2021 Kresge Annual Report Letter

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If 2020 was the year that cities were tried and tested – as racial and economic inequities were laid bare by the pandemic and an ever-deepening racial justice movement – then 2021 was the year when repair, and possibly something larger and more powerful, began. It was a year when Kresge’s long-term investment in civic renewal in America’s cities met a once-in-a-lifetime injection of cash from the federal government into local communities – creating hope for rebound and building afresh in an equitable manner.

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We at the Kresge Foundation were prepared for this shift. We have invested deeply in civic reimagination, renewal, and repair, not just in 2021 but through local and national crisis and recovery cycles that go back more than a decade. We have long sought to construct solution sets that benefit exactly the kind of communities and populations with low wealth that the federal government’s recent spending initiatives have prioritized. We have explored ways to set the terms of engagement for the public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors to work in collective effort.

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“There needs to be a fundamental shift in how decisions are made about where the [public] funds go and how complex processes of implementation can be designed to ensure the funds reach those who most need and benefit from them.”

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Some of the lessons we’ve learned through these efforts are reflected in this 2021 Kresge Annual Report.

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First, federal funds, by themselves, are not transformative. The simplest way to spend federal funds, whether one-time infusions like ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) or infrastructure monies or ongoing flows like Community Development Block Grants, is through streams and systems that result in more of the same, just bigger, or faster. To change that calculus, there needs to be a fundamental shift in how decisions are made about where the funds go and how complex processes of implementation can be designed to ensure the funds reach those who most need and benefit from them. Kresge has, accordingly, worked with local partners to enhance the capacity of communities to act, speak up, organize, and implement.

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Second, federal funds work best when they are braided with multiple forms of capital into a financial solution that outlasts the duration of any particular spending bill or the priorities of any particular administration. Again, this requires a much broader and deeper understanding of community goals and systems of accountability to make sure that the benefits of these blended capital stacks are pulled down fully to the neighborhood and community level.

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Although the upheavals, crises, and opportunities of the past years couldn’t have been predicted, the need for civic resilience could. A resilience that eschews fixed and impermeable public sector policies and practices in favor of approaches that permit a community to absorb shocks and dislocations, to re-tool implementation mechanisms, and to identify adaptive pathways forward.

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The opportunity in front of us is to build on that kind of re-imagination to move beyond “repair.” Not, to be sure, “beyond repair” in the sense of something being past salvaging, fit only to be discarded. But instead in the sense of crossing the frontier of restoration and repair to build what we have long needed but have yet to achieve.

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Kresge believes, now more than ever, that we must dedicate ourselves to fortifying a sustained racial justice movement; building new capital structures for community wealth building and finance; investing in anchors of complete neighborhoods; supporting the arts and culture sector as the glue of social cohesion in cities; re-imagining the public health system amid an ongoing pandemic; and helping to integrate equity into the very fabric of local government policy and practice with local-born solutions that appear to be working their way up to the federal government. This is all beyond “repair” – it is regeneration – creating new relationships, partnerships, and systems to deliver qualitatively different outcomes. It will take time, we know. We’ve invested time, energy, and capital to arrive at this moment and we will continue to do so. I hope you will join us.