Drawing from his experiences as a lawyer, municipal official, and foundation president, Rip Rapson offers two dozen stories of leadership across three decades of civic service. Ranging in weight, complexity, and consequence, the chapters illuminate the rich and expansive potential of principled leadership to improve the ebbs and flows, the rhythms, the contours of contemporary life.
Threaded through the accounts is the recognition that a willingness — indeed, a readiness — to adjust, refashion, or even abandon established decision-making expectations or authorities is an essential ingredient in seeking to crack the most difficult challenges of contemporary life.
Rapson's experiences illustrate how that process can inject dynamism and innovation into public discourse, policy, and practice.
Whether preserving a city's architectural heritage or protecting a irreplaceable wilderness area . . . pursuing an unorthodox run for public office or resetting the trajectory of an iconic American city . . . elevating the transformative power of the arts or amplifying the role of philanthropy in community change . . . using conceptual drawings to clarify public policy challenges or reimagining the future of a failed university.
While acknowledging that challenges from decades past are utterly different from those of today, Rapson argues the imperative of a 21st century leader—whether young, mid-career, or matured—understanding lessons from the past. As new crises emerge, and old ones mutate, our challenges become more multifaceted, interconnected, and intractable. Rapson argues that the principles of leadership must accordingly adapt, evolve, and be transformed. All in service to a more nuanced perspective about how deep, abiding change can be realized.
The two-dozen stories are, moreover, grounded in the proposition that acts of principled leadership are accretive. Our communities— whether defined by group identity, common challenges, shared environments, or collective values — will progress toward the kind of just, equitable, opportunity-rich, and healthful future to which we aspire only when our individual acts of leadership are combined into an alchemy of shared purpose.
Rapson's book illuminates how that can be done. It is must reading for those who aspire to leadership in these impossibly complex and ever-changing times.
Rip Rapson is president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, a private, national foundation that invests more than $180 million annually to improve the economic, social, cultural, and environmental conditions of urban life, including in Kresge's hometown of Detroit.
In Detroit, the foundation played a central role in funding and implementing the "Grand Bargain," which propelled the City's emergence from municipal bankruptcy in 2014.
Rapson began his career as a legislative assistant to U.S. Rep. Don Fraser, where he oversaw development and passage of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1978, which brought full wilderness protection to the million-acre lake country of northern Minnesota. After leaving Washington to attend Columbia University law school, Rapson joined the Minneapolis law firm of Leonard, Street & Deinard in Minneapolis, where he practiced law in the 1980s.
Rapson served as the deputy mayor of Minneapolis from 1989 to 1993. He 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 oversaw the mayor's initiatives to support families and children.
In 1993, Rapson was named a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota's Design Center for American Urban Landscape, where he led an interdisciplinary project to examine challenges facing aging first-ring suburban communities.
Rapson was appointed president of the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis in 1999. McKnight became a national leader in early childhood development, metropolitan growth policy, and wind energy and launched the Itasca Project, which developed a comprehensive regional business agenda for the Twin Cities.
Rapson earned a bachelor's degree from Pomona College and a juris doctorate from Columbia University Law School. He is the recipient of dozens of philanthropic and civic honors and accolades, including a 2017 induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recognition as Michiganian of the Year by The Detroit News.
He has co-authored two books: "Troubled Waters," an account of the Boundary Waters legislative battle, and "Ralph Rapson: Sixty Years of Modern Design," a biography of his father, a globally renowned architect.
