Rip Rapson has served since 2006 as president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, which seeks to improve the economic, social, cultural and environmental conditions of urban life, including in Kresge’s hometown of Detroit.

After graduating from Pomona College, Rapson began his career as a legislative assistant to U.S. Representative Don Fraser, where among other responsibilities, he oversaw development and passage of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1978, which brought full wilderness protection to the million-acre lake country of northern Minnesota.

He subsequently received his law degree from Columbia University Law School and returned to Minneapolis to practice law with Leonard, Street and Deinard, where he specialized in construction and intellectual property law and provided pro bono services to environmental, mental health, publishing, and arts and culture nonprofit organizations.

Rapson was appointed deputy mayor of Minneapolis in 1989. During his tenure, he designed a 20-year, $400 million effort to strengthen the city’s neighborhoods, redesigned the municipal budgeting process, prepared the Mayor’s State of the City, State of the Environment, and Budget addresses, and oversaw initiatives to support families and children.

After an unsuccessful run for Mayor, Rapson was named a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota, where he led a six-year interdisciplinary project focused on aging first-ring suburbs.

In 1999, Rapson was selected to serve as the third president of the McKnight Foundation. During his six-year tenure, McKnight became a national philanthropic leader in early childhood development, metropolitan growth, arts and culture, open space protection, and wind energy. He also launched the Itasca Project, a private sector-led effort to develop a comprehensive regional business agenda for the Twin Cities.

Rapson was selected to be the third president of the Kresge Foundation in 2006. During his tenure at Kresge, he has led the foundation to adopt an array of grantmaking and investing tools to improve the economic, social, cultural, and environmental conditions of urban life, with a particular emphasis on arts and culture, education, environment, health, human services and community development in Kresge’s hometown of Detroit.

Nationally, Rapson has strengthened the philanthropic sector’s role through convening, collaborating, and supplementing community development activities in cities across the country. In Detroit, Rapson and the foundation provided central support to the “Grand Bargain,” an unprecedented partnership between the philanthropic community, city pensioners, the State of Michigan and the Detroit Institute of Arts, to propel the City of Detroit’s successful emergence from municipal bankruptcy in 2014.

With experiences in the public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors, Rapson has developed an approach to civic problem-solving that emphasizes collective responsibility across sectors and integrative, interdisciplinary approaches.