take, for example, practices such as redlining, which contributed significantly to persistent racial wealth gaps. Generations of African Americans seeking home ownership were blocked from receiving federally backed loans and experienced restricted neighborhood choice.

In Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia and countless cities across the country, African American families were prohibited from obtaining loans to improve their homes. They were also restricted from buying or building homes in flourishing communities while their white neighbors fled to newly built residences on spacious lots surrounded by schools with better resources and modern suburban shopping districts. A decade earlier, following Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were held at internment camps based on unfounded fear that they were a risk to national security. These heinous actions, and thousands more, were intended to wall off entire populations. Acts of similar intent and spirit continue today.

Such patterns of inequality are abhorrent and self-defeating.
We are carefully confident that our urban opportunity framework is a strong vehicle by which we can begin to address them, and I am extremely proud of the examples you will read about in this report that demonstrate innovation by cross-cutting issues at their root cause, including:

• “Connecting the Dots,” which brings to life an innovative partnership of data sharing among six health and human service providers, powering them to provide clients access to health care, housing, education, employment and other assistance in the same visit.
• “Food and Housing Insecurity – in College” describes the ways our Education and Human Services programs are collaborating to further student success by understanding and addressing student hunger and homelessness.
• “A Rising Tide of Climate Resilience” illustrates how climate-adaption and preparedness solutions are coming directly from residents most affected by climate-induced extreme weather — partly through Creative Placemaking activities — in New Orleans, a city on the front lines of a warming world.

Addressing systemic barriers to opportunity — deliberately and over the long term — is the challenge and objective of many fine philanthropic organizations that seek a more just and equitable society. We are a small part, but to us it is a crucial tenet of our responsibility, and it is unimaginable to do otherwise.

As trustees of this organization, we have been entrusted with an incredible sum and responsibility. Driving change in America’s cities is the strategic focus toward which we persevere. But at the very core of this work is the desire to confront the systemic inequality that pervades almost every corner of every community.

Fourteen years as a Kresge trustee have taught me that a strong and sustained focus on equity always has been — and must always be — a central measure of our success.

Welcome

We were delighted to welcome Kathy Ko Chin and Cecilia Muñoz to the Kresge Board of Trustees in 2017. In just a few months, Kathy, who serves as the president and CEO of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, and Cecilia, who serves as vice president of Public Interest Technology and Local Initiatives at New America, have demonstrated their tight alignment to the foundation’s strategic direction. Both have made it their life’s work to find solutions to the most pressing challenges affecting our democracy and the people most impacted, and we are delighted that they have chosen to bring that perspective to Kresge’s work.

Hanging a Question Mark

The Kresge Foundation seeks to advance opportunities for low-income people in America’s cities. That commitment stems from the belief that the challenges confronting cities — deepening racial fault lines, stagnant economic mobility, accelerating climate change, severe disparities in educational and health outcomes, calcified patterns of neighborhood disinvestment — interact and intertwine to fence off meaningful opportunity for far too many people.

It is a consummately human tendency to attack these problems in ways in which we’re most familiar. Yet, the urgency, severity and complexity of the challenges cities face require that we move into less familiar and comfortable terrain. So, we take with good measure the sage advice of humanitarian Bertrand Russell, who said, “In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing, now and then, to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”

For more than 80 years, the foundation provided challenge grants for capital projects. Some 12 years ago, we began a pivot away from that approach — a pivot born of a conversation between our trustees Elaine Rosen and Lee Bollinger, who were co-chairing the board’s search for a successor to our distinguished and long-serving president John Marshall. After a first round of candidate interviews, Lee turned to Elaine to suggest that the foundation needed to elevate its aspirations — to migrate from practices that had become narrow and calcified toward approaches that held promise of penetrating the defining issues of our time. In a word, Lee suggested that we look to Russell and “hang a question mark” on both what we took aim at and how.

Elaine agreed, setting in motion the fundamental long-term recalibration of how The Kresge Foundation would fulfill its founder’s directive to “promote human progress.”

