Inside a Legacy Funder’s $90 Million Challenge for Racial Equity
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Activists rally in New York over the summer. a katz/shutterstock
When the W.K. Kellogg Foundation committed itself to becoming an “effective anti-racist organization” back in 2007, far fewer grantmakers were taking that path. Kellogg has long been one of only a handful of major philanthropies that have consistently kept racial equity at the forefront of their work, both through the lens of grantmaking as well as matters of staff composition and organizational culture. Kellogg stands perhaps second only to Ford as a legacy institution built on a 20th-century industrial fortune that has evolved over time into a steady philanthropic ally of contemporary progressives.
The events of 2020 have only reinforced Kellogg’s resolve. As racial equity commitments pour in from across the nonprofit and corporate sectors, the foundation is expanding its grantmaking and adding to an already sizable repertoire of anti-racist programming. “We were built for this,” said Carla Thompson Payton, vice president for program strategy at Kellogg. “You know, we’ve doubled down on our commitment. We couldn’t have predicted what was going to happen this year, although from a systemic framework, you saw the writing on the wall. But now’s the time for us to think about how we come together as communities—how do we provide examples of best practices, how do we focus on seeing our common humanity and healing, how do we focus on increasing communication lines?”
Kellogg’s latest initiative is looking to drive resources to groups asking those questions in a deep way. Dubbed Racial Equity 2030, it’s a grant competition that will award $90 million to organizations with “bold solutions” that tackle inequities through a racial equity and justice lens. Racial Equity 2030 has global scope, as applicants from the U.S. and abroad can throw their hats in the ring. In a process extending through summer 2022, 10 finalists will receive planning grants of $1 million each, and at least three awards of $20 million and two of $10 million will go out at its culmination. The foundation will pay out those awards over the course of the next decade.
Racial Equity 2030 is only the latest big entry in a long tradition of “grand challenge” or prize philanthropy, which emphasizes the value of innovation and open calls for new ideas. This approach has received a boost of attention in recent years through MacArthur’s $100 million grant competition and its related platform Lever for Change. The idea of using a competition to support social change also has its share of critics, and one of Kellogg’s peers in the sector has expressed concerns about Racial Equity 2030, suggesting the approach could cut against Kellogg’s own racial equity goals. But the foundation’s leadership stands by the program as another way to back racial justice in a historic moment.
“We believe this is a moment… to really accelerate the work that we’ve invested in and support leaders and [to] make a real systemic difference over the next decade; on issues of racial equity and equality in our nation and the world,” said La June Montgomery Tabron, Kellogg’s president and CEO.
Symbolism and systems change
The $90 million figure isn’t arbitrary. The folks at Kellogg have positioned Racial Equity 2030 as a symbol to mark the foundation’s 90th anniversary, with 2030 and the program’s final culmination marking its centennial. Tabron spoke of a deep appetite within the foundation to galvanize systemic change during the 2020s and identified this moment as a time to accelerate the racial equity work Kellogg has supported for years.
Foundation leaders say they went with a challenge approach because they wanted to invite scalable innovation from the field, while at the same time influencing the field and boosting the solutions that emerge. Though Racial Equity 2030 is structured as a competition, Kellogg sees it as a way to foster a community of practice. “We want folks to join us. It’s really important, from our perspective, that this is a journey that’s done together with community, and that we leverage the voices and the experiences of community as we look for bold solutions to our systemic issues,” Payton said.
So how does Racial Equity 2030 work? Prospective applicants should note that the registration deadline is January 28, 2021. Following that deadline, applications are due by February 25, 2021. A dedicated website includes a wide variety of information about eligibility and the application process. Evaluation will involve a peer-to-peer review process in the spring of 2021, followed by the expert review of a panel chosen for their experience working in racial equity. Kellogg will then narrow the pool down to 10 finalists, who will have nine months to develop their projects before the final award announcement.
Kellogg isn’t being particularly prescriptive about what it’s looking for, and that’s by design. “We want folks to really bring forward the opportunities that they see in their day-to-day lives and the communities that they live in and serve,” Payton said. “This must be something that’s developed by community, for community, that [breaks down] systems that support and sustain inequity.” To that end, proposed ideas must be led by a team with lived experience of the problems they’re tackling, and should center communities closest to those issues. They must also have a charitable purpose, though organizations of all stripes can apply.
