Good evening, everyone:

Among the many impressive things that have animated the terrific PathBreakers podcast series (with huge thanks to Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett, as hosts, and Krista Jahnke as editor-in-chief) is the clarity about the formative role visionary nonprofit leaders have played – must play – in ensuring comprehensive and effective municipal problem-solving.

Whether Elizabeth Moje corralling the different disciplinary schools at the University of Michigan to form an integrated engineering and social justice, student-centered curriculum on the Marygrove campus . . . or Mona Hanna mobilizing citizens to confront and remedy the harms of the Flint Water Crisis or to promote the health and well-being of pregnant women and new moms . . . or Marcia Black preserving the legacies and stories of Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood . . .  or Richard Burrell working hand-in-glove with residents of Fresno’s Parkside neighborhood to promote community health and healing . . .  or the powerfully transformative work of the other eight visionary community leaders . . . each story conveys the extent to which we need to celebrate the distributive leadership structures that are essential to community well-being, vitality, and sustainability.

This is a conclusion reached as well by a commentary that Elwood Hopkins recently sent me about how Los Angeles is struggling to face down a suite of challenges that would test the leadership capacities of any city: the Palisades fires that destroyed Altadena, the occupation of downtown by federal forces, the persistent challenges of homelessness, the pressures attendant to hosting the upcoming Olympic games, and others.

Although it’s easy to dismiss the struggles of Los Angeles as a world apart from the challenges faced by Detroit or Memphis or New Orleans or even LA’s California-sister Fresno, the themes have striking resonance in all those places.

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Written by Jim Newton for the nonprofit publication CalMatters, the story opens with the statement:

Plenty of Angelenos these days complain about what they see as the city’s lack of leadership, a critique that often is directed at the city’s mayor and council. That’s understandable in one sense — these are trying times, especially in big cities — but it’s poorly focused in Los Angeles, where history and custom suggest that what’s lacking is not necessarily political authority but civic leadership.

The article notes that although there is some validity to the argument that the city’s political leadership has not risen effectively to the moment, the more balanced assessment is that city officials have been more effective than is generally acknowledged. In either event, however, Newton contends that the real point is that there has been an erosion in the mechanisms through which public, private, nonprofit, and community leadership came together to carry a unified civic agenda.

Newton writes:

It was not that long ago that the city’s mayor was just one source of influence in this notoriously diffuse civic culture. The Committee of 25, a loose but powerful collection of civic leaders, once exercised quiet leadership over local affairs . . . marshaling their efforts on behalf of city priorities, from municipal bond measures to the construction of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The committee had its failings — it was almost entirely the domain of white, Protestant men, for one thing — but it complemented the mayor and council as a source of leadership. [And] with the committee’s eventual demise, other notable individuals rose to fill the vacuum [with each having their own standing and regard, independent of City Hall.

That’s what is absent in Los Angeles today. Where the city’s political leadership has its stumbles and failings, its civic leadership is altogether missing in action. . . . Political leadership and civic leadership are different things. Los Angeles has the former, but it needs much more of the latter.

I dwell on all of this because I suspect the challenge of civic leadership in Los Angeles is a harbinger of what other cities will have to face with intentionality and skill as they confront the pressures, complexities, and harms that will cascade with accelerating force from the current policy environment. City Halls everywhere will be asked to manage with less . . . find work-arounds to essential services no longer supported by federal dollars . . . fend off Hunger Games scenarios in which city priorities have to compete with one another to draw down State block grant funds . . . invent new mechanisms to safeguard equity and justice.

I believe that Detroit has modeled exactly the kind of cross-sectoral and far-sighted civic leadership that cities will need going forward. To be sure, that leadership must be framed and guided by our elected representatives. But our elected representatives in Detroit have shown an openness to collaboration with people and organizations beyond the fence-lines of government. They have demonstrated an ability to situate – sympathetically and effectively – the mandates of their election certificates alongside the agendas, energies, and wisdom of other civic leaders, recognizing that those mandates require for their activation, sustainability, and fortification corporate leaders, philanthropy, and citizens well-organized where they live.

It is Kresge’s commitment to contribute to this way of working in times good and bad – and not just in Detroit, but in all the cities in which we work.

Rip

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