Rip Rapson arrived at the job interview carrying a four -foot piece of foam board. It was 1999, and Rapson was a candidate for his first position in philanthropy, as president of the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis, a city where he served as deputy mayor.
McKnight wants its new leader to rethink how it invested in children, families, and economic development. Rapson put his ideas on paper-specifically, a three-panel, colored-pencil drawing attached to the foam board.
As Rapson remembers this, he was prevented from bringing his visual aid to the interview. “What in the world is that?” asked Cynthia Boynton, daughter of McKnight founder Virginia Binger. But McKnight’s board discussed the sketch at length. And Rapson was accepted.
Two decades later, hundreds of Rapson’s drawings adorn the philanthropic landscape. Some of her earliest work, in the 1990s before she joined McKnight, helped the Annie E. Casey Foundation come up with a new approach. At the Detroit -based Kresge Foundation, where he has been president since 2006, his oeuvre includes more than 50 drawings detailing the city’s charitable work, the 2013 bankruptcy, and the recovery.
Over the years, his sketches have landed at a White House cabinet meeting, the Detroit bankruptcy trial, and university discussions of philanthropy and society. Kresge staff hangs them on the walls of their office.
When Jennifer Kulczycki was interviewed to join Kresge’s communications office, Rapson pulled out a piece of paper and made a diagram of the foundation’s relationships. “I still have it,” Kulczycki said. “It was before I knew that drawings weren’t a special thing, that they were daily exercise.”
Influence of Beatrix Potter
Perhaps it’s a surprise that Rapson, a lawyer trained in the arcanery of policy and grant making, has an artistic twist. But his father, Ralph Rapson, was a world -renowned architect who often worked out of the basement of the family home in Minneapolis. He believes that “architecture can literally change lives by bringing us together in races and incomes,” then Minneapolis mayor RT Rybak said when senior Rapson died in 1998.
Rip Rapson’s mother is a volunteer in the children’s literature archives at the University of Minnesota, where her son spent a lot of time studying the manuscripts and first editions. How Beatrix Potter described The Story of Peter Rabbit? Rapson can search for answers on the book’s shiny metal production plate.
In the mid-1990s, Rapson discovered another influence when he joined the University of Minnesota’s Design Center for American Urban Landscape, which at the time was working in the aging inner-ring suburbs. Following meetings with residents and stakeholders, the team will gather around a table and spectators while Bill Morrish, the project’s co-leader and a nationally recognized city designer, describes the challenges and potential. solution to a series of sketches.
Kresge Foundation
Morrish will use the drawing to begin the next meeting with the communities. “One has the feeling of sitting on a plane,” Rapson wrote in a recollection at this time, “looking out the window, and seeing not only the physical elements of the landscape but also the non visible tendrils that connect them. Genius. “
Rapson practiced sketching during meetings, replacing lined paper for 11×17-inch papers. This led to an awkward moment at a meeting at the Casey foundation’s headquarters in Baltimore. Rapson was invited to add policy insight from his work in Minneapolis and felt like an outsider in the discussion.
A few hours into the meeting, however, when the conversation stopped, Ralph Smith, then vice president of the foundation, noticed Rapson’s sketches. Rapson was worried that Smith thought he was lazy doodling. But the veteran Casey copied and shared the drawings, then resumed the meeting focused on them. Over the next two years, Casey’s leaders invited Rapson to visit and translate their thinking into visuals.
‘Conversation Propellant’
Rapson describes drawing as more of a way to organize his thoughts. Distilling complex ideas and conversations into one page “forces you to see the relationships between things and make your own judgment on whether they add up to a coherent whole,” he says.
When shared with others, drawings can be a “propellant of conversation,” he says. “If you’re sitting in a room with 10 people trying to track and interpret a conversation, sketching can be a clarification” that allows participants to quickly understand key concepts and to react.
Not everyone finds value in Rapson’s drawings. He said the former Kresge trustee called them “childish”. But others used them extensively. According to Rapson, Shaun Donovan, a secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Obama administration, conducted at a cabinet meeting a sketch in early 2010 of how philanthropy goes into effect as the Detroit government and problems financially neglected it could not pay even basic. services. Donovan used it to describe the role that every federal agency in Detroit can play.
Rip Rapson
Rapson relies heavily on his sketches on regular visits to Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, where he talks about Detroit to students, faculty from several colleges, local officials. philanthropy, donors, and so on. The audience loves the sketches because they clearly establish the relationships and entities that are key to any change, says Professor Joel Fleishman, a philanthropy scholar.
“There are very few foundation presidents who have had the impact that Rip has had, both in Minneapolis and in Detroit,” he said. “One of the reasons is he makes it all understood by anyone who hears him talk about it and sees those diagrams.”
People at the Center
Often, Rapson sketched in pen during meetings. If the ideas are later presented to a wider audience, he will develop a colored-pencil sketch. Although his father only works in black and white, the son chooses color as an organizing principle-yellows for one type of activity, greens for another, and so on.
Rapson’s art has signature elements. Bags with dollar signs represent grants or other money transfers. Bold yellow arrows indicate narrative progress or flow. Decorative columns describe key principles or players in a plan. Cranes stood for capital construction.
In many drawings, the main institutions are described as colorful buildings. A recent drawing of the role of culture in promoting racial equality features a wide range, from Detroit’s Motown Museum to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, complete with its stacked basket and contour.
People regularly fill in the drawings. Rapson’s father, who emphasized communities that benefit from architecture, was among the first architects to include people in the renderings. Similarly, Rapson intends to remind everyone that great philanthropic plans have a human purpose.
However, he has a hard time drawing people. Weapons, for example, often end up in what look like long, extenuated flippers. No hands or fingers.
“It took me forever to figure out how to draw a baby in diapers,” Rapson said. “I just can’t.”
