Our Values

These five values shape who we are as an organization and guide how we work – with each other and with our many grantees and partners.

Stewardship

How we manage our resources

We commit to exhibiting the highest levels of integrity, humility, excellence, and an abiding sense of responsibility in acting as stewards of the human, reputational, and financial resources entrusted to us to advance the foundation’s mission and to animate the credo of our founder, Sebastian Kresge to leave “the world a better place than we found it.”

Respect

How we treat one another

We will treat with respect every staff member, and everyone with whom we work, valuing each person’s distinctive background, personal style, and perspectives, while displaying honesty, dignity, kindness, trust, and collegiality in all of our interactions with one another.

Creativity

How we approach our work

We will embrace experimentation, reasoned risk-taking, and continuous improvement, recognizing that we must balance support for proven and effective approaches with the pursuit of new approaches that, although unproven, hold the promise of breaking through stale or unproductive approaches to the seemingly intractable challenges our society faces.

Partnership

How we work with others 

We will actively seek out and embrace opportunities to partner and support others to devise and implement solutions, recognizing that by cooperating, coordinating, and aligning with others and one another we will leverage collective experience, insight, networks, and resources to more effectively advance the foundation’s mission to promote human progress.

Opportunity

How we seek to improve the lives of low-income people living in America’s cities and how we invest in our staff 

Through the work of our programs and partnerships, we will deploy an array of grantmaking and investing tools to expand opportunities for low-income people living in Amerca’s cities so that they may improve their life circumstance and join the economic mainstream.

We will foster a workplace environment and culture in which staff members have the opportunity to express their talents and ambitions, be acknowledged and rewarded for their achievements, grow in their effectiveness and careers, and see their efforts reflected in a strengthened sense of common purpose.