We began by establishing six programmatic areas and retooling every dimension of support necessary to operationalize them — human resources, finance, communications, grants management and otherwise. From the outset, we committed to four principles: taking an integrative, long-term view; embracing risks commensurate with the magnitude of the challenges we sought to address; developing a more complete toolbox; and addressing the root causes of disparities facing low-income people.

The changes proceeded quickly, accompanied by a deepening commitment to our hometown of Detroit and the creation of a Social Investment Practice to supplement our grantmaking with loans, guarantees and other financial instruments. But some six years in, another trustee, Irene Hirano, precipitated our next iteration of strategy. At a board retreat, she cloaked within a compliment a deceptively simple question: “Our six programs are clear and effective, but what makes us more than a holding company?”

Talk about hanging a question mark. To answer the question, we had to identify what unified our work — what principle could and should animate every part of the organization. The answer around which we coalesced was urban opportunity: using the full spectrum of the foundation’s resources to pursue the dismantling of the structural obstacles to equitable opportunity in American cities. We would create in their place pathways to full participation in the social and economic mainstream.

The implications of crystallizing our aspirations in these terms was both straightforward and multifaceted. On one hand, each of our programs and the Social Investment Practice would be defined by their progress in reducing urban disparities. On the other hand, the interbraided nature of those disparities required an interbraided set of responses.

We accordingly took three fundamental steps.

First, we created an American Cities Practice to arc across our six program teams and thread through them, identifying investment, convening, research and other approaches to take aim at enhancing structures of urban opportunity across America.

Second, we elevated the centrality of our Social Investment Practice. Rather than standing apart as a separate node of activities, it would work hand-in-glove with the program teams to develop investment instruments advancing those teams’ priorities.

And third, we underscored the desirability — indeed, the necessity — of working across disciplines. Just as people in cities don’t live their lives in vertical silos, neither could Kresge rely exclusively on hermetically sealed vertical funding silos.

These three changes added up to a reverse-engineering form of problem-solving — deconstructing a challenge and its underlying drivers so as to assemble the appropriate combination of disciplinary strategies, talents and funding tools in correct doses at the right cadence. Each challenge requires that we hang a different set of question marks — that we take a different perspective. I invite you to spend time with the remainder of this report to see some compelling examples of this approach.

The Primacy of Values

Breaking from our safe and secure moorings has never been more important than in the current environment. In the wake of the November 2016 election, Kresge has been forced to look inward, to interrogate our values.

The foundation’s privileged position carries with it elevated responsibility to ensure that there is no equivocation about what Kresge stands for, and what we stand against:

• We stand for the pursuit of truth — not for fealty to the indefensible or depreciation of reasoned discourse.
• We stand for opportunity structures that dismantle the persistent and pervasive racial, economic and political barriers that impede pathways to equality and justice — not for the enshrinement of those barriers in public policy ... in the perpetuation of racial and ethnic division ... or in the corrosion of compassion for the least fortunate among us.
• We stand for the stewardship of our shared destiny and the promotion of structures of mutual support — not for a machinery of feigned outrage and continual vilification that undermines confidence in our most fundamental democratic institutions.
• We stand for the power of creative problem-solving that calls on community wisdom, intergenerational exchange and respect for difference — not for the comfort of facile judgments, bombastic certitude and rhetorical hyperbole about complex, interbraided problems.
• We stand for the embrace of every individual’s inherent dignity, worth and decency — not for a denigration of those whose skin pigment, gender, physical conditions, sexual orientation or faith differs from our own.
• And we stand for an abiding optimism about the possibilities of the human spirit — not for the dismal brew of a calculating and cruel cynicism placed in service of self-advancement.

Those are our values. But the true test of those values is how we behave when they come under assault. In those cases, we intend to be guided by three ethical imperatives of action.

First, we must bear witness.

It’s understandable for community workers, nonprofit organizations and philanthropists to question whether their voices matter in an environment saturated with misinformation. Generated with calculating precision and distributed with bot-powered efficiency, wave upon wave of social media fictions and public distortions create an intellectual flotsam and jetsam intended to obscure the real issues of the day. It is imperative that we not be distracted, let alone silenced, by these diversionary feints. Our collective voices do matter — enormously.

