The Kresge Foundation

08/27/2026

Thank you to Kresge’s 2026 summer interns for your curiosity, intelligence and contributions throughout the summer. Your questions, ideas and commitment to community strengthened our work across the foundation. Congratulations on all you accomplished. We’re grateful you spent your summer with us and look forward to seeing where your paths lead.

Thank you to:
Adiah Bailey, American Cities Program (🌹 𝓐𝓭𝓲𝓪𝓱 𝓑𝓪𝓲𝓵𝓮𝔂); Nicole Chen, Information Technology (Nicoleee); Peyton Davis, Investment Office (Peyton Davis); Oona Demko, Legal; Sam Galvan, Education Program (sam

08/26/2026

Imagine getting a raise at work — and ending up worse because of it. What if the safety net stopped penalizing financial progress? The Martha O'Bryan Center is proving it can. The phenomenon known as the benefits cliff is a flaw in America's safety net that punishes the exact progress it's meant to support. When income rises even modestly, families can lose SNAP, Medicaid or childcare subsidies worth far more than the raise.

“We envision a public benefits system that stimulates career advancement and economic mobility, ultimately strengthening communities and the American economy.” — Kent Miller, Martha O'Bryan Center CEO

Learn how a benefits cliff traps families — and how one Nashville organization built a national blueprint to fix it: https://annualreport2025.kresge.org/martha-obryan-center/

08/24/2026

"Once people experience that power, they want more. They know they deserve it and they know they can do it." — Erik Takesh*ta, Director, Culture & Community Power Fund

That's the philosophy behind every grant this fund makes: invest not just in what communities build, but in how they build it. In a year of rising hostility toward immigrants and refugees, The Culture & Community Power Fund invested just under $1 million in the communities under pressure — supporting them to organize, create and lead with culture at the center.

The Fund supports a network of grassroots organizations & initiatives using culture to shape the future of their communities, including the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans, the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, the Boston Ujima Project in Boston, the Center for Transforming Communities in Memphis, the Northend Christian CDC in Detroit and the The Village of Arts and Humanities in Memphis.

08/24/2026

I've been thinking about what sets the Obama Presidential Center apart from the centers that came before it. The Kresge Foundation has been engaged with the Center and its work, and that vantage point has sharpened a few observations worth sharing.

Start with governance. Most modern presidential libraries are run by the National Archives and Records Administration, which holds and manages the archival materials within the library itself. The Obama Center sits outside that system and is privately funded and operated. It manages the 19-acre site on which it sits, and it designs and carries out its own programming. That structural difference shapes everything downstream.

Then there's orientation. Yes, the Center reflects and celebrates the President's eight years in office. But its center of gravity points forward... Programming for young leaders... A branch of the Chicago Public Library... A basketball complex built around mentoring and community programs... The Foundation describes its role as a living institution meant to inspire, empower, and connect the next generation of leaders. The Carter Center reached in a similar direction. Few others did.

Location tells its own story. The Obamas chose the South Side neighborhood where Mrs. Obama grew up and where the President began his career. Their measure of success is how well the Center serves that neighborhood, a neighborhood that is a dense, majority-Black, historically-disinvested. Many of their predecessors chose differently, attaching their libraries to a college campus or an undeveloped suburban parcel. Those are gestures toward scholarship and commemoration. This is a commitment to become part of a neighborhood's fabric.

The programming carries the President's theme of hope, rooted in a call to civic action. Threaded throughout is the dual imperatives of community engagement in fostering place-based change in the host neighborhood and a focus on investing in individuals to become civic leaders able to translate ideals into action.

And art. Here the Center stands alone in its elevation of art as an integral expression of its mission. It is a formative forethought, not an incidental afterthought, to the architecture, the landscape, the relationship to community history. It comes at curation differently: the art is comprehensively imagined . . . integrated into the Center’s themes . . . reflective of the neighborhood’s economic, cultural, and artistic history . . . aspirational and hopeful.

The Center is cast in a very different mold from what went before. Kresge’s modest support is a recognition of the ideals that are propelling this extraordinary venture forward.

08/17/2026

Michigan's housing crisis is not just about supply. Wages and job location are major factors.

08/17/2026

When the federal administration changed in 2025, Just Solutions didn't scramble. It was ready. Just Solutions is a climate justice organization that had spent the second half of 2024 running scenario planning exercises — mapping out what a hostile federal landscape could look like and what the field would need in response. When that moment arrived, the guidance and relationships were already in place.

