Welcome everybody to a special episode of Path Breakers, a
podcast from the Kresge Foundation about what it takes
to cut through the noise and red tape and all of the obstacles to
progress. I'm Tracy Pearson and I work on
the communications team at the Kresge Foundation.
Hey Tracy, I'm Jamie Bennett, and I work at the intersections
of arts, culture, and equitable community development.
On this season of Path Breakers, we've been talking with
community leaders who are forging new ways forward and
solving urgent problems and creating new paradigms.
That's right. We've talked with people who
work in community organizing, finance and economics, arts and
culture, as well as public health, higher education, and
even environmental justice and public policy.
All of these folks are breaking paths in their communities
across the country. Places like Memphis, TN.
Fresno, CA as well as Oakland, CA.
New Orleans and Detroit. New York City.
Springfield, MA. Flint, MI.
LA, Atlanta, and today we're right here in my hometown of
metro Detroit. That's right, we're close to
Tracy's hometown. We're actually in Troy, MI
today, which is the current home of the Kresge Foundation topic
we're going to come back to at the end of the episode.
But Tracy, we're here today to talk with someone who, like,
breaks paths for the Path Breakers.
Yes, it is a pleasure to welcome my boss and the Kresge
Foundation President and CEO, RIP Robson.
He has been with the Foundation for almost or maybe more than 20
years now. RIP.
Almost, almost. 20 years. That's right.
Well, welcome, RIP, and thank you so much for being with us
today. Yes, thank you for being with us
on our special episode. It's a pleasure to be with you.
So today we're going to talk with you.
We thought we'd sort of start out by getting your take on the
path Breakers have Tracy and I've been doing this season.
What are the great stories that have been told?
We want to hear a little bit about your own journey, sort of
the ways, some of the ways that you've broken paths yourself.
And then we do, Spoiler Alert, have a big announcement coming
up at the end of the episode, which RIP is going to share
with. Us and RIP will not get out of
our wonderful, entertaining and hard hitting lightning round of
questions. So RIP, over the season we've
featured many different path Breakers who are creating all
sorts of bold and creative unique change across the
country. They're taking risks.
They are letting leaders follow their instincts for change and
being guided by community input. And so one of the things that I
wanted to ask you as the CEO of Kresge, you direct a pretty
significant amount of money, something like six, $160
million. Every year.
Every year in grants, what are you taking into consideration
when you make those decisions about the types of risk you
invest in, the types of leaders you invest in?
What are some of the things that the team collectively talks
about? Well, you've ticked off a lot of
them, Tracy. I mean, it is, it is courage, it
is integrity, it's values alignment with community, it's
predisposition to make sure that the community's voice is
reflected in in the work everyday, not just occasionally.
But one of the things I've been struck by as the podcasts have
rolled out is the extent to which each of these path
Breakers has had a relationship with another sector of
community. Some are pushing against or
working with the public sector. Some are trying to introduce the
private sector in different ways.
Some are trying to mobilize the nonprofit, the civil society
actors, in a very different way. And that I think in some ways is
a thread through all of them that they are trying to
understand that everything we do at community is interrelated and
there are complex sort of systems that sort of surround
everything we do. And so just working in one
dimension doesn't work very well.
And so each of our path Breakers, I think, has
understood that in very different ways and has tried to
stitch together a different kind of way of working that sort of
breaks through barriers that engages brought a much broader
sector of community than maybe just the people they serve
directly. But it's a, it's a fascinating
sort of fabric weaving exercise that these path Breakers do.
It's not just sort of hunkering down and doing one thing all the
time the same way. It's really trying to make sure
that the totality of of a community is recognized in the
kind of solutions that these folks are going at.
Yeah. I mean, $160 million a year,
almost 20 years, that's an awful lot of grants.
And when you think back across all of those, is there one that
you sort of stands out to you as one that was exactly the right
money at exactly the right time, that sort of blew up in a way
that even you and the program officers didn't expect?
Well, because I've known Jamie for so long, I'm not going to
answer that question quite that way.
I will it. I know it's fine.
It's. Fine.
But I do think that one of the things that has been so
remarkable over the course of the 20 years that I've been in
Christie is the extent to which philanthropy has changed.
In one dimension, it's moving an enormous number of dollars out
the door each day to to extraordinary folks.
But in another way, it's trying to understand what our roles and
our responsibilities are in the broader civil society.
