WASHINGTON – The Kellogg Foundation has inaugurated an ambitious nationwide campaign to combat racial and ethnic inequality with a five-year, $75 million commitment to award grants to support organizations working to fight racism.
At their news conference in Washington, D.C., Kellogg officials on Tuesday challenged the tendency of Americans to identify post-racial progress with statistics that instead demonstrate the pervasive disparities between Whites and racial minorities in nearly every social and economic indicator.
“Far too many vulnerable children still grow up in profoundly limited opportunities to succeed because of the damaging effects of long-term racial and ethnic discrimination,” said Fred Keller, trustee of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. “They face the effects of structural racism in every aspect of their lives.”
The “America Healing” initiative will target children in three critical areas, including education, nutrition and health, and family economic security. The initiative’s mission is to work with organizations to support efforts to redirect and channel productive social investment into disadvantaged communities.
“It’s poverty—its burdens and its crushing consequences—that is at the heart of vulnerability for children in this country,” said Sterling Speirn, president and CEO of the Kellogg Foundation. “To have a nation and a vision of that nation filled with communities that are propelling vulnerable children to success demands that we look at the obstacles that stand between us and that vision.”
Speirn identified those obstacles with alarming statistics about the poor employment prospects for Black youth, the documented income gaps between racial groups, and the lower life expectancy of minorities.
Kellogg’s “hope-filled” initiative is guided by its resolve to become an “anti-racist” organization, Speirn said. Nearly 1,000 proposals were submitted, but, in the first phase, 119 grants were awarded, totaling $14.6 million, according to Kellogg officials.
