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Detroit

We collaborate with cross-sectoral partners to promote and expand long-term, equitable opportunity in Kresge’s hometown by centering the priorities of its residents.

Detroit Funding Opportunities
 
Key Impact Stat

$53m

Detroit Program grant dollars awarded in 2023

About The Detroit Program

The Detroit Program works with a range of partners, including resident leaders, nonprofit organizations, businesses, and state and city governments.

We believe centering people, racial equity and place is crucial to the broad, equitable development needed across neighborhoods of the iconic city that is our hometown. This is an evolution of Kresge’s Reimagining Detroit 2020 framework, now anchored by the framework’s neighborhood module. To that end, we work toward leadership and community development that supports and improves quality of life for all Detroiters, beginning with our next generation of young leaders and enriched through the power of the city’s arts and culture ecosystem. In this matrix of relationships, we place our highest priority on neighborhood-based organizations that reflect community. These organizations are best able to ensure that the history of structural racism and bias do not shape our city’s future. This leads the Detroit Program to a posture of listening to people and community; being humble, respectful and inclusive; challenging power narratives, our own included; and acting with intention.

Featured News

Detroit News & Views

All Detroit News & Views

Detroit Resources

All Detroit Resources

Our Strategies

We Invest in These Focus Areas

Our mutually reinforcing focus areas are building blocks for thriving, vibrant neighborhoods of engaged residents as the foundation of a thriving city.

Early Childhood/Hope Starts Here

Along with Hope Starts Here’s broad engagement process, we and our partners are reimagining a Detroit that puts young children first.

Nonprofit Capacity Building and Leadership Development

We support residents, their organizations and their governmental representatives to work together and self-direct their future.

Equitable Community Development

We seek to bolster community development organizations and systems that support resident-engaged, neighborhood-level change.

Coordinated Investments and Technical Assistance

We seek to align key resources – including grants, loans and technical assistance – to support neighborhood anchors to implement catalytic change.

Arts and Culture Ecosystem

We actively promote the power of arts and culture in communities through support to individuals as well as organizations.

Transformative Marygrove Cradle-to-Career Campus

Kresge and partners are creating a cradle-to-career P-20 educational continuum on the former Marygrove College campus.

We Invest in These Initiatives

Ongoing initiatives reaching hundreds of grantees each year anchor our work.

All Initiatives

Kresge Innovative Projects: Detroit Plus (KIP:D+)

Building on Kresge Innovative Projects: Detroit (KIP:D) for transformative projects tapping the vision and creativity of neighborhood residents.

Kresge Arts in Detroit

More than $6 million with no strings attached has enhanced the lives of more 250 artists across metropolitan Detroit.

Funding for the Detroit Program

We use an array of funding and investment tools, including project grants, planning grants, operating support and a variety of program-related investments through Kresge’s Social Investment Practice. We also use our resources to convene cross-sectoral partners to expand knowledge of growing issue areas in the city of Detroit.

Current grant opportunities are listed on the Current Funding Opportunities page. Artists seeking Kresge Arts in Detroit fellowships should visit Kresge Arts in Detroit.

We look for proposals to align with our focus areas; to contribute to broad, equitable and sustainable revitalization; to engage the community, particularly at the neighborhood level; to complement others working on the same issues and/or the same geographies; and to address the legacy of structural racism and bias at the root of the city’s challenges.

How to Apply

Detroit Grants Made

Detroit Social Investments Made

Detroit Programs Team