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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 led by people of color, Indigenous people and women – 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.
Historic wins need to be preserved. So we focus on strengthening the early childhood workforce, addressing issues of attrition and advocating for a living wage for educators. We also push for an early learning system that makes sense to all partners, children and families, reflective of parent voices and experiences.
Passage of the Early Education Act.
The city invests $750,000 in early childhood education (ECE).
Voters approve $21 million millage for ECE1,000 classroom seats added for children under 3 years old.A local HBCU builds an early childhood lab school.
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Moms and babies need culturally competent support beyond the birthing process. Our investments support safe housing for the houseless, ongoing medical care, education assistance, job placement and family counseling.
A healthy food system takes care of everyone, from growers to growing kids. With our support, families can use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dollars at farmers markets. And, farmers cooperatively bring produce to markets, sharing supplies, labor and transportation.