Urban Innovation Exchange from Model D TV on Vimeo. Detroit is one of eight cities Knight Foundation considers “resident communities.” In the last five years, the foundation has committed more than $45 million to projects there. Below, freelancer Mary M. Chapman writes about the challenges and opportunities facing the city. Some news accounts of Detroit’s woes sound like postmortems. Causes of death: financial insolvency, decreased population and unemployment, complicated by home abandonment, subpar services and high crime. Those conditions are fact. But tough, resilient Detroit has heard last rites too many times to count. After all, the boulevard to bankruptcy is long and wide. All those other times on the brink, Detroit has shrugged off its troubles and kept going. The bankruptcy filing on July 18 poses the city’s biggest test yet. But that’s only part of the story. Even as the city makes history as the largest U.S. municipality to seek Chapter 9 protection, it’s also experiencing, in some areas, a momentum-shifting surge of public and private investment and business and residential growth. People are working together to start organizations, hatch community projects, reimagine businesses, and launch creative and digital economies. Detroit—an important, thriving center of culture—is also a community where brothers John S. and James L. Knight operated a newspaper, the Detroit Free Press. Because of that connection, Detroit will continue to receive sorely needed help from the Knight Foundation, an independent, national foundation that the brothers founded in 1950. In the last five years, Knight has awarded 59 grants totaling $43 million to efforts that have a direct impact on Detroit. It is one of eight cities the foundation describes as “resident communities,” where it has program directors on the ground leading its grant making. Investment areas include arts and culture, journalism and media innovation, community and economic development, and entrepreneurship. This week the foundation announced $2.1 million in new funding for 56 projects in the Knight Arts Challenge Detroit.