And so whether it's making a grant to a nonprofit in Fresno
or whether it's commissioning research in San Antonio, or
whether it's pulling together a network of Human Services
providers across the country, every time you invest in people,
you're surprised. And so in some ways this kind of
strategic, which is an overused term, but it's sort of
intentional, purposeful, long term grant making is inviting
surprise and inviting something that you didn't expect.
But to be a little bit more specific, one of the most
obvious examples is the Marygrove project that Dean Moji
talked about in her podcast. But let me not use that one
because it it it was truly extraordinary in both its
conception and its execution. But the one I'd I'd point to is
something called Hope Starts here.
This was an effort we began A decade ago to try to take their
early steps in figuring out how to build an early childhood
development system that was a little bit more coherent, a
little bit more well resourced and a little bit more impactful
in the city of Detroit. So many kids in the city of
Detroit enter kindergarten not prepared to to go on, whether
that's emotionally or developmentally or
intellectually or otherwise. And so we joined with the
Kellogg Foundation to try to figure out what is it that the
community believes could be done that would augment the
opportunities for low income kids in the city of Detroit to
to get ready for kindergarten, but then put together a suite of
supports that would enable those kids to actually be successful
once they got to kindergarten. And so we spent a whole year
talking to community, trying to understand from parents or
providers or kids themselves what they might think would be
most appropriate, and then stitched together a framework.
So far, so good sort of classic philanthropic intention.
But then what happened is that we were able to grab private
sector folks, public sector folks, nonprofit sector folks,
and put together a consortium of folks who could actually create
sort of a delivery mechanism into the kind of aspiration that
we had identified at a community level.
So all of a sudden it became really important that the
facilities were healthful, they were safe, they were beautiful.
All of a sudden, it became important that the parents could
talk to one another and compare notes.
All of a sudden, it became really critical that the
providers could band together and work collectively for higher
wages. All of a sudden, we were able to
identify a policy agenda that might actually, actually push up
to the state when they had excess revenues that they could
then push back down to the early childhood system.
And in fact, 10 years on, that has been an enormous success.
There's still an enormous gap of opportunity and young people in
the city of Detroit, but we have made very concrete strides in
helping young people get ready for kindergarten and beyond.
I think, Tracy, if we sort of think back across all the
episodes, children is maybe the one topic that's come up in
every single conversation we've had.
That's true. There's that sort of Masai
wisdom that when 2 warriors greet each other, they sort of
ask how are the children? How are the children?
Because if the children are doing all right.
The society is doing all right, and if they're not doing all
right, we have work to do. Well, and Wendy Jackson of our
staff, who directs our Detroit work, has often said that at the
end of the day, the litmus of whether we've done our job well
or poorly is whether the children are better off.
It's wonderful having a young person in the city of Detroit
and all of the things you all have done, just not just with
hope starts here, but some of the our colleagues who who have
helped sort of implement different programs throughout
the city and neighborhoods. I want to ask you what do you
think is driving the change and how we approach the grant
dollars in the way in which we sort of allocate them and give
them out within cities? Maybe Tracy, it's a little bit
what I was describing earlier is it rather than sort of thinking
about grant dollars in sort of a siloed 1 dimensional way, I
think we are increasingly asking how an early childhood grant
matches up with a transportation grant, matches up with a housing
grant, matches up with an open space grant.
Because essentially what you want to do is grab the web hole.
You want to make sure that these places in Detroit are places
that parents and kids and elders want to live.
They want to make a life there. And you can't just do it in one
dimension. You've got to do it across
multiple dimensions. And so one of the the big
changes at Kresge over the last 10 or 15 years is the extent to
which we have each of our programs talk to one another
about whether they can't do joint grant making.
Can you get the arts and culture team to actually partner with
the Human Services team? Can you get the environment team
to partner with the health team? And I would say that probably 30
to 40% of our grants are now multi programmatic grants, just
recognizing the reality that people don't live their lives in
one dimension, they live their lives in complicated
relationship. So.
True. And you know, philanthropy is a
little bit of a niche thing, right?
I don't think 6 year old RIP raps and dreamed he would grow
up one day to, you know, lead a social impact investing in grant
making program in America's cities.
Yeah, it's possible. Well.
It's. Possible.
I'm guessing you wanted to be a firefighter.
You know What did you want? To be well, it would it
explained why I wore a suit when I was five years old that's.
Right, right. That's for your birth.
Tie that you were, that you were aware.
But we've spent some time with each of the path Breakers
talking about sort of their own origin story.
How did they arrive at doing the work they wanted to do?
And, you know, you are the son of an architect who went to law
school, worked in environmental justice.
