Kresge Foundation: Increase Creative Capacity to Shape Healthier Neighborhoods

The Kresge Foundation’s Increase Creative Capacity to Shape Healthier Neighborhoods grants seek to address the harm done to people with low incomes – historic trauma, systemic racial injustices, and normalized acts of exclusion – and with the disinvestment in the places they live. Only then can communities recognize and deploy creative placemaking as a necessary dimension of strategies to create the conditions by which people thrive and communities are supported.

The Foundation’s goal with this focus area is to invest in the pre-conditions for long term change such as resident empowerment and agency, social cohesion, narrative change, and equitable physical improvements. Through this focus area, the Foundation works to support organizations (arts and community development) and projects that:

• Advance innovative and creative approaches to community development that lead to inclusionary practices and policies
• Use creative strategies to foster resident’s agency, social cohesion, and narrative change

The Foundation seeks to cluster organizations (arts, community development, and other nonprofits) and creative placemaking activities into cohorts and initiatives. It focuses where there is the greatest promise for this kind of sector-specific work – initiatives that create the greatest opportunity for deep cross-team work within the foundation and collaborative work across foundations; that have existing, mature support infrastructure; and that demonstrate particularly well-formed creative placemaking practices. It looks for patterns and opportunities to better understand outcomes and impacts, and to build the capacity of its grantees to more directly engage in advancing field-critical needs ranging from policy to evidence base, and to fuller integration of racial equity and inclusion practices within community development.

Amount: Awards range from $75,000-$1,100,000 and average approximately $300,000.

Eligibility: U.S. 501(c)(3) organizations with audited financial statements that are not classified as private foundations, and government entities in the United States.

Link: https://kresge.org/programs/arts-culture/increase-creative-capacity-shape-healthier-neighborhoods

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