How Will Walton's New Five-Year Plan Impact K-12 Education?

The Walton Family Foundation announced its new 2025 Strategic Plan yesterday, and framed it with the alliterative tagline “Listen, Learn, Lead.” New year, new Walton? Not exactly.

The foundation isn’t abandoning its signature education priorities. It will continue to champion the charter school movement, for example, a controversial area where Walton has taken the lead and funneled dollars for years.

WFF isn’t changing direction; instead, it’s training a different lens on the causes it supports, with a new stated emphasis on listening to the communities it serves, leaders said. The foundation will highlight three specific objectives in its five-year strategic plan:

Community-driven change
Diversity, equity and inclusion
Collaborative and inclusive partnerships

The plan will reach across all of the foundation’s program areas, which include, along with K-12 education, protecting rivers and oceans and the local communities they support, and investing in Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta, where the Walton family got its start.

Strategic plans tend to come and go in this sector, but Walton looms large in the areas it funds, granting over a half-billion dollars in 2019 and over $200 million to K-12 education alone. Any shift in how it operates could have far-reaching impact. The foundation’s heightened focus on inclusivity and being responsive to communities also reflects a larger trend underway in philanthropy, in which the pandemic and a nationwide push for racial equity have been pressuring funders to rethink how they operate. Walton’s new strategic plan raises the question of whether such a large and powerful funder can thread the needle between its own longstanding priorities and allowing communities to lead.

“It’s our intentionality that has shifted, not our core values,” said Caryl Stern, the Walton Family Foundation’s executive director. “We will continue to be who we are and to do what we are good at. But we’ll be increasing our efforts to ensure seats at the table for all voices, and to amplify those voices from our podium.”

Listening and learning

The language of any strategic plan is, by nature, aspirational and heavy on generalities rather than specifics. Still, the outlines of the new plan make it clear that Walton is aiming for a more inclusive approach in its funding. The foundation is embarking on a sustained effort to reach out to the communities it works with, which is where the listening and learning comes in, according to Marc Sternberg, K-12 education program director.

“This has to start with listening, and getting in the room with parents, stakeholders and community leaders, and asking what they want, facilitating a conversation about that and bringing to that data and what we’ve learned,” Sternberg said. “It’s going to be a set of conversations in communities far and wide, bringing voices together that are often unheard and overlooked, to set an agenda about what education could look like. One conversation at a time, one community at a time, we’re going to assemble transformation at a moment that requires it.”

Asked if he thinks philanthropy hasn’t traditionally done enough listening, Sternberg said, “I think we have learned that to sustain that work, we need to work harder to build buy-in and to do the listening that I’m talking about. And to make sure that the work we’re supporting with all of our enthusiasm and beliefs is answering a question that comes from the community.”

Getting out of the way

To provide a glimpse of what Walton’s strategic plan will look like in practice, Romy Drucker, Walton’s deputy director of K-12 education programs, points to the new VELA Education Fund, which it created in partnership with the Charles Koch Institute in August 2020.

VELA launched in the middle of the pandemic with a $1 million “Meet the Moment” program to quickly get funds to education innovators without forcing them to navigate the complicated and time-consuming process typically required to get a grant. One VELA grantee, the National Parents Union, used the funds to help parents create pandemic pods to keep children in disadvantaged communities learning at home, as IP previously reported.

“That’s an example of philanthropy getting out of the way and convening a conversation in which parents helped other parents put in place support for students,” Drucker pointed out.

The 1954 Project, which aims to increase the number of Black leaders in the education pipeline, is another example. Walton teamed up with the Chicago-based Cleveland Avenue Foundation for Education to provide seed funding for the project, as IP previously reported.

“We’re increasingly seeing the value of a community approach, of supporting those who have proximity to the issues because of their own lived experience,” Melinda Wright, Walton senior program officer, told IP. “These are the people who are best placed to find solutions.”

2020 and beyond

WFF put the final touches on its new strategic plan last spring, before the pandemic hit and George Floyd was murdered, but Marc Sternberg says the events of 2020 only make the goals more urgent. “All that COVID has done, through the suffering it has created, is to make things more true than they were before,” he said. “If you were on the wrong side of the tracks, you are more on the wrong side now. If you were struggling to get your kid into a good school, you’re struggling more now. This work—it just raises the stakes. If this isn’t the moment for big and bold thinking about a better future for what schools and learning can look like, then we’re not going to experience one.”

For Sternberg, part of that boldness means bridging the conflicts that have riven the education landscape in recent years. “In my 25 years in education, I’ve never seen anything close to this articulation that ‘we’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, and there’s got to be something better.’ Right now, I see a terrific opportunity to move past the old lines of division to create a new North Star: Building an education system for an information age, as opposed to a system that is built for an age that is over.”

Carly Stern believes that Walton’s approach is one that could chart a course for other philanthropies, as well. “I don’t think it’s a matter of ‘ears shut,’ but now, we are going out with the intention of listening. Often, foundations set a goal and only hear what is related to the goal. We want to understand what a project means for a community, what it means for the future of education, and to learn alongside the communities we work with. I hope at the end of our five-year plan, we’ll be known for this: learning and leading together.”

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