Executive Commentary for Diversity in Philanthropy Website
by
Sterling K. Speirn, President and CEO, W.K. Kellogg Foundation
In the following Commentary, completed with support from Diversity in Philanthropy Project consultant Robin Templeton, Sterling K. Speirn, President and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, discusses Kellogg’s institutional commitment “to seek to eliminate racial disparities wherever we find them.”
The year after the celebration of the Kellogg Foundation’s 75th Anniversary, our Trustees conducted a probing evaluation of the most significant barriers we face today in carrying out Mr. Kellogg’s founding mission to “promote the health, happiness and well-being of children.” One of our conclusions was that, in order to address the needs of vulnerable children and families, we must confront the persistent role that racial inequity plays in exacerbating poverty. We felt that the best way to capture and lift up Mr. Kellogg’s original donor intent was to acknowledge and confront the ways in which racism and poverty threaten the well-being of vulnerable children and their families in the United States.
Dr. Martin Luther King said that “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the economic injustices that make philanthropy necessary.” Dr. King called us to confront the larger systemic forces that place such grave numbers of people in need of relief. At most conferences I attend these days, someone points out that this is the first generation of children in the United States that is not likely to be better off than previous generations. We are simply not making enough progress toward improving the lives of vulnerable children and youth and, in fact, we may be losing ground. But I am encouraged by a new generation of leaders who are bringing issues of racial equity to center stage in our field and driving home the point that while we did make progress historically, the prognosis today for vulnerable kids and their families is not encouraging.
At the Kellogg Foundation, we are joining this new leadership in saying that until we start investing in children when they are very young; until we say that absolutely every third grader must be given full opportunity to succeed in school and build a bright future; until we deal with these factors at the very beginning of life, we will not only fail to make up the ground we have lost since the Civil Rights Movement, we will continue to lose ground—ground that we cannot afford to lose.
Our generation has inherited new social challenges that call upon us to do what previous leaders did in their time, to ask “What is our task?” and to identify our calling. I think that we can get a lot of traction by calling people back to a core sense of fairness and belief in equal opportunity. I think that there’s no question that people in our society believe in equal opportunity. But the question becomes, “What are we prepared to do to make equal opportunities available to poor kids and kids of color who are growing up in very disadvantaged conditions?” One of the tasks of our generation is to apply a structural racism lens when examining the root causes of national crises like our failure to meet the health needs of the disadvantaged and the uninsured.
One of our approaches at the Foundation has been to begin looking seriously at the social, economic and racial determinants of health. Beyond the fact that poor people have limited access to quality health care and health insurance, aggravating factors like poverty, lack of nutritious food, unsafe and toxic neighborhoods and the stress of living with prejudice—forces not typically seen as health-related—dramatically harm the well-being and life chances of vulnerable children and families. We are not alone in that many health funders are also recognizing that health policy is social policy and configuring some of their grantmaking strategies accordingly.
Mary McLeod Bethune, the great African American educator and Civil Rights leader whose parents had once been slaves said that “The freedom gates are half ajar; we must pry them fully open.” Her words still resonate today. The “freedom gates” have been half ajar for a very long time and it is incumbent on those of us who work in philanthropy to find our role in prying them open and in preventing them from closing any further.
When I assumed the presidency of the Kellogg Foundation, people repeatedly asked me “What changes are you going to make?” It’s something of a pattern I’ve noticed among big foundations, that when a new CEO takes the helm, new priorities, initiatives, frameworks and restructuring are announced, while many established programs are phased out. When I came on board, however, I knew that I was joining an institution with a rich tradition of defending diversity and equity, stretching all the way back to Mr. Kellogg’s father, J. Preston Kellogg, who was an abolitionist. And for the past decade through our Diversity Action Committee and our Capitalizing on Diversity Initiative, the Foundation has been looking both at our internal practices—how we celebrate and manage diversity within the building—and at how this translates into upholding diversity standards in our programming and work with vendors, grantees and partners. The first thing I did when I arrived at the Kellogg Foundation was to ask a set of three questions: “What kind of foundation did Mr. Kellogg want us to be?” Secondly, “What kind of foundation does the world need us to be?” And, finally, “What kind of foundation can we be?” In other words, I didn’t come to change the Foundation. I came here to join a team of people who want to help change the world.
Sterling K. Speirn is the President and CEO of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Previously he was President and CEO of the Peninsula Community Foundation where he launched the Center for Venture Philanthropy. He has also worked with the U.S. Department of the Interior, as manager of Apple Computer’s national computer grants program, and was a guest professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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