We're deputy mayor of Minneapolis.
We're a mayoral candidate for Minneapolis.
But you ended up as President McKnight Foundation in Minnesota
and now President the Kresge Foundation.
When you sort of look back over that life, how, how did that
path come to be? How did you end up here, sitting
in this chair? Well, you know, in some ways,
Jamie, it was sort of less of a path than sort of a creative
serendipity. It was a series of experiences
and exposures and adjacencies to leadership that helped me
realize that in order to make social change, you need all of
the sectors pulling in the same direction.
And I thought, well, that's hard for the public sector to do,
right? It has an election certificate.
It has certain responsibilities back to community.
It's sort of circumscribed in its its realm of motion.
It's hard for the private sector to do.
They have quarterly earnings reports they've got to meet and
sort of short term values in in many cases hard for the academic
community, hard for the journalistic community.
And one of the things that was sort of interesting about my
increasing exposure to philanthropy was the extent to
which it could sort of shape shift.
Sometimes it would behave a little bit like the public
sector, and it would use lots of different tools to advance
social change. Sometimes it looked a little bit
more like an academic sector. So taking this Longview patient
capital, waiting forever to get stuff done too long so often
sometimes it it acted much more like the nonprofit sector, just
making sure its focus was on issues of equity and social
justice. And philanthropy has this rare
privilege of being able to sort of mix and match when the
circumstance requires. And sometimes we do act like a,
a different sector, But when you actually push all of that
together, it becomes a a very unusual sector if properly
deployed, because you can use capital, you can use convening,
you can take risks, you can take a long term view, you can take a
short term responsive view. And so I think after coming out
of public and private and nonprofit work, it just seemed
to me that the opportunities to pull all of that into a
different methodology of social change had real promise.
And that's what attracted me first to McKnight and then to
Kresge. And another theme that we've had
throughout sort of our conversations this season has
been unusual approaches to work. And there have been many
instances in these conversations where I am talking to someone or
interviewing someone. And I think to myself, how would
RIP draw this out in the picture?
Because there are many CE OS who are in the boardroom, they're in
their suits, they look wonderful and lovely.
But if you look over at RIP, sometimes when we're in big
meetings, he. He has.
He has his pen and you see him sort of moving this this, you
know, furiously and these creating sort of a masterpiece
based on what's sort of going on the dialogue in the room.
And I just wanted to ask you, how did you come to find
yourself in a place where you could sort of hear complex
issues and scenarios and then you take them to paper?
Well, it's interesting you would phrase it that way because some
some would ask why do you draw? And I think that misses the
point you just made. It's trying to take complexity
and distilling it into a form that can sort of serve as a
point of departure for a, a different kind of conversation.
You know, the, the actual origin story for this is, is pretty
clear. I, I have absolutely no artistic
talent. I remember coming home in 7th
grade. No, no, no.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, wait.
I came home in 7th grade with the, the, my sort of master
class in, in pencil drawing, which was a Turkey.
And my father took one look at it and he walked out of the
room. And this is one of the great
draftsman, architectural draftsman of the 20th century.
So I knew my, my future was not in that direction.
And so I really, I never did learn to draw.
I was never trained to draw, but I found myself one day in a
meeting at the Casey Foundation and the and the conversation was
just incoherently complex. It was 40 academics who
specialized in kids and kids policy trying to help the Casey
Foundation figure out what would how they could sort of retool
their programs to meet the full challenges of kids.
Any rate, after about 3 hours, I just got lost in the Peacock of
of the room, just people starting all of their knowledge.
And so I started doing this little sketch.
And after about 3 or 4 minutes of this shape kind of began to
emerge about how I thought the major themes were lining up and
the relationship among them. And Ralph Smith was then the
vice president of the Casey Foundation was running the
meeting, looked over and he said, what is that?
And I said, well, I just real, if I'm not, I'm not just
doodling. I'm just trying to make sense of
this conversation. And he, and he raised his hand
and he said, all right, we're going to take a break for 10
minutes. And I thought he's going to yell
at me for not paying enough attention to his meeting.
So he took the piece of paper and he went and made 40 copies
and brought it back and handed this piece of paper out, the
sort of schematic piece out. And the people around the room
were so offended. I mean, these were serious
academics and the idea that you could reduce their complexity to
this sort of simple diagram was blasphemy.
So anyway, the the meeting proceeded and it kind of it kind
of teed off of the drawing. And so Casey actually asked me
to continue doing this for them. They were developing a new
strategy and they wanted a way to sort of pictorially represent
it in a way that wasn't just all 40 page PowerPoints.