Practiced hands
Looking at the Kellogg Foundation’s racial equity funding since that 2007 commitment, the overall sense is one of breadth. Kellogg’s primary focus is on children and families, a mission it interprets broadly in its grantmaking, giving across health, education, advocacy and much more besides. The same is true of its racial equity commitment, which it refers to as a part of its “DNA,” going all the way back to Will Keith Kellogg’s abolitionist family, and to the foundation’s hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan, which once served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Kellogg’s contemporary racial equity work operates across an impressive number of fronts. Educational and health equity, environmental justice, workers’ rights and equitable community development are all on that list. Kellogg is also one of the few philanthropies, alongside other legacy institutions like Ford and Robert Wood Johnson, that have significantly backed the fight against residential segregation, a thorny and entrenched problem that undermines equity across the board. We’ve also seen Kellogg join other progressive grantmakers to fund efforts—both established and emerging—to lift up racial justice as a nonprofit sector priority.
One of the hallmarks of Kellogg’s recent racial equity work is its Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) initiative. TRHT takes its inspiration from the truth and reconciliation commissions countries like South Africa and Canada have employed to tackle their historical sins. Kellogg’s initiative prioritizes healing and transformation, as opposed to mere reconciliation, and takes aim at deep-seated, often unconscious beliefs in a “hierarchy of human value.” In 2017, Kellogg committed around $24 million to fund racial healing efforts in 14 places across the country. In each community, a local partner—often a community foundation—has been coordinating the work.
TRHT follows in the footsteps of another Kellogg program called America Healing, a five-year initiative launched in 2010 to contend with racial inequity where it adversely affects children of color. Through America Healing, the foundation channeled over $100 million to nonprofits across the country and hosted a number of conferences. Kellogg also conceived of the National Day of Racial Healing, which it has celebrated three times so far through community events, bus tours, concerts and the like. All told, Kellogg’s racial healing commitment is a hopeful, if slow-moving, body of work, and one of philanthropy’s most forthright efforts to make amends for the original sin of slavery.
It’s also a reminder that this funder isn’t just focused on the United States. Kellogg has long funded racial equity work abroad, including by providing scholarships to Black South Africans under apartheid in the 1980s, and more recently, matching donations to Brazil’s Baobá Fund for Racial Equity. The Racial Equity 2030 challenge was also conceived as a global effort, acknowledging that the problem of systemic racism resonates worldwide.
Leveraging outside expertise
Rather than building out the challenge’s infrastructure itself, Kellogg is working with Lever for Change to implement Racial Equity 2030. Lever for Change debuted last year as an affiliate nonprofit of the MacArthur Foundation, and represents the evolution of that funder’s much-discussed 100&Change grant competition, which awards $100 million to one proposal in each round. We’ve been following Lever for Change as it ramps up its offerings, including a series of funding challenges bankrolled by partner organizations like Kellogg, as well as a Bold Solutions Network meant to preserve and circulate ideas that don’t actually win their respective challenges.
“We knew that [Lever for Change] had the infrastructure,” Tabron said. “If the Kellogg Foundation had to replicate that system, it would have taken us maybe another year for launch. And we wanted to launch very quickly.” This is the first time Kellogg is working with Lever for Change, and also one of the first times Lever for Change is partnering with an established legacy foundation besides MacArthur.
“We started discussing a potential partnership with the Kellogg team at a conference last year,” said Lever for Change CEO Cecilia Conrad, who also serves as managing director for MacArthur’s 100&Change and MacArthur Fellows programs. “The conversation progressed from there, and we’ve really enjoyed working with them throughout the entire process,” Conrad said.
To date, Lever for Change has designed and managed nine competitions. We’ve written about a fair few of them, including the Economic Opportunity Challenge, the Larsen Lam ICONIQ Impact Award (sponsored by billionaire couple Chris Larsen and Lyna Lam), the Lone Star Prize (sponsored by Lyda Hill Philanthropies), the 2030 Climate Challenge and Melinda Gates’ and MacKenzie Scott’s $30 million Equality Can’t Wait challenge, focused on gender equity.