More than ever, we must encourage our partners to give voice to their values — our values — for a just and humane society. We must continue to tell the stories of ordinary people and exceptional organizations working in dignity to improve the economic, social and political conditions of community life. In the surfacing and amplification of those stories, we deny the power of an insidious, nascent sense of defeatism to smother authenticity and conviction.

Second, we must create space to demonstrate our courage.

Libraries, community centers, social service agencies, places of worship and countless other places of public gathering and sanctuary already play a central role in safeguarding individual and group expression and in affirming the power of informal networks of mutual assistance. Their importance will only grow as threatened and disempowered communities look for physical, spiritual and emotional safe harbor and support.

We need to fortify these and other parts of the civic membrane that enable us to hold acts of courage. These are the organizations closest to those most affected by injustice. They are vehicles to amplify community voice and build community agency. As the demands on them multiply, we must support them generously and without hesitation.

Third, we need to forge alliances around the nonnegotiable.

Although foundations can’t lobby or advocate for legislation, we can help build and strengthen the alliances necessary to advance those truths of equity, fairness and justice that we know to be inviolable:

• That the machinery of public decision-making must be calibrated to ensure that city residents have full agency not only to engage in, but also shape, the policies, practices and investments that create the map of neighborhood life.
• That every city in America must play a role in, and reap the benefits of, the evolution of equitable, inclusive regional growth and prosperity.
• That the arts can refract the infinite varieties of creativity and cultural identity into a kaleidoscope of community-building possibilities.
• That unequal educational attainment is an injustice no civilized society can tolerate.
• That climate change is a social justice issue.
• That moving upstream to eradicate the social, economic and environmental determinants of health disparities is an essential predicate of our nation’s approach to public health.
• That the work of human-serving organizations needs to be recognized as moving beyond charity to providing the essential supports that families require to achieve economic mobility and social well-being.

Institutions like Kresge must accordingly recommit to ensuring that individuals, organizations and movements possess the tools they need to organize and mobilize, to educate and advocate, to rebuild social capital and strengthen citizen-based problem-solving.

Fortifying the Architecture

Our concepts of risk and safety have been turned on their head. Acts that were once risky are now elementary and insufficient. Fundamental democratic norms that were once safe are too often trivialized as transitory or out of touch.

I choose, however, to view this moment as a time to adjust our perspective, not to make our peace with a new normal. It is a time to reassess, recalibrate and recommit. The nonprofit and philanthropic sectors have spent decades trying to create and assemble enduring and resilient building blocks of opportunity and justice. Although that architecture is still incomplete, we have nevertheless created a complex, dynamic and durable infrastructure to fit together those building blocks in an increasingly coherent, impactful way. This is no time to put down our trowels and mortar. We need to keep building and rebuilding. Even when the building inspector tells us we don’t have a permit — even when the demolition crew drives onto the site.

My father was an architect and a planner. In this climate, we all need to be. We all need to take a stand for our values and fortify the architecture of opportunity and justice.

For nearly a century, through changing times and shifting political tides, The Kresge Foundation has continually adjusted our perspective and recommitted to carrying out Sebastian Kresge’s directive to promote human progress. Today, that commitment is deeper than ever. By hanging a question mark on how we do our work, we open new possibilities for the ways we fulfill that commitment.

These challenges aren’t going away any time soon.

Neither are we.

Showing Up When it Counts

The 2016 election and its aftermath have challenged core American values — and so, too, Kresge’s mission.

Representing something altogether different from the normal rhythms of political change and party factionalism, these consequences have come not just in the form of hateful rhetoric and policy out of Washington — but also in the fraying of social fabric and norms of decency throughout the country.

And yet, we have been inspired by partners who have stood up in the past year through social movements of profound breadth and impact. By nonprofits that have stretched themselves creatively, empathetically and inexhaustibly on behalf of those they serve. By private citizens who have shown up at airports, at marches, in courts and at town halls to be heard and offer solidarity and support to friends, neighbors and strangers alike. By public figures, religious leaders and even CEOs who have taken real personal risk to call out bigotry when they see it. But philanthropy — which so prides itself on risk-taking, mission-orientation and a commitment to serve others — does not, and must not, get a pass.