And so slowly, slowly, slowly, I began sort of drawing more and
more. And I had an enormous good
advantage of being at something called the Design Center in
Minneapolis, which was run by a really gifted illustrator drawer
conceptualizer guy named Bill Morris.
And Morris took this drawing that I had done for a Smith back
and he said, what is this? And I thought, here we go again.
And he said, well, let me, let me just show you a couple of
things that might make this more interesting.
And so he started giving me these little pointers about how
you can do clouds, or you can do arrows, or you can do 3
dimensional cross sections or whatever it was.
Any rate, make a very Long story short.
That began a process in which I increasingly felt comfortable
trying to take complex ideas and complex conversations and make
them a little bit more accessible, a little bit more
legible. And sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn't. They're almost never end
products in themselves. They are most always an
opportunity for people to look at a piece of paper and sort of
locate themselves in it or not, and then that becomes a point of
departure for a different kind of conversation.
Amazing. Before we I, I'm sure we want to
plug the book right? The RIP raps and drawn to
challenge book very important. But before we do that, can we go
back to your dad for a second? You and I once had a
conversation with your dad, who was the architect Ralph Rapsom,
and you said to me once that you thought he was a perfectly good
architect. You thought he was an
exceptional architect teacher, a teacher of other architects, but
you said he revolutionized the way that architects often did
renderings. Will you?
Do you remember what I'm talking?
Will you, will you tell this bit?
Because I think this is helpful insight.
My father came of age in the 1930s at Cranbrook where he had
of art and he had this incredible array of colleagues,
including Uriel Cernan and and others who who sort of helped
define the mid modern era. And they were all brilliant in
in their own way. But what dad was really good at
was drawing. And when he began his
architectural career, he started in a very conventional way with
a bunch of conventional firms and drew just like the rest of
them. He sort of drew in section and,
and what I think was expected at the time.
But he increasingly, as he developed his own style, started
populating his drawings with people.
And he took took drawings away from the sort of the frontal
section view and would take the camera up and look down or take
the camera sideways and look in and would show a woman hanging
clothes or a child playing on the grass or how people would
actually move through space. And I'll never forget, Jamie, I
was having a conversation with the great architect Cesar Pelle.
And Pelle taught first year architecture at Yale.
I was the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
And he, he said to me, your father, you know, revolutionized
drawing. And I said, really?
And he said, yeah, he is the first.
Person to really humanize architecture.
Every, all of the great architects, even Frank Lloyd
Wright, never put people in their drawings, and they
certainly never put people using the space in their drawings.
And your father did both. And he said, so I actually
consider his drawing of something called the Case Study
House, which was a 1940s project in California, to be the single
most important architectural drawing of the 20th century.
And I said, well, you say that to all the guys.
And he said, he said, he said, no, really.
He said when you look at you, when you look back at that time,
this was so unusual and it was so idiosyncratic that you always
knew that it was sort of a Ralph Rapson drawing and a Ralph
Rapson project, He said since then, others have copied it and
computers have populated drawings now with people for
quite a long time, but for a long time that was a highly
unusual act. That's amazing because it's a
standard now. Yes, it's, yeah, hard to
imagine, hard to imagine doing an architectural scheme now
without that in it. But in 1935, that was not what
was done. OK, very interesting.
Jamie first shared a little bit of that story with me and I was
like, how come Rick never told us this?
Is so. Interesting.
So thank you. Well, it's because none of that
talent was passed down. I wish I could claim some of it.
Right. Did you?
I I've never asked you this. What did you take from your
mother? The librarian.
Oh, thank you for asking. My mother was a librarian of the
Children's Collection at the University of Minnesota, The
Kerlin Collection, and the Kerlin Collection was known for
its books of children's illustration.
Also drawings. Also drawings.
And so she would bring me into her workplace and I would climb
up the stairs to the fifth floor, wherever it was.
And the minute you open the door, there were just these
stacks of books everywhere. And there were these drawers
that you could pull out and see the original drawings for Peter
Rabbit or something else. And it was just magical.
And so when, when she began collecting her own very small
collection of books, it, it was sort of the classics, but it was
much more books in which the drawings were really
extraordinary. And I, I just, I probably
learned to look at drawings before I learned to read.
I probably learned to read by the time I was in 8th grade.
But the, but the drawings had really sort of stuck with me
from a very early age. And again, it, it's the, the
sort of the ability in a way that sort of takes you out of a
paper reality into something else.
It sort of triggers a, a part of your brain that thinks about
ideas and stories and possibilities very differently.
My drawings clearly don't do that.
But I think there was sort of this impulse that there is more
beyond the just the, the written word.
There's more beyond the spoken word as a way of communicating
ideas to people. There's what you did, a drawing.
I can't remember the context, but you sort of drew the art and
culture ecosystem in Detroit and it involves sort of the Wilds,
the stuff that happens naturally there was like a greenhouse
element. What is the stuff that
philanthropy wants to make sure is nurtured there?
You know, I get, but I, it's something I actually Omari Rush,
who runs Culture Source here in southeastern Detroit, he and I
had a conversation. He's just published something
that's sort of the art and culture ecosystem based on a
conversation he and I had, which was actually based on my memory
of that drawing, which I don't know that that drawing made the
RIP Raps and Ronda Challenge book, but there's some other
great things. That I knew Omari was doing it,
so I didn't dare put it in. That's great.
So Tracy, I think it's time for you to earn your Kresge salary
on the communications team. It's a big Newsday at Kresge.
What's going on? It's an amazing Newsday and I'm
so excited for today. We have some big news and I
think that as a Detroiter, I, I probably am especially excited.
We have some news to share with and I will I will let you go
ahead and share that news with with all of the folks that are
listening. We have for a long time been
located in Troy, MI, just down the street from where we're
recording. And it's a lovely facility and
it's a lovely town, but it's not Detroit.
And as you said earlier, Tracy, Detroit is our home.
It is always been the Kreski home.
It's where Kreski was founded and where it, it grew up and
flexed its muscles and became Kmart.
I mean, the, the K and Kmart is Kreski.
It was essentially as the, the five and dime store business got
bigger and bigger and bigger and they sort of morphed into the
sort of these department stores, Kmart's.
And matter of fact, it was when Kmart got so big that
essentially the family got out of the business because it was
no longer really a family business.
And so they sold their interests and helped capitalize the trust
that is the Kresge Foundation. But we have been in Troy for a
very long time and it's time to come home.
And so we announced today that we are moving into Detroit, into
the the northwest quadrant of the city.
And that is only a very small part of the news because the
real news is that this is a partial investment in a much
larger suite of investments that are intended to help continue
the revitalization of the Live 6 neighborhood, the Livernois Six
Mile neighborhood in northwest Detroit.
And so in in some ways, it's the announcement is sort of like a
set of Russian dolls. You know, with the at the center
is Kreski's decision to move into a new headquarters and
build a new headquarters. It'll be on the Marygrove campus
where we already have a substantial investment
surrounding that. And the next doll out is a reek
imagined and reconfigured campus that sort of draws together all
of the extraordinary activity on Marygrove and invites the
community in in a very different way to think about this space,
this public space. And then the the largest of the
dolls is the broader neighborhood strategy where
we're going to be investing in housing programs, commercial
corridor revitalization programs, open space programs,
community engagement programs. And all told, we think this is
probably the single largest commitment that has ever been
made to a neighborhood in the city of Detroit and probably one
of the larger commitments that's been made anywhere in the United
States. But it's not so much the
magnitude, but the sort of the multi dimensionality of it.
It's it's sort of building from the inside out and inviting the
outside in. And I think it's important to
say that if this were just an office relocation decision, it
would be interesting, but not particularly.
But I think because of the way we're trying to integrate the
facility into the broader campus and the campus into the broader
community and the community into the broader city, I think it
will have enormous repercussions over the long term.
And it's certainly signals our intention to be part of the
Detroit community for the next 5000 years.
Amazing. And that brings to mind what?
So what's the what does this represent in terms of the
trajectory of the foundation? Well, it's, it's tempting on one
hand to think that this represents a significant
departure from past practice. And to the extent that we're
actually moving 120 people down to Detroit and working with the
the Marygrove community to make a more integrative holistic
community asset work, it is a departure.
But in many ways it's not a departure.
We have been investing significantly in Detroit since
the moment I arrived. And early on, it was sort of
tempting to say that a lot of that investment went into
downtown along the Woodward corridor and in the central
business district and along the riverfront.
But I think it misses the point that we've always invested in
the neighborhoods of Detroit. We've always thought that you
can't do just a central business district revitalization of a of
a city. It needs to be done in balance
with a broader set of community investment.
