michigan

overview

In Michigan, it is estimated that one in five children live in poverty. Unemployment rates have surpassed 15 percent. And more than 11 percent of households lack ready and affordable access to healthy food. But communities are standing tall and fighting for a better future. From urban Detroit to suburban Battle Creek to Michigan’s rural Upper and Lower Peninsulas, we’re helping to transform communities by supporting local efforts to put healthy food on the table, jump-start education and promote entrepreneurship. By lifting vulnerable children and families out of poverty, we’re helping build a nation in which all children thrive.

Protecting Michigan’s vulnerable children and propelling them to success has been a key part of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's mission for the past 80 years.

W.K. Kellogg's first philanthropic impulses to improve the lives of vulnerable children came in response to frustration over not being able to help his grandson, who was seriously injured in a fall, as well as to conditions in his hometown of Battle Creek and surrounding Michigan communities. Among other things, he knew that the economic viability of families was essential to the well-being of children. So, rather than lay off workers during the Great Depression, he revamped Kellogg Company shifts to keep more people on the job, and initiated park projects to employ greater numbers of local workers.

By the time he formalized his philanthropic interests, Mr. Kellogg was convinced that an action-based approach to even the most daunting societal challenges was better for children, their families and their communities. The foundation's first pioneering venture, the Michigan Community Health Project, was an unconventional collaboration that joined children, teachers, librarians, parents, civic leaders, health care providers, tradesmen and university researchers in an effort to improve the lives of children.

Mr. Kellogg was impatient for results. If the pressing needs of children and Michigan's social and economic conditions were catalysts, he resolved that the foundation would furnish the risk capital of society to fuel ingenuity in response.

Over the course of 15 years, leaders emerged and were inspired to create new community services. Witnessing the results of this program, W.K. commented that the "greatest good for the greatest number can only come through the education of the child, the parent, the teacher, the family physicians, the dentists and the community in general."

When Mr. Kellogg created the Kellogg Foundation, the foundation's efforts were concentrated in seven counties in south central Michigan.

Today, with the state in crisis, that geographic scope has widened. The W.K. Kellogg foundation is the only one of Michigan's three largest philanthropies with a statewide focus on initiatives that offer the potential to create innovative social change that will improve conditions for people. And President and CEO Sterling K. Speirn has pledged that 50 percent of the foundation’s budget for place-based initiatives will be spent in Michigan.

In Michigan today, 468,000 children—one in five—live in poverty. Unemployment rates have well surpassed 10 percent. And more than 11 percent of households lack ready and affordable access to healthful food. Job losses make family economic security, and therefore children's futures, more precarious. State funding cuts at every level of service are stretching community resources available to address families in crisis. And in the face of greater competition for fewer public dollars, societal differences are becoming a target.

Even as the population of Michigan becomes more diverse, some communities are acting on the impulse to contract. Under these economic and societal circumstances, graduates of Michigan's colleges and universities are leaving the state in record numbers. And among the young people who remain, one out of six 18- to 24-year-olds with a high school diploma is unemployed and not enrolled in school.

Despite Michigan's wealth of natural resources, its respected institutions of higher learning, its growing capacity for emerging economies, and its diversity, the confluence of social and economic challenges threaten the state's viability.

In confronting many of these challenges, the foundation has made currently active legacy grants totaling more than $49 million for Michigan-based initiatives, including:

2009 grants

More recently, during the 2009 calendar year, the foundation approved more than $75 million in place-based grant requests centered either on Michigan alone, or on Michigan in combination with its other two priority states: New Mexico and Mississippi. Those grants include: