A behind-the-scenes look into thirty years of unlikely partnerships, unique collaborations, varied financial tools, and bold bets led by The Kresge Foundation to catalyze a sustainable and equitable recovery for Detroit and all of its residents.
“…the story of one major American foundation finding its way in the modern landscape of foundations and of how, with many partners, it could 'promote human progress' in its home of Detroit.”
For close to fifty years, Detroit has held a peculiar fascination for American philanthropy. The prospect of reversing a steep and accelerating decline, a cause at once tantalizing and forbidding, has drawn a number of foundations into repeated, often unsatisfying, efforts at novel civic[1] philanthropic initiatives there. Like Kafka’s castle, the city’s unique history of triumphs and crises has loomed on the philanthropic horizon as alluring yet stubbornly impenetrable.
Millions of charitable dollars have been ventured to various ends in Detroit, including education reform, the arts, regional cooperation, nutrition and health, neighborhood redevelopment, economic revitalization, juvenile justice, and many others. Some of these contributed to improvements here and there, though for most of this history only a very few led to any fundamental shift in conditions that average Detroiters would experience. Several efforts flared and sputtered without leaving much of a trace….
Perennially wary of political entanglements and public controversy, funders not rooted in the city tended for decades to focus their projects narrowly, concentrating on just one or two aspects of urban life, such as health or urban planning or after-school programs…
Tony Proscio is associate director of the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society at Duke University and a consultant to foundations and major nonprofit organizations on strategic planning and evaluation. He is co-author, with Paul S. Grogan, of Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Neighborhood Revival (Westview Press 2000), and author of Becoming What We Can Be: Stories of Community Development in Washington, DC (LISC, 2012). A Detroit native, he has held executive positions in New York State and City government and in the 1990s was associate editor of The Miami Herald.
Myron Farber is an award-winning former investigative reporter for The New York Times. From 2001 to 2014, he conducted oral histories for Columbia University on the 9/11 attack, capital punishment, the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and American philanthropy. Educated at the University of Maryland and Northwestern University, he has contributed to Vanity Fair and Smithsonian magazines and is the author of Somebody is Lying: The Story of Dr. X.
John Gallagher is a veteran journalist who covered urban and economic redevelopment efforts in Michigan and Detroit as a Detroit Free Press reporter and columnist for more than thirty years. His book Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City was named by the Huffington Post as among the best social and political books of 2010. He also authored Yamasaki in Detroit: A Search for Serenity, a biography of architect Minoru Yamasaki, and coauthored AIA Detroit: The American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit Architecture.
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