When the W.K. Kellogg Foundation first rolled out its Racial Equity 2030 grant challenge in the fall of 2020, the events of the past summer were fresh in our collective imagination. It seemed a fitting moment for this steadfast racial justice grantmaker to mark its 90th anniversary by leaning into a cause it had championed well before the 2020-era pledges started coming in. “We were built for this,” Carla Thompson Payton, Kellogg’s vice president for program strategy, told us at the time.
Earlier this month, after winnowing through more than 1,400 applications from around the globe, Kellogg announced the challenge’s five winners. They were drawn from a pool of 10 finalist organizations, announced roughly a year ago, which each received $1 million planning grants and capacity support. The five awardees will split $80 million in long-term support extending through 2030, when the foundation will mark its centennial.
The majority of Kellogg’s grantmaking takes place in the United States, but the foundation hasn’t shied away from elevating international awardees: Two of the five work outside the U.S., while another will operate in the U.S., Kenya and Sierra Leone.
Kellogg has made a point of funding “bold solutions” that it sees as scalable. “Each of the awardees isn’t just working on projects that will improve the lives of the communities they serve directly,” wrote Kellogg President and CEO La June Montgomery Tabron in a USA Today op-ed. “They also are ambitious, creative efforts that attack the roots of racial inequality and could be scaled to deliver transformative change for communities across the globe.”
There’s a lot to like about what Kellogg’s doing here. The awardees’ work is intersectional by design and addresses the structural roots of racial inequity in interesting, ambitious ways. Several awardees are seeking to shift the legal landscape in favor of marginalized people. For instance, an initiative spearheaded by the Indian Law Resource Center will work to secure land rights and titles for Indigenous communities in Mexico and Central and South America. If successful, the effort will have positive carry-over effects not only in the realm of human rights and racial equity, but also in terms of economic empowerment and climate change mitigation.
Another awardee, Namati, is equipping community paralegals to seek remedies for harms perpetrated against vulnerable communities in several countries, with a focus on addressing environmental racism.
Other awardees want to reimagine entire local and national systems along racially just lines. In Brazil, the SETA Project is launching a “national communications and advocacy campaign” to combat Eurocentrism and promote anti-racist practices in the nation’s public education system. And in Hawai’i, a collaborative of community organizations and public agencies is looking to replace a youth incarceration system that disproportionately affects Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders with restorative programming rooted in Native Hawaiian practices.
The final project, Healing Through Justice, will work in Chicago to address the trauma and mental health challenges many youth of color face there, in part by training youth fellows to engage with their peers, and by working with thousands of other young leaders.
Kellogg’s long-term support for the awardees is a big point in its favor. In our own recent investigation of 11 philanthropic racial justice pledges (which did not include Kellogg’s commitments), multiyear support was not a guarantee, even among a very progressive list of grantmakers. For funders to back racial justice groups for nearly a decade, as in this case, is rare. In a sense, Kellogg has visibly hitched its name and reputation to the success of these initiatives. It’s a risky move, but it’s also a sign of just how far the funder trusts these grantees, which is good to see in a racial justice context — and in any philanthropic context, for that matter.
That said, some of the critiques that Racial Equity 2030 prompted when it was first launched still stand. At that time, Inside Philanthropy published an op-ed by Edward W. Hazen Foundation CEO Lori Bezahler articulating some of those criticisms. In particular, Bezahler questioned Kellogg’s explicit choice to structure the initiative as a competition — in this case, one that required an outlay of time and effort from over 1,400 applicants for only 10 chances to actually get Kellogg money. Bezahler also wondered whether Kellogg would choose proposals led by and centered on those most affected.
In a statement Kellogg provided to us at the time, the foundation characterized Racial Equity 2030 as a “more participatory grantmaking approach” rather than a straight-up competition, and called attention to the 10 finalists’ $1 million planning grants and a normalization technique to ensure fairness in the application review process. Kellogg also incorporated peer-to-peer review, letting each applicant score and comment on five other applications. In addition, the foundation told us that its scoring mechanism “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.”
Here at IP, we’ve long viewed philanthropic prizes and competitions with some skepticism, for many of the same reasons Bezahler cited two years ago. While Kellogg did take steps to mitigate some of those problems with Racial Equity 2030, the objection to grant competitions on the basis of lost time and effort still holds. Of course, that criticism also applies to a vast range of hurdles grantseekers are obliged to navigate, and certainly isn’t limited to these larger and more splashy grant challenges.
Lever for Change, a MacArthur Foundation affiliate that hosts grant competitions and worked with Kellogg to implement Racial Equity 2030, has been one strong advocate for the continued usefulness of the challenge/competition model. One of its main arguments has always been that whether or not a given applicant actually wins a grant, a competition can confer value on that organization’s work by bringing it to the attention of other potential donors.
Lever for Change has sought to make that case with its “Bold Solutions Network,” and Kellogg has followed suit — at least when it comes to the award-winners — by promoting the heck out of them. Recall Tabron’s emphasis on the potential for scale. Kellogg’s support can give these initiatives a big boost, but getting attention and backing from other funders is also part of the equation here.
As for whether the five awardees truly confer power on those most affected, it’s tough to say. In our own deep dive into a selection of philanthropic racial justice pledges, we found that in most cases, the funding has failed to meaningfully shift decision-making power to community members. Given its framing as a competition and Kellogg’s final say over any and all awards, it would be difficult to say anything different about Racial Equity 2030 — at least in terms of the competition itself.
However, there’s cause for a sunnier outlook when it comes to what the awardees are doing with the money. In pretty much every case, these initiatives are centered on empowering people from affected communities, and often in impressive numbers. Training and equipping ground-level advocates, educators, community leaders, youth leaders and paralegals is a major throughline, as is making concrete changes to law and policy to give marginalized people more control over their lives.
In that sense, Racial Equity 2030 holds a great deal of promise going forward, even if structuring it as a competition was a questionable choice.