Kresge’s New Racial Justice Grants Connect a National Movement with Local Action
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Black lives matter protests in detroit over the summer. Dedan Photography/shutterstock
When protesters took to the streets this summer calling for action against racial injustice, the sheer magnitude of the movement prompted organization after organization to sound off and commit funds. The Kresge Foundation, whose urban opportunity focus resonates strongly with racial equity goals, was under a lot of pressure to make a grants announcement in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death. But the venerable institution held back—until now—because it wanted to get its approach right, foundation leadership said.
Last week, Kresge committed a total of $30 million to nearly 60 racial justice organizations in what the foundation calls “a sharpened focus and intensification” of its longstanding grantmaking in this area.
“This is all new money—we’re not repurposing our existing grant portfolio,” said President and CEO Rip Rapson. “We tried to make sure we were making investments that were interlinking, and contemporaneous with energies that were emerging [from communities]. We also wanted to make the linkage between national and local… and that sort of stitching took a while.”
The fruit of Kresge’s approach is a slate of grants that looks pretty radical, especially from a grantmaker that not so long ago (in the grand scheme of things) was dedicating most of its funding to the construction of libraries, schools and museums. In keeping with its place-based ethos, most of Kresge’s new racial justice grants are going to movement nonprofits and community organizations in its hometown of Detroit as well as the cities of Memphis, New Orleans and Fresno. But the foundation is also supporting 13 national organizations in a bid to “fortify the ecology” of a movement that has caught fire this year, but remains deeply embattled on the policy front.
Some might question why Kresge, which formally adopted equity as its “sixth foundational value” in 2019, waited this long to make its big 2020 move on racial justice—a valid point. But it’s also true that through these grants, Kresge is making a case that the measured, slow-burn pace of traditional philanthropy has applicability, even among movements demanding justice.
Motor City movement building
During his tenure at Kresge, which began in 2006, Rapson has overseen a complete reworking of the legacy funder’s grantmaking strategy. This current set of racial justice grantees represents the latest stage of that evolution, which has seen Kresge adopt an interesting position at the intersection of local, regional and national philanthropic engagement. In many ways, that story revolves around Detroit. Could a wealthy, mostly white-led institution return its focus to its beleaguered birth city and face up to the many injustices—including systemic racism—that have held back the Motor City?
“When I first arrived at Kresge in 2006, I got a lot of pushback from people who said, ‘We don’t trust philanthropy and we sure don’t trust Kresge,’” Rapson said. “You sit out in the suburbs and do these capital challenge grants. You’re not really about Detroit.” The best Kresge could do, he said, was to do the work and let it speak for itself. “And if the work doesn’t meet that standard, you have every right to criticize us.”
This latest $30 million is in part an effort to meet a standard set in Detroit, and across the nation, by the emergent youth-led movement groups that laid the groundwork for this year’s racial justice reckoning. “We needed to come to terms with the fact that our longstanding commitment to racial opportunity and equity still hadn’t really kept up with the emerging energies of the Black Lives Matter movement and other youth movements,” Rapson said. “We realized we were missing people.”
According to Kresge, over half of the organizations in this latest slate are new grantees. Many (but not all) of the grants involve general operating support over three years. The $7 million headed to 13 national-level grantees represents the foundation’s first step on a path that will characterize its approach going forward—that is, to knit together the work of local and national organizations in particular cities or regions, and give national grantees what they need to support local groups on the front lines.
“What we’re trying to construct is the beginning of a system where a local grantee that wants to do advocacy would have someone at the national level they could look to for technical assistance,” Rapson said.
Cues from conservative movement funders
Thinking through that approach, Rapson and the Kresge team took cues from their ideological rivals. As observers—including Inside Philanthropy—have often pointed out, conservative philanthropy has been remarkably successful over the long term in deploying 501(c)(3) dollars to build up a comprehensive system of advocacy infrastructure that spurs on real policy change. Rapson expressed a desire to emulate some of what the conservative movement has done. That might include working alongside other progressive funders to jumpstart leadership training, advocacy capacity, and communications and educational vehicles, “all of that cohering into a larger system that permits you to reach some of the policies you seek,” he said.