So whether it's housing or early childhood development or
commercial corridor revitalization or open space
protection or education, all of those things occur in
neighborhoods. And so we can stabilize the tax
base of downtown Detroit. And I think we've contributed
significantly to that through the queue line and through
quarter revitalization funds and the like.
But it always had to be done hand in glove with a
neighborhood strategy. And so in that way, I think it's
not so much a departure, it's simply a, a fortification, an
acceleration, an intensification, but it's not
different. And Tracy, you've got a special
interest in this project because you live not that far from Mary
Grove Camp. You know, this is news.
It's just breaking today. How's the neighborhood going to
react? What are their hopes, dreams and
fears? Well, I, I, I, I grew up not
even 10 minutes from the neighborhood.
I went to the school on the campus, what is now the Mary
Grove Elementary School, used to be Bates Academy, used to be, it
was a Catholic High School. So I went there, My mother
taught there, my aunt taught there.
So I spent a lot of time on the campus.
And I told Dean Moji that when you walk on campus, it feels
like a warm hug. The, the space feels like love.
It feels like care. And I'm really excited to see
the thoughtful way in which Kresge will come onto that
campus. And it it's just also keeping in
mind that, and RIP can attest to this.
Our presence is but a small percentage on the campus.
There's life there already. There is there's a lot happening
there already. And so just just how thoroughly
and mindfully and with love, as Wendy Jackson, who runs the
program to in Detroit, says, we we do things with love.
And so if we're coming onto a space that already feels like a
hug and it feels like love is moving in the air and it's good,
people should be excited about it, Yeah.
That's a that's a high standard, but it's the only standard,
right? We simply have to respect and
honor all that has gone before and then all that will come
later and we're going to be good neighbors.
One of the things that we are spending a lot of time doing is
having conversations with neighborhood leaders,
neighborhood representatives, not to have them go through one
more planning exercise, but just to make sure that the kinds of
investments, the kinds of initiatives, the kinds of
engagements that we have on Marygrove are the kinds of
things that add to the neighborhood.
They don't, they don't distract from other work.
They don't push people aside. And, and I think we need to be
very, very careful that everything we do is something
that that builds community. It doesn't sort of fragment
community further. Yeah.
That's yeah, I think it's really exciting and it's, and it's in
many ways, it's sort of a national philanthropy at its
best because you're building on local momentum, you're working
with local leaders. You have some pretty big minds
that are both inside Detroit and outside Detroit.
They're going to work with you all on this.
And so I think this is how long is it?
When is when's the ribbon cutting going to be?
How long a project is this? I I laugh because our project
team tells us that it'll probably be three years and I
tell them no, it will be two. We need to, we need to fire on
all cylinders. And I think because we have such
a coalition of the willing going on, whether it's the Marygrove
Conservancy, whether it's the Live 6 Alliance, whether it's
the neighborhood block club leaders, everyone is excited
that I've spoken with about the project.
And so I I think there will probably be bumps in the road,
things that we won't get quite right, but I think everyone
brings to the project enormous goodwill.
And I think when you have enormous goodwill in community,
projects move more quickly. What?
Do you think is there an office pool yet on what what it's going
to get is 2 years or the project?
Gets us two years. That means my commute gets cut
down from like 24 minutes to 7 minutes.
So I am all on the RIP bandwagon of two years.
Excellent, excellent. You know what's so funny too,
Jamie, is that when a number of years ago, when the Marygrove
campus was at risk of of being shuttered and Dean Mochi talked
about this, we had a decision to make.
We could either kind of let the natural process of markets sort
of shutter the campus and create something of a black hole.
Matter of fact, Aaron Siebert, our wonderful head of social
investment said, well, we'll just get get it on the rebound.
Let's go, let it go into bankruptcy and we'll get it on
the rebound. He's a finance guy.
And there is there is a tale to that story that is a little bit
more charitable to Aaron because we said, no, of course not,
we're not going to let that happen.
And Aaron then became the greatest advocate for the
project and has done kind of more than any single human being
could possibly do to make to make it possible.
But one of the very first things we decided to do was to take
that Hope Starts Here framework and landed on the Marygrove
campus because you already had the School of Education at the
university developing the K12 programming, which was
spectacular and beyond imagination.
But then we thought, well, if we are going to help build out a
new model of early childhood development, why don't we do it
on this campus? And so that has been an
extraordinary addition to the neighborhood.
