Leadership

Kellogg Foundation Teams With Nonprofits on Racial-Healing Campaign

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, one of the country's largest philanthropic organizations, will collaborate with 70 nonprofits as part of its Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation effort, which aims to find structural solutions to the ongoing problem of racism.

One of the largest philanthropic foundations in the country hopes to keep the discussion going regarding racial equality, and it’s doing so with the help of a number of nonprofits and associations.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF), which is funded in part by a significant percentage of stock in the namesake cereal company, has in the past nine years spent $200 million funding efforts to help break down structural divides that it argues can hold back society as a whole. The organization’s latest part of that initiative, which it calls the Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) campaign, hopes to take those efforts even further.

The campaign, which is working with 70 nonprofits, associations, and educational organizations—including the American Library Association, the National League of Cities, the Northeastern University School of Journalism, and the NAACP—aims to move beyond conversation and find ways to encourage changes in society as a whole.

“Our nation looks at far too many people as deficits, instead of assets,” said La June Montgomery Tabron, the foundation’s president and CEO, in a news release. “Entrenched beliefs create an uneven disbursement of opportunities that give advantages when it comes to jobs, education, housing, civic participation and health. TRHT follows a proven and structured process for implementing change that can allow all children to matter and have opportunities to succeed.”

One starting point for the campaign comes from Northeastern University’s journalism school, which assisted the foundation in the creation of a meta-study focused on recent trends in racism. The study found that last year, more than half of all white Americans felt the need to do more to improve equality between whites and blacks and that 70 percent of Latinos felt that more needed to be done to improve equality. The study also highlighted that more Americans were pessimistic about the state of race relations than during any other time within the past two decades.

From here, the TRHT campaign will move toward awareness advertising, with the launch of a new effort called Remix the Narrative, which includes a social media element.

And in the foundation’s hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan, Tabron emphasizes that the TRHT campaign will also take on a local element.

“In Battle Creek those conversations must be centered on racial healing,” Tabron wrote in a recent op-ed for the Battle Creek Enquirer. “Only then can we fully explore the segregated housing patterns, the disproportionate unemployment in minority communities and the history behind establishing four school districts for a city with less than 14,000 students.”

(iStock/Thinkstock)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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