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Right now in the United States, too many children are missing the basics they need to grow up healthy and thrive. The systems that are meant to support their health, education and family well-being are broken. Year after year, policy and budget choices take us down the wrong path, leaving families to navigate a difficult maze to get the support they need. This impacts not only children and their families, but our entire economy. The way we support children is off-track, not by accident but by choice.
What if we chose a better direction? We can lay the foundation for a system where public preschool and affordable early learning are built into our infrastructure. We can choose to build systems that provide nutritious food, clinics and workplaces that keep families healthy and secure. We can create the pathways to good jobs with fair wages, safe working conditions and flexibility for caregiving.
In this new animation, we explain how the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is committed to scaling innovative solutions that work and investing in systems that support children, families and caregivers. Together we can build a future where every child, family and community has the opportunity to thrive.
The child care system in the United States doesn’t just affect children and parents, it’s woven into the fabric of our economy. But right now, that fabric is fraying. The child care system in the United States is broken and it’s costing everyone.
It costs parents who often pay more for child care than they would for college tuition. It costs the workforce, often women of color who are underpaid and undersupported. It costs employers who lose $23 billion a year in missing revenue, productivity and hiring costs from employees struggling to find child care. It doesn’t have to be this way. Across the country, innovations are proving that a better child care system is possible.
This new animation explains how the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is scaling effective solutions by investing in innovative programs, advocating for more public investment and supporting sustainable business models that work for children, parents and providers. Together, we can build a stronger, more resilient child care system that works for everyone.
Every day, many families struggle to make ends meet, even with a job, and one unexpected expense can trigger a flood of instability. When children experience financial insecurity, their physical and mental wellbeing can be affected for years to come. Reliable income and access to essentials like food, healthcare and education create a ripple effect of stability and wellbeing.
When they have fewer financial pressures, caregivers can focus on nurturing their children and building a secure home environment. These kinds of support lay the groundwork for stronger families, healthier kids and more resilient communities.
This animation explains how the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is supporting policies and programs that boost financial stability -– including guaranteed income programs. Research shows that when caregivers receive unconditional cash benefits, they invest in their children’s needs, creating a future where every child can thrive.
Americans spend significantly more on health than other wealthy countries. Yet, we face the worst health outcomes with the lowest life expectancy and highest maternal and infant mortality rates among peer nations. While our current health system fails everyone, it doesn’t affect all communities equally. This animation explains how the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is supporting efforts to build equitable health systems where every person, regardless of background, has access to the essential ingredients of optimal health.
Our partners and grantees are investing at the intersection of healthcare, education and community systems to create conditions where all children and families can thrive. We fund initiatives that create culturally respectful health and social support systems that enable better communication and building trust between individuals and providers, which leads to improved health outcomes and reduces disparities.
We also support a well-funded and equitable public health system that invests in preventive care. We need affordable and quality health care, paid family leave, respectful maternity care and a diverse and culturally affirming public health workforce. Together, we can build a future where the wellbeing of all children, families and communities is a fundamental right.
Racial equity means that everyone, regardless of their race or ethnicity, has a fair shot at opportunities and success. It’s about ensuring that no one’s identity determines how they are treated or the life outcomes they experience.
Achieving racial equity requires three things. First, it means transforming the way we organize ourselves – what some people call systems, practices and policies – in every setting as neighbors, classmates, colleagues and members of the larger community. Second, it means engaging in racial healing to better understand each other and the ways that racism impacts our lives. Third, it requires communities to collectively envision an equitable future and actively work toward that vision.
Racial healing allows us to build relationships within our communities l to increase our collective capacity to work toward achieving racial equity.
When it comes to racial equity and racial healing, we support organizations that:
We also support initiatives such as:
This is why we focus our health equity grantmaking in two priority areas:
Good health is about more than medical care. Health equity means removing economic and social barriers that prevent people from experiencing optimal health, such as poverty, lack of transportation and education opportunities and environmental factors. We look for innovative initiatives that:
Healthy moms, healthy birthing people and healthy babies should be the starting point for a healthy society. Yet in the U.S., racial disparities in maternal and infant mortality and morbidity persist across all socioeconomic statuses – especially for Black and Indigenous families.Our grantmaking promotes peak health for birthing parents and our youngest children, prenatal through infancy. We look for initiatives that:
Approaches vary by location according to the expressed needs of our communities.
The Haiti Peer-Learning Network (HPLN) is a dynamic forum that fosters collaboration, innovation and systems change to improve the lives of Haitian children and families. It brings together more than 200 grantees, funding partners and diverse local and international stakeholders in public, private and nonprofit sectors to align efforts with local realities, priorities and opportunities.
Through intelligent study, cooperative planning and group action, the HPLN leverages the collective expertise and resources of its members to drive change across education, family economic security, food systems, health and leadership.
Since 2013, the HPLN has spurred the development and growth of transformative initiatives such as the Model School Network, the Haiti Food System Alliance, Kolektif Arcadins and strengthened regional health systems in southern and central Haiti.
Our grantee partner, AtentaMente, developed a comprehensive socio-emotional learning (SEL) program for preschool and primary school, adapted for Maya children and educators. Leveraging their experience working with educational authorities and in policymaking, the organization is making SEL programming available to children throughout the Yucatán Peninsula.
