March 23, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
New Orleans
Foundations that are working together to try to revitalize Detroit are borrowing from New Orleans’s playbook, Wendy Lewis Jackson, a senior program officer at the Kresge Foundation told participants here at the Katrina @ 5 conference.
“The contraction of the U.S. auto industry has been our Katrina,” she said. “It’s an economic catastrophe that has permeated every corner of our city, but just like New Orleans, we’re trying to build back better.”
New Orleans’s rebuilding effort has shown grant makers in other parts of the country the importance of having a “compelling vision that captures people’s imagination and spirit” and thinking big, Ms. Jackson told the audience.
“Tinkering around the edges is no longer an option,” she said. “We have big problems to solve in our community, and philanthropy has to both push and pull with audacious, bold strategies that work on multiple levels at once.”
One of the biggest problems that Detroit has to tackle is what to do with the more than 40 square miles of properties in the city that are vacant, abandoned, or in disrepair. It will be critical for the city, like New Orleans, to get residents involved in the planning process, said Ms. Jackson.
“Dealing with this challenge of having a city built for two million people that now may shrink down to 700,000 or so is a huge and complex undertaking,” she said. Philanthropy will play a key role “working to ensure that residents in Detroit have a chance and an opportunity to be engaged on all decision-making aspects of this work.”
Right now, Ms. Jackson said, there’s a radio advertisement that starts off with the tagline, You wouldn’t use a road map of New Orleans to find your way around Detroit.
“On the surface, that might seem true,” she said. “But for those of us who are working on large-scale, unprecedented community transformation efforts, we are using the New Orleans roadmap as a guide, because without it, we would be lost.”
