W. K. Kellogg Foundation

The foundation receives the great majority of its investment income from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation Trust, a separate charitable trust that exists exclusively to hold stock and channel the proceeds to the foundation for its grantmaking activities. In fiscal year 2024, the Trust contributed $358 million to the foundation and held nearly $9 billion in assets. Major recipients of foundation grantmaking have included the left-of-center groups Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, UnidosUS, the NAACP, the National Urban League, Race Forward, and the Open Society Foundations. ^{5 2 3 4}

Background

Will Keith Kellogg founded the W. K. Kellogg Child Welfare Foundation in June 1930, later renamed the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. The foundation’s original charter specified that its purposes “shall be confined to receiving funds for the health, education, and welfare of mankind, but principally of children or youth, directly or indirectly, without regard to sex, race, creed, or nationality.” In 1934, Kellogg donated more than $66 million in Kellogg Company stock and other assets, equivalent to more than $1 billion in current dollars, to the W. K. Kellogg Foundation Trust, which in turn funds the foundation’s charitable operations. ²

The foundation’s early operations were focused on a seven-county area surrounding Battle Creek, Michigan, where it built health clinics, community hospitals, and conducted medical screening programs. During and after World War II, the foundation expanded internationally, offering health fellowships to Latin American professionals and ultimately broadening its grantmaking globally. Researcher Martin Morse Wooster noted that Kellogg “never used his foundation to promote political ideas,” and that its founder “rejected socialism.” ^{6 2}

The foundation began a substantive shift in 1992 when it launched a $15 million African American Men and Boys Initiative, formally broadening its scope to include race-based grantmaking. In 2007, the board of trustees formally committed to operating as “an effective anti-racist organization that promotes racial equity.” In a January 2018 interview with National Public Radio, president and CEO La June Montgomery Tabron stated the foundation had dedicated itself to “ending structural racism.” ^{7 8 9 8 10}

The right-of-center Capital Research Center has observed that the foundation’s current operations represent a direct contradiction of W. K. Kellogg’s explicit founding instruction, as the foundation now makes race “the filter through which the dollars flow” despite a charter that specified service without regard to race. ²

Activities

Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation

The W. K. Kellogg Foundation launched its Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) initiative in 2016. The program was designed in collaboration with 176 partner organizations and touted itself as a national process to help people heal from the effects of racism. The program established multi-sector coalitions in 14 communities across the United States starting in 2017. The foundation had committed over $32 million to TRHT site funding as of 2026, with grants awarded for both planning and long-term implementation. The TRHT framework also expanded to college campuses through the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ TRHT Campus Centers program. ^{11 12 13}

National Day of Racial Healing

The foundation hosts an annual National Day of Racial Healing, held on the day after the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. The foundation recruited a coalition of left-wing civil rights groups as “Racial Equity Anchor Institutions,” including the Advancement Project, the NAACP, UnidosUS, the National Urban League, Race Forward, Demos, the PICO National Network, and the National Congress of American Indians. ¹⁴

Racial Equity 2030

In 2020, coinciding with its 90th anniversary, the foundation launched the Racial Equity 2030 Challenge, pledging $90 million to organizations developing what it described as scalable solutions to racial inequity worldwide. The initiative received 1,453 submissions from 72 countries. In October 2022, the foundation announced five awardees, committing $80 million over eight years to groups operating in Chicago, Brazil, Mexico, Central and South America, Hawaii, Kenya, and Sierra Leone. ^{8 15}

Expanding Equity

In 2019, the foundation launched Expanding Equity, a corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training program that had partnered with more than 250 companies and reached more than 3.5 million employees by the mid-2020s. The program offers three-month courses guiding corporate leaders in planning and implementing DEI strategies. ^{16 17}

Race Forward

Between 2019 and 2022, the foundation provided approximately $14.9 million to Race Forward, a group described by right-of-center sources as one “of the most aggressive promoters of critical race theory in both schools and corporations.” Race Forward operates the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE), a network that works to embed critical race theory-inspired racial equity frameworks into municipal government policies covering areas including housing and law enforcement. ^{18 2}

Film

In fiscal year 2016, the foundation contributed $3,567,387 to Macro Content Fund I, a private investment fund financing film and television productions featuring left-of-center racial and gender equity content, followed by a $5 million contribution in fiscal year 2017. ^{19 20}

Biden Administration Community Violence Intervention Collaborative

In June 2021, the Biden administration announced a program to combat rising gun violence and violent crime using a collaborative composed of government and nonprofit organizations funding community violence intervention (CVI) measures. The Kellogg Foundation was a major funder of the collaborative, along with the California Endowment, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation. Other foundations funding the initiative include the Kresge Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Emerson Collective, the Heising-Simons Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. CVI strategies “act as an alternative to heavy-handed policing” by focusing its efforts on the minority of citizens who are perpetrators or targets of violent crime. CVI treats violence as a communicable disease rather than a violent crime and attempts to stop the “spread” of violence. ²¹

Funding

The foundation’s primary funding source is the W. K. Kellogg Foundation Trust, which exists solely to hold stock on behalf of the foundation and only disburses money to the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. The trust held approximately $8.97 billion in assets and disbursed $358 million to the foundation in fiscal year 2024. ^{22 5}

The Trust holds legacy equity stakes in Kellogg-related corporate enterprises. In August 2024, snack company Mars announced an approximately $36 billion acquisition of Kellanova, a food company in which the Trust held a top shareholding position; the Trust was projected to realize approximately $4.3 billion from the transaction. ²³

Grantmaking

The foundation distributed approximately $286.5 million across 1,763 grants in fiscal year 2024. The foundation concentrates up to two-thirds of its grantmaking in its designated priority places: Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, and New Orleans domestically, and Mexico and Haiti internationally. ^{24 25}

The America Healing initiative, begun in 2007 by the foundation, provided $75 million to “anchor” civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, and the group also highlighted donations to left-of-center groups such as the Center for Popular Democracy, Community Change, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and United for Respect, when asked about its Black Lives Matter-related funding in 2020. ²⁶

Additional grantees have included the Open Society Foundations, Faith in Action (formerly PICO), the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Center for Community Change. ²

Leadership

La June Montgomery Tabron has worked as president and CEO of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation since 2014, when she succeeded the retiring Sterling Speirn. She is the foundation’s first female and first Black chief executive. Tabron joined the foundation in 1987 and previously worked as a financial controller, treasurer, and executive vice president of operations. She also sits on the Kellogg Company’s corporate board of directors and chairs the W. K. Kellogg Foundation Trust. Tabron’s total compensation exceeded $1 million annually in 2024, comprising $900,328 in base pay plus $213,972 in other compensation. ^{27 2}

Criticism

The right-of-center Heritage Foundation published a 2023 report examining how major philanthropic institutions had deviated from their founders’ original charitable intent in favor of race-conscious advocacy, citing the Kellogg Foundation at length. The report noted that W. K. Kellogg had originally specified that the foundation operate “without regard to sex, race, creed, or nationality,” and concluded that the foundation’s current operations contradict that founding mandate. ²⁸

The right-of-center Capital Research Center similarly alleged in 2025 that the foundation’s original purposes have been overtaken by left-wing activism, noting that the foundation directed approximately $91 million to Black Lives Matter–affiliated organizations in 2020 alone, and that tens of millions of additional dollars per year flow to groups engaged in racial and political organizing. ²