The Gyroscope of Change: Community, Constancy and Forward Energy

I suppose it is true that – at any moment – an organization like Kresge should be looking both back and forward. But it is particularly true for us as we contemplate our centennial in 2024. It affords the opportunity to reflect on what we’ve learned and accomplished with our grantees and partners through relationships that stretch back for years. It carries the imperative of thinking about how we carry those lessons into the future.

The Kresge Foundation operates in an interesting zone of creative tension. On one hand, we value the rootedness that accompanies long-term commitments to places, disciplines and ways of working. On the other hand, we fully embrace the need continually to adapt to changing external circumstances, to take risks commensurate with the magnitude of the challenges at which we take aim and to excavate more deeply how best to identify and overcome structural barriers to economic opportunity and racial equity.

Reconciling that tension was never more clearly in evidence than when we undertook in 2006 to shift away from our decades-long, singular reliance on capital challenge grants. It was an exercise in “accelerated gradualism.” Within a very few years, we were no longer making that form of grants, but we had to pace our change, as we constructed the competencies of wielding new tools, including diverse forms of capital, convening power, network building, strategic communications, funds for research and supports for advocacy. That path moved us steadily toward refining our purpose as expanding structures of equity and opportunity in America’s cities.

As we did, it became clear that reconciling received practices and assumptions with future adaptability would become an enduring characteristic of the foundation. To work in cities is an exercise in constantly spinning fluidity. To confront inequity and injustice is an exercise in tempering the urgency of the call with a recognition of the long-term and often incremental nature of dismantling systems that impede progress. Like a gyroscope moving along a wire: a constant spinning on a defined axis combined with a continuing forward energy.

As we look forward, the manifestations of these tensions come in all shapes and sizes. As I look back on the year, though, three surface with particular force and frequency.

First, lived expertise versus technical knowledge.

For too long, government officials and other decision-makers turned to trained experts – lawyers, engineers, urban planners – to solve problems for marginalized people. Those solutions were often impeccable on paper yet failed in practice, because they did not take into account the voices of the real experts: the people themselves, who might not have been specialists in transportation planning or curriculum design or economic development, but who knew exactly what made their lives difficult. It is now commonplace in philanthropy and the nonprofit sector to talk about working with, rather than for, communities and ensuring their voices, ideas and experiences are integrated into discussion of problems and solutions. We have gotten much better at listening.

But the tension isn’t fully resolved because listening isn’t enough. We need something more like translation into action and continual dialogue across levels of government. In our work in Detroit and elsewhere, Kresge teams are figuring out the wiring so that federal dollars can move with greater ease to community organizations and into small businesses. These groups can (and must) act as essential delivery mechanisms for public policy, especially for the waterfall of funds and programs in recent bills like ARPA, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Time and again, we see that rules and processes still are not right-sized for or responsive to the capacities of small organizations closest to communities.

It is also, still, very difficult to reverse engineer federal policy so that promising new ways of working locally influence federal regulations and policies in real time. Going forward, our challenge is to create a capillary movement from neighborhood to city hall to state capitols to federal agencies so that lived expertise and technical expertise are both brought to bear at every level of decision-making.

Second, philanthropic power versus democratic accountability.

Philanthropy has the power to both backstop local government capacity and fund a community agenda that may be very different from that of elected officials. We support both community leaders and some of the institutions and administrations that they criticize fiercely. That’s not hypocrisy, it’s by design. Investing across sectors means sometimes inserting ourselves amidst conflicting imperatives — between business and government, between neighborhoods and city hall and between people who want incremental change and those who want to wipe the slate clean. (Sometimes the same people want the former in one situation and the latter in another.) It makes for difficult conversations with grantee partners in all sectors, particularly around the uses of power and the pace of change.

There is another way that philanthropy works in tension with democratic accountability. Kresge and its philanthropic peers have a point of view, which we pursue to the best of our ability, without many structural constraints. When we take a seat at the table of civic leadership, who is going to tell us to leave? Our bold aspirations have to be married to a carefully calibrated approach. We can be aggressive when challenging institutions with equal or more economic, social and political power than we have, but we must be humble when we show up in the communities that we purport to serve and support.

As former mayor and HUD secretary Henry Cisneros has admonished, “If philanthropy is going to assert that they’re doing the most important things for the society, then they need to let the society have a voice in some of those priorities.” Philanthropy’s accomplishments are not our own. They are inextricably tied to the work and creativity of our partners, and whatever legitimacy we have comes from them, not from our impressive endowments.

Third, incremental versus rapid or discontinuous change.

Or, the recurring challenge of accelerated gradualism. Inside and outside Kresge, the question of whether change should happen slowly over time or in rapid bursts is insistent. People are frustrated by the slow pace of change and dismiss the counsel of patience for a reason. Our Board Chair, Cecilia Muñoz, reminded me, “Incrementalism wasn’t incremental for the people left behind. It was nothing for the people left behind.”