In that spirit, immediately following the 2016 election, the Kresge Board of Trustees broke new ground in approving a multimillion-dollar increase in our 2017 grantmaking budget. In particular, we created an Opportunity Fund to help the foundation respond to the unprecedented challenges of this troubled time, and to address likely threats to our core values as an institution. Very simply, the intent was to create a funding vehicle for Kresge to do what so many of our partners have done over the past year: step up in an entirely new way.

The Opportunity Fund represents a new structure for Kresge: a pool of flexible, responsive funding that can be deployed to enliven and protect core values; to take aim at cross-cutting priorities that no one program team could address directly; to uncover our blind spots as an organization, highlighting communities and issues that require far greater attention; and to serve as an incubator for our local and national work.

In practice, it allowed us to marry our words to action in 2017. As we spoke out with ever greater vigor about challenges to core American values and Kresge commitments — from the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement to the administration’s appalling false equivalencies after Charlottesville — we simultaneously pushed ourselves into new areas of work and forms of funding to better and more directly support those commitments.

With the Kresge board’s active direction and input, in 2017 we invested in efforts designed to safeguard civility and decency, counteract hate, support emerging social movements, advance civil rights, defend our immigrant and refugee neighbors and provide legal assistance to the underserved. Among other projects, we partnered to support:

• The Community Remembrance Project, part of a campaign led by the Equal Justice Initiative to memorialize and tell the stories of victims of lynching throughout the South, and to contextualize that legacy of terror in the broader history of racial injustice;
• Teaching Tolerance and Hatewatch, two programs of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The former provides cutting-edge materials to educators nationally to foster an understanding of and commitment to diversity, equity and justice; the latter is a critical source of monitoring, analysis and reporting that brings attention to hate-group activities and hate incidents in the United States;
• The Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services efforts to provide critical support and information to, and build organizing and advocacy capacity within, communities throughout metro Detroit and around the country;
• The People’s Climate March, a March 2017 protest on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and in hundreds of other cities around the world, in support of critical environmental protections under threat and action in the face of global climate change;
• The elevation of civil legal services as a social justice priority by the Justice for All Project through the National Center for State Courts, aiming to bridge the shocking gap in access to legal representation and tools for low-income people on issues ranging from eviction to domestic violence;
• A range of activities to help cities respond to a rising tide of preemption laws coming out of statehouses — on topics as far afield as immigration, minimum wage, plastic bags and bathrooms. Our funding helped create the Local Solutions Support Center through the Rockefeller Family Fund and supported research and action by the National League of Cities. That resulted in a range of convenings, advocacy and communications activities, as well as legal supports to cities under threat; and
• Vera Institute of Justice’s legal support to immigrants and asylum seekers facing deportation, in partnership with cities around the country.

On behalf of the Opportunity Fund team and the entire foundation, I am proud to stand alongside so many partners who have spoken out, who are doing the difficult day-to-day work, who are facing threats head-on and who are demonstrating tremendous organizational and individual courage.

The Opportunity Fund embodies Kresge’s cross-disciplinary way of working and our commitment to the principle of “opportunity.” Our members represent the broad diversity of our staff. We have sought to draw from the full spectrum of the foundation’s expertise, to partner with peer funders to invest wisely and unlock even more responsive resources and to push our own comfort level with, at times, challenging topics and tools for social change.

And so, beyond creating a new responsive capacity at Kresge, the Opportunity Fund has helped build our institutional muscle for — and comfort with — addressing issues that we might have shied away from in the past, but which are essential to confront if we are truly committed to “opportunity” as the fulcrum of our mission.

Kresge is under no illusions: Ours is but one minor voice, and our reach is deeply limited. But we are committed to showing up, to speaking out, and to affirming and supporting nonprofits that are leading the charge for positive change in this difficult moment for our country.