Regional Solutions for Regional Problems

Fred Blackwell

President and CEO
The San Francisco Foundation

Fred Blackwell, a former city official who now runs the San Francisco Foundation, discusses non-traditional approaches to racial equity and economic justice in the San Francisco Bay area with Rip Rapson. Blackwell focuses on his career evolution – eliciting what he learned about public sector policies and funding streams and their evolving perspectives on how local philanthropy can catalyze, complement, and align across sectors to create inclusive economies.

Henry Cisneros
Chairman, American Triple I
Partners, LLC. & Vice Chairman
& Equity Owner, Siebert,
Williams, Shank, LLC

Rip Rapson
President & CEO,
The Kresge Foundation

« Back to Philanthropy and the City 2022

The series is a partnership between
The USC Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy and
The Kresge Foundation

Fred Blackwell

Fred Blackwell is the CEO of the San Francisco Foundation, one of the largest community foundations in the country. The San Francisco Foundation works hand-in-hand with donors, community leaders, and both public and private partners to create thriving communities throughout the Bay Area. Since joining the foundation in 2014, Blackwell has led it in a renewed commitment to social justice through an equity agenda focused on racial and economic inclusion.

Blackwell, an Oakland native, is a nationally recognized community leader with a longstanding career in the Bay Area. Prior to joining the foundation, he served as interim city administrator for the city of Oakland, where he previously served as the assistant city administrator. He was the executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and director of the Mayor’s Office of Community Development in San Francisco; he served as the director of the Making Connections Initiative for the Annie E. Casey Foundation in the Lower San Antonio neighborhood of Oakland; he was a Multicultural Fellow in Neighborhood and Community Development at San Francisco Foundation; and he subsequently managed a multiyear comprehensive community initiative for San Francisco Foundation in West Oakland.

Blackwell serves on the boards of the Independent Sector, Northern California Grantmakers, Bridgespan Group, League of California Community Foundations, and the community advisory council of the San Francisco Federal Reserve. He previously served on the boards of the California Redevelopment Association, Urban Habitat Program, LeaderSpring and Leadership Excellence. He is a visiting professor in the department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Blackwell holds a master’s degree in city planning from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in urban studies from Morehouse College.

Rip Rapson

Rip Rapson is president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, a private, national foundation dedicated to expanding opportunities in America’s cities through grantmaking and social investing.

Since his appointment in 2006, Rapson has led the 95- year-old foundation to adopt an array of grantmaking and investing tools to improve the economic, social, cultural and environmental conditions of urban life through six defined programs: arts and culture, education, environment, health, human services and community development in Kresge’s hometown of Detroit. Using a full array of grant, loan and other investment tools, Kresge invests more than $160 million annually to foster economic and social change. Nationally, Rapson has strengthened the philanthropic sector’s role through convening, collaborating and supplementing community development activities in cities across the country.

Rapson earned a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College (Claremont, Calif.) 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 has been named Michiganian of the Year by The Detroit News, a Power and Influence Top 50 executive by The NonProfit Times and a Michigan Changemaker by Crain’s Detroit Business. He has co-authored two books: “Troubled Waters,” an account of the Boundary Waters legislative battle in Minnesota, and “Ralph Rapson: Sixty Years of Modern Design,” a biography of his father, a globally renowned architect.