Rip Rapson

Rip Rapson

Rip Rapson is president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, which contributed $100 million to Detroit’s “Grand Bargain.” Rip Rapson is president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, a $3.5 billion private, national foundation dedicated to expanding opportunities for vulnerable people living in America’s cities.

Since his appointment in 2006, Rapson has led the 91-year-old foundation to adopt an array of grantmaking and investing tools to improve the economic, social, cultural and environmental conditions of urban life through six defined programs: arts & culture, education, environment, health, human services, and community development in Kresge’s hometown of Detroit. In 2013, Kresge’s Board of Trustees approved grants and investment commitments totaling nearly $140 million.

Nationally, Rapson has strengthened the philanthropic sector’s role through convening, collaborating and supplementing community development activities in cities around the country. In Detroit, Rapson and the foundation provided central support to the “Grand Bargain,” an unprecedented partnership between the philanthropic community, city pensioners, the State of Michigan and the Detroit Institute of Arts, to propel the City of Detroit’s successful emergence from municipal bankruptcy in fall 2014.

A 40-year veteran of urban policy and philanthropic leadership, Rapson began his career as a legislative assistant to U.S. Rep. Don Fraser, D-Minn., and in that position oversaw development and passage of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1976 which brought full wilderness protection to the million-acre lake country of northern Minnesota.

After attending law school, Rapson became increasingly interested in philanthropy’s role in urban and economic development while representing a number of Minnesota nonprofit organizations as a partner at Leonard, Street & Dienard in Minneapolis in the 1980s.

Rapson later served as the Deputy Mayor of Minneapolis from 1989 to 1993 and was the primary architect of its Neighborhood Revitalization program, a 20-year, $400 million effort to strengthen the city’s neighborhoods. He also directed a comprehensive redesign of the municipal budgeting process and developed the mayor’s initiatives to strengthen and support families and children.

In 1993, Rapson was named a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Design Center for American Urban Studies. There he led a successful five-year interdisciplinary project to examine the forces affecting first-ring suburban communities and address the challenges brought on by declining tax revenues, changing economic and social demographics, and shifting political forces.

After serving as a consultant to the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, where he helped the foundation develop and implement a new strategic plan, in 1999 he was appointed president of the McKnight Foundation, a $2 billion private foundation based in Minneapolis. During his six-year tenure with the organization, McKnight was recognized as a national leader on a variety of public policy issues, including early childhood development, metropolitan growth, open space protection and wind energy. Rapson launched the Itasca Project, a private sector-led effort to develop a new regional agenda for the Twin Cities, and he advanced McKnight’s work supporting arts and cultural activities, enhancing water quality and public enjoyment of the Mississippi River, and fostering economic development in rural Minnesota.

Rapson earned a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College (Claremont, Calif.) and a juris doctorate from Columbia University Law School. He is the recipient of dozens of civic and philanthropic awards, and has co-authored two books: “Troubled Waters,” an account of the Boundary Waters legislative battle in Minneapolis, and “Ralph Rapson: Sixty Years of Modern Design,” a biography of his father, a globally renowned architect.

An active member of the national philanthropic and southeast Michigan civic communities, he currently serves on the board of directors of ArtPlace America, Living Cities, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), Detroit RiverFront Conservancy, Downtown Detroit Partnership and M-1 Rail. He resides in metro Detroit with his wife and two children.

Rip Rapson

Contributing Articles

Philanthropy Must Increasingly Become Comfortable in Engaging the Changes and Ambiguities of Public-Sector Policies and Practices

Philanthropy has acted boldly in Detroit to re-imagine the city’s future, and has contributed to a larger conversation in cities across the nation about how we can collectively confront and overcome some of urban America’s most intractable problems. This blog post is part of the series “Closing the Racial Gaps: Together We Can” which highlights efforts across the United States that show …

Contributing Resources

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