An advantage the conservative movement has over progressives, Rapson went on, is that it’s more comfortable with central coordination. Organizations and funders on the left tend to be less amenable to “command and control.” Kresge wants to resource a progressive alternative by relying on geography to catalyze and organize connections on the local level, boosting “ecologies of mutual support” in particular places. “We’re not creating anything,” Rapson said, but instead seeking to “fortify, accelerate and encourage deeper connectivity” in the cities where the foundation works.
In the lead-up to these grants, Kresge connected with the mostly new national organizations leading today’s civil rights movement and discussed that place-based ecosystem approach. According to Kresge, several grantees embody that approach, including the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and the Black-Led Movement Fund at Borealis Philanthropy. By channeling monetary resources and other supports to local organizers, these coalition-builders let funders fill needs while keeping locally arising priorities and leaders in the driver’s seat.
Other national grantees, like the Center for Community Change and the National Black Justice Coalition, operate in a similar fashion. So do grantees like Mijente, the immigration-focused Four Freedoms Fund at NEO Philanthropy, the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center and the Black Trans Fund—in the context of different demographic groups and across intersecting identities.
Meanwhile, local commitments in the four cities Kresge is targeting cover a broad array of work, from movement building and policy advocacy to the kind of community development and small business support the foundation has become known for in its hometown. For instance, a total of $8 million in Detroit commitments includes support for Detroit Future City, the polished regional development think tank that arose from the Kresge-funded DFC Strategic Framework, a 50-year vision for the city released in 2012. Kresge’s grants also support grassroots groups like FORCE Detroit and community organizing hubs like the LIVE6 Alliance.
Grants in Memphis, New Orleans and Fresno also operate across intersecting priorities, including community development and wealth-building, shifting power and supporting equitable recovery from COVID-19 disruptions.
An antidote to the vulnerabilities of place-based giving?
Kresge, Ford, Kellogg and the other funders involved in Detroit’s 2014 “Grand Bargain” have often been hailed for their role in that agreement, which drew in part upon philanthropic resources to help the city exit its catastrophic bankruptcy. It seemed, at the time, yet another sign of the ascendance of private money and the blurring of sectoral lines on the municipal level. It was also celebrated as a triumph of local philanthropy and a sign that the region’s many well-resourced private foundations were on the right track in their local and regional work.
And yet, while the Grand Bargain was a success, the overall record of place-based philanthropy is very much mixed. Local funders’ earnest efforts around community development, for instance, or to help provide basic services, can be frustrated by destructive national crises and trends that local actors are powerless to stop. We’ve often cited the Great Recession as an example, one in which the Motor City was hit hard. The fallout from COVID-19 and the Trump presidency, for some priorities, also fit the bill.
By aligning itself firmly behind contemporary justice movements, Kresge has adopted an approach with these grants, that while still place-based, may sidestep some of those vulnerabilities. While COVID-19 and Trump-era rhetoric may be disproportionately harming communities of color, they’ve done little to extinguish the racial justice movement. In fact, today’s crises have only increased movement leaders’ urgency and energy. By supporting those leaders and organizations, even funders working on the local level alone can be more assured of their long-term impact. As conservative advocacy funders have long known, the movement lives on even if local progress falters.
Kresge’s intentional efforts to weave together the local and the national, though they’re in their formative stages, seem promising in their attention to long-term, values-driven advocacy infrastructure. They also appear sensitive to the need for grantees, not funders, to determine the parameters and direction of movement work.
“A lot of grantees do a lot of things that we can’t do, and maybe even wouldn’t do, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t support them,” Rapson said. “The real game is building community capacity to rebuild policy, and the words [grantees] attach to it or the tactical strategies they attach to it are less important to us than building the musculature of the movement.”
