Good Friday afternoon, everyone:

Next Thursday and Friday is Detroit Homecoming – the tenth anniversary of the gathering that seeks to draw former Detroiters back to the city to witness the steps the city continues to make toward long-term vitality, sustainability, and health.

Our journalistic colleague extraordinaire, John Gallagher, was asked by the originators of the event (Mary Kramer of Crains and Jim Hayes, a former journalist himself) to create a written volume describing the arc of Homecoming’s evolution. John asked if I would contribute an introductory piece. With the invaluable help of Kim Herron, I wrote the following, which I thought you might like to see:

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Cities thrive on connections, on their density of interwoven histories, needs, desires, challenges, opportunities, energies … and ideas. Conversely, cities suffer and shrivel if isolated from the outside and disconnected within.

Crain’s Detroit Homecoming has been a triumphant proof point of the power of connection. That is the story of its genesis, the key to its success, and the promise of its future relevance. If you’ve been there, you’ve felt it. The Kresge Foundation was fortunate to be there for the first connective spark, and we remain proud to be among many others who have tended this hearth as the idea took hold in the years since.

It’s important to remember what else was happening in Detroit during the summer of 2013 when the initial concept for Homecoming was conceived.

Many of us in the nonprofit,  civic, and business realms had been united for years in a renewed effort to build on the city’s nodes of resilience and move into an era of revival.

That was evident for all to see in the first stages of the Detroit RiverWalk, a new public waterfront that had previously been an inaccessible, industrial wasteland. It was increasingly apparent as efforts began to revive the central business district, bring residential vitality to Midtown and build a Woodward Corridor streetcar line as a downpayment for regional mass transit. And it was even discernable as the city’s arts and culture, food, and neighborhood actors pioneered efforts to explore how blighted and abandoned parcels might be reimagined as vibrant productive landscapes.

By that inaugural year of Homecoming, the business community had quickly left its defensive crouch. Downtown rapidly transformed from ghost town to boom town.

Meanwhile, we were all but consumed that summer by crisis, which was conveyed in bold headlines: The city of Detroit was gathering speed in a downhill slide to insolvency. Months of foreshadowing culminated in the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in U.S. history. Sadly, it remains the most-covered Detroit news story of this century.

So, there we were, working to keep our existing initiatives moving forward while working frantically behind the scenes to address the bankruptcy. While the public was consumed with the direness of the city’s precarity, we were cobbling together the beginnings of a solution through a $370 million pool - nicknamed “The Grand Bargain” – which was funded by 13 foundations

During one of our many difficult in-house Kresge meetings about the situation, Laura Trudeau, who led Kresge’s Detroit grantmaking at the time, told me of a connection she’d made with Jim Hayes. Having held the title of publisher at Fortune magazine and with other prestigious career posts, Jim was circling back to seek a supportive role in a troubled city where he’d worked for a decade in his early career. He’d never let the city out of his heart or out of his sight. At the end of a now legendary lunch meeting seeking Laura’s thoughts on his quest, Jim had immediately taken to her impromptu suggestion for a “homecoming”: inviting Detroit expatriates who made successful careers elsewhere back to their hometown, where many still felt a sense of nostalgia.

With Crain’s Detroit publisher Mary Kramer and then Crain Communications President Keith Crain giving Jim an institutional base to work from, Kresge formally signed on in support. I joined the planning committee and watched with admiration as this intriguing idea morphed into a living, breathing thing.

By the fall, as the plans for the Detroit Homecoming had started to take shape, the work toward the Grand Bargain became public. The negotiations and jockeying in U.S. Bankruptcy Court would remain fraught for another 12 months until the Grand Bargain was confirmed as a central tenet of the plan of adjustment that ended the saga.

The negotiated settlement that ended the bankruptcy prevented the City of Detroit from being torn apart by a decade of litigation – over the sanctity of public pensions, over the ownership of the Detroit of Institute’s art collection, over the city’s ability to balance its financial books.   In place of that legal purgatory, Detroit now had a clean balance sheet,  and the community had a renewed civic spirit. The Grand Bargain became our largest demonstration that this city can unite around challenges, and it stands as one of the most remarkable transformations of urban America to-date.

It is near-miraculous in hindsight, but the Homecoming did in fact shape despite the existential path the city was traveling. Its import is almost impossible to overstate: it meant that we could bring the first group of expats to a Detroit of possibilities,  connecting them not to a city that needed to be saved, but to a city that was saving itself and had roles for them to participate as investors and supporters.

Since first hearing of the Homecoming idea from Laura those years ago, I’ve proudly participated as an opening keynote, as a panelist, and as an interlocutor with the likes of economist and presidential confidante, Gene Sperling . . . or the Bloomberg executive Dan Doctoroff . . .  or the economist and environmental visionary Jeffrey Sachs . . . .  or the then newly-appointed president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Raj Shah.

With other Kresge colleagues, I’ve shared our view of the mosaic of efforts moving Detroit forward, and we’ve called attention to seminal bodies of  work like our efforts to revive the Livernois-McNichols neighborhoods in Northwest Detroit and to support the Marygrove Conservancy, a one-of-a-kind cradle-to-career campus connecting the work of the University of Michigan, Detroit Public Schools Community District, and early education provider Starfish Family Services.

But whether on the stage or in the audience, I’ve found the Detroit Homecoming energy is at once palpable and a little hard to explain.

On one hand, the challenges continue to be daunting, at times seemingly intractable. We are a city of which one-third of our population lives in poverty. We are a city where the successes of downtown and the Woodward Corridor and Corktown, for instance, have yet to radiate fully into the neighborhoods. We are a city that continues to wrestle with the interlocking challenges of educational underachievement, health disparities, social service underfunding, transportation shortcomings, and others.

On the other hand, however, this Detroit diaspora of expats has taken on a sense of itself as a prime force in the Detroit-progress mosaic. That’s why we need expats to continue to bring not just cold, hard capital– beyond the estimated $1 billion to date – but also their passion, problem-smashing skills, and expertise. We need both to set the table for projects that move our imagination and souls.

We need expats to continue showing up,  together.

Rip

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