Rip Rapson

Rip Rapson is President and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, a $3.1 billion national, private foundation based in metropolitan Detroit and founded by S.S. Kresge in 1924. He assumed leadership on July 1, 2006, and soon after began a multi-year transition to expand and recalibrate Kresge's grantmaking. Prior to joining Kresge, Rapson was president of the Minnesota-based McKnight Foundation, the private, $2 billion foundation governed by the descendents of William McKnight, one of the founder's of 3M Corporation.Rapson served as a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota before joining the McKnight Foundation. There he led a five-year, interdisciplinary project to help aging first-ring suburban communities address the challenges faced by declining tax revenues, changing economic and social demographics, and shifting political forces. As the deputy mayor of Minneapolis under Mayor Don Fraser, Rapson served as primary architect of the pioneering Neighborhood Revitalization program, a twenty-year, $400 million effort to strengthen Minneapolis neighborhoods. He also directed a comprehensive redesign of the city's budgeting process and developed the mayor's initiatives to strengthen and support families and children. Rapson came to the mayor's office from the Minneapolis law firm of Leonard, Street and Deinard, where he was a partner in the litigation division. He received his law degree from Columbia University. Before entering law school, Rapson worked as a legislative assistant in then-Congressman Don Fraser's Washington, D.C. office and oversaw the development and passage of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1976, which brought full wilderness protection to the million-acre lake country of northern Minnesota. He sits on the boards of the Detroit RiverFront Conservancy, the Downtown Detroit Partnership, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation of New York, Living Cities, and the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago. He and his wife Gail have an eleven-year-old daughter, Anna, and a fourteen-year-old son, Avery.