_{The Hold and Build Imperative: Kresge’s Path Through Disruption}

The philanthropic sector in 2025 found itself navigating a landscape pocked by federal funding freezes and families torn apart in ICE raids . . . a shredding of the social safety net and cities under siege by armed forces . . . regulatory pullbacks and attacks on free speech . . . the ascendency of artificial intelligence and the upending of systems in which we have operated for decades.

It was at once disruptive, unsettling, and profoundly troubling. But it was also not the first time our sector—and Kresge—has had to adapt to rapid and disturbing change.

When I arrived at Kresge twenty years ago, it had become clear that the foundation’s long-standing reliance on capital challenge grantmaking had reached its natural limits of efficacy. Over the next few years, we pivoted to develop and deploy a more varied and multi-layered suite of tools, ultimately rooting our work in advancing equity and opportunity in American cities.

That diversification became essential as our hometown of Detroit was soon thereafter buffeted by the convergence of the federal economic recession of 2008, the bankruptcies of the automotive industry, the housing foreclosure crisis, and an implosion of the city’s municipal leadership. All leading to the declaration of municipal bankruptcy—pretty much the definition of an existential crisis for Detroit.

Kresge played an essential role in assembling multiple civic and philanthropic actors to both meet the pre-bankruptcy challenges and raise the capital necessary for the federal bankruptcy court to formulate the “Grand Bargain,” which resolved the bankruptcy by protecting the fundamental integrity of city pensions and prevented the fire-sale of the holdings of the Detroit Institute of Arts. That resolution enabled the city to emerge with a clean balance sheet and an optimism to approach its own resurgence.  

That was 2013. The shocks of 2020 were a completely different creature, no less existential. The COVID-19 pandemic tested civic society’s capacity to combine innovation and speed in an environment wracked by pain, suffering, and ideological fragmentation. The murder of George Floyd and the subsequent demonstrations of racial reckoning tested quite different values and behaviors, giving rise to a clarified imperative of racial justice.

Philanthropy leaned into both. Kresge deployed more than $19 million in grants and social investments to the pandemic response, while also adding flexibility to existing grants so that partners could redirect resources to meet urgent community needs. And we granted $30 million in support of Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous-led organizations across our focus cities of Detroit, Memphis, Fresno and New Orleans.

This kind of rapid, trust-based response—loosening reporting requirements, converting restricted grants to general operating support, accelerating disbursements, putting dollars directly in the hands of communities that needed the resources the most—proved essential for keeping community-based nonprofits afloat after revenue streams collapsed.

That was then, and this is now. The crises have taken multiple forms, but they too held enormous potential to disrupt fundamentally and in an enduring way the trajectories of the kind of human-centered, equitable progress to which philanthropies like Kresge are so deeply committed.

As in the past, the question is how best to balance the protection and preservation of those civic qualities we most value with the need to reimagine and rebuild new systems that best serve our future.  

The Dual Imperative

The tendency to “hold constant”—to honor our commitments, protect our grantees, and weather the storm—is a powerful impulse within the philanthropic sector, and it comes from a place of wisdom, care, and privilege. It is absolutely necessary; but it is not sufficient. It needs to be accompanied by a willingness to see new possibilities—to “build.”

As the policies, behaviors, and norms of each of the systems in which Kresge works—education, health, community development, environmental resilience, human services, arts and culture—are being upended, transformed, and deconstructed, there accordingly emerges a dual imperative: to hold and to build.

Protecting Progress and Possibility

Holding means actively defending the infrastructure of opportunity to which we have contributed, such as the community development financial institutions that provide capital in delicate or unproven markets, the arts and culture organizations that anchor neighborhood identity, or the public health systems working to eliminate disparities.

It means protecting the civic infrastructure that enables democracy itself—the nonprofit organizations, community leaders, and cross-sector collaborations that give voice to those historically excluded from decision-making.  

It means deepening our investments in the communities where we’ve made deep, long-term commitments even as political and economic winds shift.

It means rejecting cynicism and disengagement by holding space for the possibility of meaningful change and the recognition that enduring change requires staying power.

The Next Turn of the Wheel

Even as we protect what we’ve built, however, we must expand our aperture of aspiration and begin to imagine what comes next.

How does higher education adjust in the face of challenges to received assumptions about the value of a college degree? How can public health be safeguarded when its most fundamental premises of equitable access are undermined? How can arts and culture fortify a community’s values of identity and belonging? How can models of community-based climate resilience persist and grow in the face of a hostile federal policy environment?

Answering these and other questions affecting the stability, health, and vitality of America’s cities may, in some cases, involve the adaptation of existing systems to be more responsive and nimble. In others, it may entail radical restructuring. And in others yet, it may require thoroughgoing reinvention.

Philanthropy is uniquely equipped to do all three.

• We can forge new partnerships that bring together unlikely allies around shared purpose. We need to cast a net across sectors, disciplines, and even ideologies that share a commitment to pragmatic problem-solving.

• We can invest in emerging leaders and organizations that understand this moment in ways we may not. We need to work across generations to blend experience and idealism, a comfort with accelerated incrementalism and a sense of untampered urgency.

• We can experiment with different channels of capital deployment. We need to reverse-engineer our solution-sets—recognizing that grants and loans, convening and communications, strengthened networks and improved data may all play a role in varying combinations in coming at a challenge.

What This Means for Kresge

It was never in doubt that Kresge would maintain our core commitments to expand equity and opportunity for low-income people in America’s cities. Full stop. No mincing words or hiding behind less potent vocabulary.  

The imperative to both Hold and Build gives deeper meaning to that commitment.

We will stand with our grantees, our borrowers, and our community partners while excavating ways in which our national and place-based disciplines can evolve to remain relevant and effective.

We will sharpen our place-based work in Detroit, Memphis, New Orleans, and Fresno, recognizing that it is in cities like these that the changes in the federal policy environment will fall most directly, and harmfully.

We will expand our capacity to transcend traditional boundaries – across sectors and among disciplines . . . between the immediately urgent and the more nuanced ambiguity of the long-term.

We will underscore selectively, but forcefully, the values and principles that guide our work with particular emphasis on equity, community problem-solving capacity, and the integrity of democratic participation.

And we will invest in our own organizational capacity to navigate complexity, to learn quickly, and to adapt without losing our core identity.  

There will always be tension between protecting what we’ve built and creating what must come next. The question is whether we can hold that tension creatively, using it to generate new possibilities rather than allowing it to paralyze us.

For decades, philanthropy has operated with certain assumptions about its place in the social change ecosystem—as catalyst, as risk-taker, as bridge-builder, as patient capital provider.

It is the healthy evolution of those roles that equip philanthropy to rise to the challenges of this moment.

When others retreat, we can continue to catalyze through creativity . . .

When a blanket of caution substitutes for courage, we can take risks commensurate with the magnitude of the hardships washing over our communities . . .

When polarization is the default position, we can foster what Robert Putnam terms bridging social capital . . .

And when traditional resource channels become untenably constricted, we can carve new ones capable of moving capital the last mile to those in greatest need.

We know that the path forward requires equal amounts of courage and humility, of conviction and flexibility. That was true even in less volatile and insidious times. But it takes on a crystalline clarity today. Hold and build is exactly what we’ll do.

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