And what makes me think of it, Tracy, is it, is it a lot of
folks in the neighborhood have said, you know, I, I was
thinking that maybe we might not stay, we might go somewhere
else. It's just too hard to raise
children in this neighborhood. And now all of a sudden you have
a, a, a preschool program, you have AK-8 program, you have a
912 program. And the University of Michigan
has said that if you move through that system as a
Detroiter, you get automatic admission to the University of
Michigan Extraordinary. They have never done that.
And so you really have this preschool through post secondary
continuum that is I think unlike anything I'm aware of anywhere.
What I love about the hope starts here, the award wielding,
award-winning building that is on the campus.
It has won international awards. It's not just a beautiful
building. The space when you walk in, it's
so thoughtfully designed that as a parent, you, you look forward
to sending your your little one there.
Like the just the landscaping, the windows, the lights, how
they thought about just the design of the corridors is
beautiful. And I think when children are
learning and growing in beautiful spaces, it's an
affirmation of their importance. Yeah, we've had a terrible time
getting parents out of the space after they drop the kids off.
When I tour, I just want to sit down and take it in like just,
it's beautiful it it is absolutely worthy of all of the
awards it's received so. Well, I don't mean to to pile
on, but it just seems to me that that then becomes another reason
to do the campus right, because the renovation of the high
school has been spectacular. These are beautiful turn of the
century buildings, turn of the 1900s buildings, and if we can
make sure that the entire campus has that quality of of warmth
and holding of community, then we'll have done our job well.
Amazing. Dean Moji, who's leading a lot
of this work, kicked off our series.
Yes, she did. She also shared that some of the
kids are actually helping to design those spaces, that the
kids aren't just inhabiters of the spaces, but the kids are
actually helping to shape the spaces they're in.
And is it Eric Howard, who runs the project in southwest
Detroit, often talked about sort of visual equity and that one of
the conditions of being a young person is you're not in control
of how anything in your life looks anyway.
I just anyway. Well, so wouldn't it be
spectacular, Jamie, as we designed this new building?
Because we are going to design a new building and a new grounds
again in conjunction with the Conservancy.
Wouldn't it be cool if those kids were sitting right there
helping us figure out how to do this?
And they will, yeah. Sorry, So what I was supposed to
do with that transition? Before I got lost.
Is to say that not only did Dean Moji kick off the series the
season of Path Breakers, she also inaugurated our favorite
tradition, which is the Lightning Round.
So this is where we're going to see if you deserve to be CEO of
the Kresge Foundation by asking you a series of hard hitting
questions. I think we know the.
Answer to that, right? So, Tracy, I think you're
kicking this. One What is an essential part of
your morning routine? I'm embarrassed to say that
every morning of my adult life I have run.
You have a run. I've run.
I know it's so tedious and uninteresting, but I whether
it's 20 below or 90 above, I, I go slogging out.
I it's now more of a waddle. But it is.
It is. It is out in the open air every
morning. Just stop What?
What's the best thing to draw with?
What's the best drawing implement?
Oh, there are these sort of wonderful new pencils that can
actually change colors. And so I used to have to figure
out where my Reds were and where my Blues were.
Now you can actually turn a little knob and and you only
need 1 pencil. I think I still have 500 but I
you only need one. If you could spend one day as
any animal, what would you be? I think an Otter when, when,
when we were growing, when, when my son was growing up, he had
this fascination with otters. And when we would go to
aquarium, he would stand in front of the Otter case and he
would move and the otters would move with him.
And I've often thought, wouldn't it be nice to have have that
kind of rapport with a human being?
Just. Amazing.
What's the first book you remember reading?
Oh, oh, it, it was probably Pinocchio and it wasn't the
Disney Pinocchio. The the actual real version of
Pinocchio is a terrifying book by an Italian author.
And we had it in our library and I made the mistake of opening it
and I was just traumatized for years.
I don't think I read another book.
Do you collect anything and if So, what?
What do I collect? Oh, oh, I this is a terribly
Monday. I collect T-shirts from other
cities. Oh.
That's. Not terrible.
Yeah, it comes in handy if you have to go running in the
morning. We'll have to snake you out.
You come and see what cities you're representing.
What's the best part of summer in Michigan?
Oh, I think clearly if you can get there, being on the the
northernmost reaches of Lake MI. If you could create a holiday,
what would it be? Maybe it would be National
Architecture Day. If you could have dinner with
any historical figure, who would you have dinner with?
I actually did. It was Stephen Hawking.
Yeah, Hawking was giving one of his very final lectures, and
using the voice technology made him make that possible.
And I was invited afterward to sit at a very small dinner with
him. And he didn't have to say a
word. Just being in his presence was
inspirational. Speaking of dinner, what's your
favorite thing to make? Doesn't have to be dinner.
