We are excited to share with you the lessons we have learned from the first cohort of the Human Services Program’s National Next Generation Initiative. These lessons are drawn from months of working with cohort members and thought leaders, which focused on where – individually and collectively – we have seen the greatest progress in advancing social and economic mobility with an applied racial equity lens.  These lessons are even more important as the nation seeks to address COVID and the continued taking of Black lives, reinforcing the reality that racial inequity is a matter of life and death.  Driven by a commitment to families and communities realizing success from one generation to the next, the cohort emerged from this mutual learning experience with an intentional focus on dismantling historical, institutional, and structural racism as a collective priority.

For over a decade, The Kresge Foundation’s Human Service Program has invested in human-serving non-profit organizations that are on the frontlines of expanding opportunity for people with low incomes. With the unprecedented hardships faced by human service agencies during the Great Recession of 2008-2009, that work was thrown into a very different light.  Even as the need for human services support spiked – as millions of Americans lost jobs, homes, and, often, their health – public sector budgets were slashed, and safety net programs were sharply cut or eliminated. Kresge’s efforts had to adapt. Primary among our responses was a decision to provide grants and no-interest loans to help bridge organizations through the crisis.

The years during and immediately after the crisis shined a spotlight on a number of non-profit human services organizations that were not only particularly resilient but were also advancing innovative approaches to addressing poverty.  These centers of innovation shared a number of characteristics: They were relentlessly driven by outcomes. They grounded their work on data. They were person centered.  They refused to be constrained by traditional program siloes. They reached into the public and private sectors to identify multi-dimensional solutions.

Kresge recognized the possible power of providing flexible operating support for these kinds of organizations. In 2013, the Human Services team accordingly launched a grantmaking portfolio that did just that.

That was just a first step.

Driven in part by the work of these leading edge organizations but also fueled by new research, analysis, and writing, the years before and immediately after the Great Recession also gave rise to a new vocabulary describing, and new ways of thinking about, the bedrock challenges faced by the people these front-line organizations served. In a word, there was an emergent focus on social and economic mobility, and on how environmental and structural barriers can impede movement out of poverty.

Those developments led us, the Human Services team, to recalibrate its strategies further in 2016. The Foundation as a whole had earlier articulated as its North Star the expansion of opportunity for people with low incomes. The team proposed translating the meaning of opportunity within its portfolio to be promoting social and economic mobility. Through high-performance human services organizations. Through networks of innovative organizations sharing their experiences and learnings. Through geographic clusters of organizations working in tandem to create a comprehensive ecosystem of supports. Through policy aimed at dismantling structural barriers to opportunity.

The Next Generation Initiative became the central manifestation of that thinking.  We would support human services organizations that were, literally, laying the foundation for the next generation of efforts to help people improve their social and economic status – how to usher the next generation of the human services field’s prevailing aspirations and practices . . . how to encourage the next generation of strategy for organizations that had been working in a particular way for decades . . .  how to incentivize the next generation of partnerships across sectors . . . how to shift to higher ground the aspirations and opportunity structures for the next generation within families.

In its brief life span, the NextGen Initiative has powerfully lived into the expectations we had for it. We look forward to sharing what our grantees have learned from their work over these two years but also what they believe their experiences signal for the future. We will leave for you to draw your own conclusions. But for the three of us, their reflections furnish a powerful dose of optimism at a time when that commodity is in woefully short supply.

Rip Rapson
President

David Fukuzawa
Managing Director, Health
& Former Managing Director, Health & Human Services Program

Raquel Hatter
Managing Director, Human Services