At the onset of COVID, I felt it important to stay connected with our staff and trustees by writing a note each night of the workweek. It was a time in which we all had to adapt, improvise, and tap into new sources of optimism, pragmatism, and inner reflection in order to move forward with our lives. There is no question that that was a poor substitute for taking the temperature of Kresge culture through pop-in conversations at someone’s desk or office, formal meetings, or serendipitous encounters in the hallway. But I have come to believe they served a purpose while we were working at home and even after we returned to the office two days a week.

So now, some five years on, I’ve continued to write them, every night.

They give me the sense of “talking” with the Kresge community every night, furnishing one small antidote to the erosion of shared culture and emotional connection that we inevitably feel when we aren’t seeing one another each day.

They provide a vehicle to try to capture, make sense of, and situate our work in some of the shifting moods and larger issues of the world around us – whether Indigenous rights, voter suppression, violence against people of color, environmental stewardship, the passing of larger-than-life figures, COVID, economic disparities, racial reckoning, Detroit, the power of arts and culture, and so many others.

And they afford a way of mixing some lightness, humor, and irony into the serious and difficult issues we face daily. If the only communications the organization received from me were the kind of substantial messages essential to our work, they take on a certain tone and weight commensurate with the subject. I’ve accordingly thought that there might be value in injecting the curious, irreverent, or offbeat into the overwhelming heaviness of what we’ve all experienced over the last several years.