“Collective power is crucial in challenging circumstances, now more than ever. Climate touches everyone in different ways, yet mainstream solutions often do not do enough to center people. To build a powerful movement, we have to educate and engage people, especially those disenchanted or marginalized by politics, working with groups that are strong organizers and networked institutions, and most importantly, led by the community.” —
Aiko Schaefer, Just Solutions’ Executive Director

08/13/2026

In 2025, the Reinvestment Fund (Reinvestment Fund) launched the HBCU Brilliance Initiative, a transformational inaugural cohort of 11 institutions to address the systemic undercapitalization Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have long faced.

In this clip, from our annual report, Christina Alexis details how the organization held the line on progress, justice and equity amid multiple threats and challenges.

08/12/2026

Kresge American Cities Managing Director Chantel Rush Tebbe and I had the privilege of spending two days with an extraordinary cross-section of St. Louis civic, business, neighborhood, and philanthropic leaders. Invited by our grantee, Accelerator for America, and the St. Louis Community Foundation, we explored which lessons from Detroit’s journey over the past two decades—and from other American cities where we work — might be relevant to St. Louis.

St. Louis faces many challenges that echo early- to mid-2010s Detroit, including population loss, high downtown vacancy rates, and widespread and decades-long disinvestment in the traditional Black neighborhoods of North St. Louis. Like Detroit, St. Louis possesses remarkable assets: world-class institutions, committed civic leaders, strong philanthropic organizations, and deeply engaged residents. The challenge is not a lack of assets; it is aligning those assets behind a shared agenda and sustaining the discipline required to implement it over the long term.

A recurring theme throughout our conversations was the importance of collaboration. Detroit’s progress was never the result of any single project, institution, or sector. It depended on government, philanthropy, business, and community organizations finding ways, often imperfectly, to move in the same direction. St. Louis leaders repeatedly returned to this idea, acknowledging both the promise of greater alignment and the frustration of fragmented efforts, competing plans, and uneven implementation.

The visit reinforced something we have learned repeatedly: revitalization is not about individual projects. The larger goal is creating a quality of life that gives residents confidence in their city and a sense that they have a stake in its future.

St. Louis has work ahead, but it also has extraordinary potential. As an outsider, I was struck by the depth of talent, institutional strength, and civic commitment that were present for our conversations. If Detroit’s experience offers any lesson, it is that meaningful change is possible when communities commit to the long game, embrace shared responsibility, and align around a vision larger than any one organization or sector. I left St. Louis with a sense that a critical mass of leaders there understands exactly that and are eager to begin the work.

St. Louis leaders say unity can lead the city in the same direction as Detroit, a city that turned around declining population, mass vacancy and the largest municipal bankruptcy ever filed.

08/12/2026

VOTING IS NOW OPEN: The biggest economic wins in America's cities don't start with a ribbon cutting. They start years earlier — with land assembly, environmental remediation, patient capital, and building community trust. We've proposed a session for SXSW 2027 that digs into exactly that: "The New Infrastructure of Economic Development."

This session will explore the often-invisible groundwork that determines whether cities can compete for advanced manufacturing, technology and entrepreneurship — and how that groundwork can be laid equitably.

The conversation will bring together three leaders working across philanthropy, community development and land justice:

🔹 Mikeya Griffin, President & CEO, Rondo Community Land Trust
🔹 Lillian Kuri, President & CEO, Cleveland Foundation
🔹 Rip Rapson, President & CEO, The Kresge Foundation

Together, they'll draw on success stories from legacy cities to show why site readiness, neighborhood investment and community trust have become real competitive advantages — and how philanthropy, government, business and communities can align to unlock lasting opportunity.

Community voting is open now through August 23. If this is a conversation you want to see in Austin, we'd be grateful for your vote: https://bit.ly/4hqnqwV

08/11/2026

Kresge Education Program Managing Director William Moses has been honored with UNCF’s Impact Partner Award for extraordinary leadership and enduring commitment to advancing Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). A steadfast advocate for HBCUs, Moses has worked alongside institutional leaders, philanthropic organizations, policymakers and community partners to elevate the national profile of HBCUs.

The award coincided with the 20th anniversary of the UNCF Institute For Capacity Building, which works to strengthen the operational and financial health of member institutions. Kresge was one of the Institute’s first major philanthropic partners, backing a then-emerging idea: that lasting change in higher education requires investing not only in students, but in the institutions that educate them.

Congratulations Bill!

https://bit.ly/3TM7P0Z