It could be breakfast, lunch, brunch.
Oh gosh. I think if.
It's a mimosa for brunch. I won't judge.
You, I think it would be going to the local Kroger and getting
some kind of icing topping and then putting it on pretty much
anything. It doesn't match matter.
You're not allowed to say Detroit and you're not allowed
to say Minnean. What's an American city everyone
should visit? I think New Orleans, I think
there is a magic to New Orleans beyond the French Quarter.
I mean, when you think about the complexity of what that city has
gone through and how it's both rebuilt to its past, but rebuilt
to a future, and the resilience of the folks in in New Orleans
remind me a lot of the resilience of the folks in
Detroit. Where do you do your best
writing? The computer has sort of changed
that it it it used to be holding up in a study and kind of
walling myself off and doing long hand work was that's what I
would do. Now it's just the kitchen table.
Just because you can go get the icing that you got it cover.
But you know. There is something about that
pen to paper that just feels good, and then you can look at
it when you're done and close the page and you feel like
you've accomplished something that just doesn't come with
minimizing the screen. Oh, absolutely not.
That's. True, and so we usually end by
asking folks who's someone who broke a path that made your
career possible? Who do you look to as a path
breaker in your life? There have been so many leaders
who have sort of modeled different kinds of behavior in
their sectors. I had a mentor at the law firm.
I worked for a congressman, I worked for a mayor.
I worked for a designer. But you know, in some ways the
person who sort of entered my life first was a Superintendent
of schools in Minneapolis who asked me to lead a project to
help define sort of a Bill of Rights and responsibilities
during a particularly tumultuous period of Minneapolis when we
were desegregating our schools and going through the anti war
movement and everything else. And the fact that he chose to
trust in a young person and backed us all the way and
permitted us to do our work unimpeded was an enormous gift
of how leadership can can be both risk taking and risk
accepting. It was.
He was an extraordinary leader. His name was John B Davis and I
kind of carry his image with me pretty much wherever I go.
That's amazing, Tracy, this is a little bit of a bittersweet
moment for us. This is our final episode of
what we hope is the first season.
Path Breakers, What's been your favorite part of the season?
Oh wow, talking about just the change taking place in cities,
learning about the different aspects of how people are able
to do their work, that has been really eye opening for me.
I just, I wake up in the morning and I'm now on a diet of how
much MSNBC I can watch. And it's so easy to get so
depressed. But then you talk with someone
like Doctor Beverly Wright from New Orleans and what she's
accomplished in her career and is still accomplishing.
I've just been filled with so much hope about what's possible,
what can actually happen. So, but I think for now we're
going to leave it here. We'll leave it here for now, see
what happens. Absolutely.
Thank you, RIP for joining us today.
It was a wonderful time talking to you.
We so appreciate all of the knowledge and insights that
you've went today, as well as sharing this amazing big news
with us. Yeah, I can't.
I mean, this was so much more interesting than I thought it
was going to be. No, I'm, I'm totally kidding,
but this is a big deal about Kresge relocating.
And so thank you for coming on our podcast to break the news.
What a pleasure. Path Breakers and news Breakers.
Thank you both very much. And Tracy, I think we've got to
read ourselves out of this episode.
We do. We have to officially put some
icing on this thing. RIP Rapson is the president and
CEO of the Kresge Foundation. We've put links in the show
notes to the announcement about our new headquarters and to a
great video of RIP demonstrating his drawing process.
Path Breakers has been produced by the Kresge Foundation.
It was founded in 1924 with a mission to promote human
progress. Today, Kresge works to expand
equity and opportunity in America's cities.
Read the stories of all of this seasons Path Breakers and learn
about our grant making social investing work in Detroit,
Memphis, New Orleans, Fresno, as well as cities across the US at
presby.org. To hear more stories from the
Path Breakers, be sure to subscribe to the show wherever
you listen to podcasts. Our producers are Juliet Heimley
and Zach Rosen, managing editors, Krista Yankee, show art
by Rochelle Baker, and creative direction by Alejandro Herrera.
Special thanks for this episode to Podcast Nation Studio here in
Troy, MI for hosting us and to Mark Marks for his work on the
video version of this episode. I'd also like to say thank you
to all of my crazy colleagues for their support and enthusiasm
on this project, especially Jennifer Koziki, Sarah Traxler,
and of course, thank you, RIP Rapson for letting us do this.
See y'all next. Time.
Bye.