AtentaMente reaches:
3
States in the Yucatán Peninsula
395
Preschools
450
Primary Schools
Learn more about AtentaMente
Welcome to our micro-regions of southern Mexico – dynamic Indigenous communities from the lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula to the misty highlands of Chiapas, from tropical to cloud forests, cenotes to rivers, plains to mountains, diversified systems like milpa and backyard vegetable gardens to apiaries and coffee plantations, from Yucatec Maya to Tsotsil and Tseltal people.
The inner Yucatan Peninsula and Chiapas Highlands represent great cultural and biological diversity but also share important traits…
Communities are reclaiming history long held by colonists, telling their own stories and writing their own futures, planting the seeds of progress in their ancestors’ earth, growing strong organizations, leadership and partnerships, and beginning to reap the rewards: thriving food systems, health systems, education models and income generation opportunities.
Nurtured more every day, the children are rising to lead and harvest a brighter future.
Budget information is crucial for informed decision-making and progress in early childhood education. The Early Childhood Education Budget book is a tool for Mississippi policymakers, educators and stakeholders to help them understand and evaluate the allocation of resources for our children.
Welcome to Mississippi. A state rich in culture and tradition. A place where civil rights activists still courageously carry the mantle for just and equitable policies. A community continually reckoning with its history of slavery and the modern-day impacts.
William Faulkner once said, “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” This Deep South state holds some of the widest racial disparities, a consequence of historical policies and racialized systems that still perpetuate inequities in pay, access to care and opportunities to work.
However, at WKKF, we see Mississippi as a beacon of light in the South.
In Grand Rapids, we concentrate our investments on bringing inclusive growth and equitable access to opportunity in:
Our approach to racial equity and community engagement is grounded in supporting the work and leadership of people of color. We emphasize building power within their communities to create more equitable systems, structures and narrative change.
Good food helps children grow up healthy and strong, fuels brain power and gets kids ready to learn. Good food practices protect and respect the natural environment.
Good food comes from community – from farmers, markets, grocers, schools and other institutions that work together to ensure children and families can access the nutrition they need.
Yet children and families of color in low-income communities face significant barriers in their access to good food, while discriminatory policies limit access to resources for small farmers, community farmers and entrepreneurs of color across the food system.
We support efforts to address these challenges and transform food systems to better serve communities, farmers, workers, businesses, families, children and our natural environment.
Approaches vary by location, as we listen to communities to identify needed solutions and strategies.
Many health-promoting resources – like education, transportation and healthy food – are unevenly distributed. That’s why we support efforts that dismantle economic and social obstacles to health, such as poverty and discrimination, so everyone has an opportunity to be healthy.We maintain a dual focus on reducing health disparities through programs or services, as well as fixing broken systems that don’t work for everyone. Our funding supports:
Learn more about the social determinants of health.
Our grantmaking aims to ensure that people of color and those in low-income communities can financially sustain their families. We support strategies and innovations that offer an array of opportunities, including:
Our approaches vary by location, in response to communities’ vision and expressed needs.
Early childhood care and education systems play a hefty role in supporting children’s learning and development, so they are ready for success in school and life. However, significant challenges and barriers disproportionately affect children of color, children from low-income families and English learners.This is why we focus on advancing equity and increasing access to culturally affirming care and learning in early childhood education, as well as school systems more broadly.Our approaches vary by location, in response to communities’ vision and expressed needs.
Female leaders from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Urban League of Louisiana, Louisiana Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Ashé Cultural Arts Center take to the Global Black Economic Forum stage at the 2023 ESSENCE Festival of Culture™ presented by Coca-Cola®. They talk about what really is needed to achieve Black wealth, the creativity of Black entrepreneurs in our economy and the role Black culturalists play in promoting policies that lead to Black joy.
New Orleans is anchored in ingenuity. It ranks No. 1 in self-employment among Black people, and entrepreneurship is a gateway to jobs and wealth-building. After Hurricane Katrina, the city’s innovative entrepreneurs attracted investors. However, the mostly Black population has not benefited equitably from those investments.
Black-Owned Businesses in NOLA
2%
City’s Sales Receipts
Our investments support increasing access to capital and capacity-building resources for businesses that have historically lacked access to funding – so they can start up, stay up and scale up.
We also support innovative equity-focused approaches that accelerate delivery of capital to entrepreneurs of color while reducing risk.
Our employment equity approaches are among the most urgent in yielding dividends for families. Many of the issues in this sector are structural. So we also support power-building, collaboration between sectors and advocacy that helps transform those systems.
We focus on expanding access to better jobs – particularly in high-paying industries and high-demand sectors like green careers, technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and the environment. We do this through job mentorship, training and experience for individuals, and capacity-building to help organizations connect individuals to those career opportunities.
Good-paying jobs present only one pathway to family economic security. In New Orleans and Louisiana, families also navigate the financial impact of climate change and environmental disasters. Our grants provide families with wraparound supports: assistance with transportation, dependable quality child care and financial literacy tools that are essential to building stability and wealth.
How do you improve student achievement? Teacher quality is the single most influential school-based factor. Meanwhile, culturally relevant approaches make a difference for all learners.
Nestled inside the city’s all-charter public education system – unlike any other in the U.S. – our grants strengthen the educator workforce, improving teacher quality and retention. We also support culturally relevant approaches with a focus on fostering a love of learning and ultimately improving literacy and numeracy rates by the critical third-grade gateway.
An essential deeply held belief undergirds all of our work: Those closest to a problem know the solutions. Our investments braid community engagement, power-building, advocacy and voice. The payoff: Schools listen to parents and design policies that respond to the needs of diverse learners, including those with special needs and English language learners.