Lever for Change primarily partners with individual donors and newer family foundations, either to ease their entry into philanthropy or to make up for a lack of staff time or expertise with grant competitions. The fact that it’s working with the Kellogg Foundation is a testament to how much Lever for Change and its approach is catching on, as well as another sign that big legacy funders aren’t always dinosaurs. Ideally, they’ll be able to adapt to and use new resources as they arise, including intermediaries like Lever for Change that have one foot in the world of major living donors. Since its inception about a year ago, Conrad says Lever for Change has “leveraged $527 million in capital, including award funding and additional donations to organizations featured in our competitions.”
Grant competitions and their discontents
As popular as they are, challenges like 100&Change and the Lever for Change competitions aren’t without their downsides. Prize philanthropy has been subject to several criticisms, including that it wastes applicants’ time and resources, and that it provides for little follow-through on the long and difficult work of social change—overemphasizing the importance of new innovations and then failing to see them through to fruition. Prizes and awards may also promote the idea that funding big problems means reinventing the wheel, rather than simply moving money where it’s needed now.
Kellogg’s challenge isn’t immune to those issues. During the reporting of this article, Inside Philanthropy received an op-ed from Hazen Foundation President Lori Bezahler, criticizing Kellogg’s program. The core critique is that by choosing a competition format, Kellogg has committed to a process that could work against its own racial equity goals. In particular, the op-ed argues that competitions are divisive and fail to build collective power, that it’s unclear whether Kellogg will end up choosing proposals led by and centered on those most affected, and that finalists who don’t end up getting a $10 million or $20 million award may have wasted substantial time and effort.
You can read Bezahler’s op-ed in its entirety here, but we wanted to give Kellogg the opportunity to respond here. As mentioned before, Kellogg sees Racial Equity 2030 as less of a competition and more of an open call intended to support innovation and expand networks. Describing it as a “more participatory grantmaking approach,” the foundation told Inside Philanthropy in a statement, “The challenge is an opportunity and a mechanism for us to engage as many people as possible to find bold solutions even beyond our networks.” It cited the 10 finalists’ $1 million planning grants and capacity building support over nine months to counter the idea that the challenge is at heart a meritocratic, winners-take-all competition.
Kellogg also called attention to other facts about the challenge. For instance, it’s providing awardees with sustained support over a decade, and not just giving winners a million or two upfront. It’s also using a normalization technique to ensure that applications get a fair shake regardless of whether they happen to come before a more critical or more generous judge. On the question of communities most affected, Kellogg said its scoring rubric “specifically prioritizes proposals led by teams with lived experience and driven by community-led solutions that center those who are most impacted by systemic injustices.”
On the charge that the five to seven finalists who don’t win will have wasted their time, Kellogg pointed to their inclusion in Lever for Change’s Bold Solutions Network, which attempts to match promising proposals with funding even if participants didn’t succeed in their initial challenge. “Finalists will work intensively with Lever for Change to strengthen their proposed solution, identify potential partners, understand their communities of interest, and find additional sources of support for their submitted projects,” the foundation stated. Finally, Kellogg characterized its peer review and scoring process as a means to knowledge sharing and dialogue that can raise the profiles of small and mid-sized organizations led by people of color.
More to come
Though it’s clear Kellogg is aware of the difficulties grant challenges pose, and has taken steps to address some of them, Racial Equity 2030 doesn’t completely escape the power imbalances inherent in prize philanthropy. Whether or not those imbalances will actually hinder the effort’s goals depends to a large degree on what ends up getting funded, and whether the process, in execution, is as supportive and collaborative as Kellogg says it will be. The opinion in vogue among progressive funders is that movement work provides the most bang for the buck, and Kellogg certainly isn’t averse to those strategies.
Another matter the op-ed doesn’t address: The branding of this challenge, as it were, is awfully self-referential. All this talk of anniversaries and centennials might not hinder the program’s goals in any meaningful way, but it does speak to established institutions’ tendency to get caught up in themselves. This is less a dig at Kellogg than a comment on the sector at large. It’s hard to respond nimbly in the moment when there are strategic plans to finalize, theories of change to expound, and reviews of organizational culture to carry out.
However one judges its merits, Racial Equity 2030 is only one of many racial equity initiatives underway at Kellogg. It’s also probably just the first of many such projects this grantmaker will debut going forward. Tabron and Payton all but alluded to more to come in the months ahead. If nothing else, this challenge showcases Kellogg’s willingness to lean into multiple funding strategies, so it’ll be interesting to see what it has in store next.
