Kellogg Foundation Takes New Approach to Aiding Young People

In May 2007, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation gathered its more than 200 staff members for a three-day discussion

and brainstorming session. It was the start of a soul-searching process that has led to a new mission statement and, for the foundation’s program staff, a new organizational structure that goes into effect this week.

The changes are designed to break down divisions among departments within the organization, seek multifaceted approaches to solving problems, and sharpen the organization’s focus on the vision of its founder, W.K. Kellogg, the breakfast-cereal magnate.

All of the foundation’s grant-making staff members will be assigned to interdisciplinary teams in an organizational system that is rare among foundations but common in large companies.

Sterling Speirn, president of the foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich., describes the overhaul as “starting the next generation of our work.”

But, he says, the foundation will continue to build on the efforts it has supported in the past and probably will continue many of its current grant-making programs.

“The great thing is that all of our program areas were already powerful levers for change for vulnerable kids and families,” he says. “We didn’t have to invent a new program to be right there in the mix.”

A New Mandate

When Mr. Kellogg established the foundation — one of the world’s largest philanthropies, with $8.4-billion in assets — at the start of the Great Depression, he sought to aid disadvantaged children. “His guidance in 1930 was: ‘Do anything you please so long as it promotes the health, happiness, and well-being of children,’” says Mr. Speirn, who took the helm of the foundation in 2006.

The new mission statement reflects that mandate by pledging that the foundation will “strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success.”

In the past, Kellogg’s staff members say, the organization sometimes seemed more like a collection of mini-foundations gathered under one roof. The hope is that the new mission statement will unify the grant maker around a single goal.

“It hasn’t always been easy to give an ‘elevator speech’ about the Kellogg foundation, unless we’re in an elevator in a very tall building,” says Jim McHale, senior vice president for programs. “Now it’s going to be much easier for us to talk about the purpose and the intent of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.”

It is not yet clear exactly how the new mission statement will change the foundation’s grant making, or whether any programs will be cut, Mr. McHale says, except that it will provide a clearer lens through which to view potential projects.

“It’s going to make our decision making that much easier,” he says. “We’ll really be able to ask ourselves, how is this going to impact the lives of vulnerable children?”

In addition, the foundation, which provided $656.8-million in grants last year, is seeking to change the way it pursues its mission by emphasizing holistic, multifaceted solutions to the problems that threaten children and families. “We’re really proud of our legacy work across our program areas,” Mr. Speirn says. “It just seems that the challenges we face call for a more integrated approach.”

Until this month, the foundation’s approximately 65 staff members who focus on grant making for programs in the United States worked in four departments, such as health, or food systems and rural development, depending on their background and expertise. But such divisions didn’t reflect the way that social issues intertwine in the real world — for example, how poor nutrition can derail a child’s education, or how financial instability can affect health.

Under a new system, members of the grant-making staff will continue to work together based on their expertise, but will also participate in interdisciplinary teams that focus on a geographic area or on one of three strategic goals, including racial equity, leadership, and public policy, that will infuse all of the foundation’s work. The teams that have a geographic focus will make grants in Michigan and two other states and one metropolitan area yet to be announced.

The new arrangement will require staff members to report to more than one supervisor and to work with colleagues throughout the organization. Under the old system, “we would have interacted a lot with people within our own given unit, which for most of us meant not walking more than 20 paces in a given day,” says Ricardo Salvador, a program director. “Now we’ll actually be doing a whole lot more work across the building.”

Multiple Issues

The resulting structure will resemble a matrix, with each staff member working on several issues. For example, one program officer might be asked to focus on community assets and on Michigan, or on education and learning and on leadership.

Gail Christopher, one of three newly hired vice presidents, is leading teams on racial equity; public policy; and food, health, and well-being. She comes to Kellogg from a job as director of the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a nonprofit think tank in Washington that focuses on issues that affect members of minority groups.

“Previously, you might have defined yourself as vice president of health,” she says. “Now you are a vice president for the foundation, and your slate of responsibilities continues to grow.”

Tony Berkley, a program director at the Kellogg foundation, worked for several years in an arrangement similar to a matrix structure elsewhere at the foundation before he joined the grant-making staff. He’s optimistic about the change but says some staff members might find the adjustment challenging.

“We have a culture that’s heavily meetings-focused,” Mr. Berkley says. “What happens when you’re in a matrix structure is that there’s almost a constant flow of meetings, and they conflict.”

Breaking Down Walls

Matrix structures have become common in the corporate world, where companies might organize employees by both a geographic region and a product line. The arrangement is unusual in philanthropy, says Melissa Berman, president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, an organization in New York that advises foundations and donors. (Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors is a Kellogg foundation grantee.)

Yet the Kellogg foundation is hardly alone in seeking to break down departmental divisions. “Many large foundations are trying to find ways to eliminate the rigidity of the classic program-area structure,” Ms. Berman says. “Problems in the real world don’t organize themselves in terms of program areas. The more we understand about how issues like health and education are linked, the less sense it makes to separate them rigidly.”

Mr. Speirn thinks the new approach will lead to more-creative grant making. “It feels like we’ve crossed the Rubicon,” he says. “In the past, we would aspire to do cross-program work, but it always seemed like an exception to the rule.”

Under the new system, he says, that situation will be reversed; the foundation’s interdisciplinary efforts will become more common than grants made to deal with a single topic.

Mark Kramer, managing director of FSG Social Impact Advisors, a nonprofit management consulting group in Boston (which has been a Kellogg foundation grantee in the past), describes the move to a matrix structure as “a terrific idea to try.”

Both he and Ms. Berman caution, though, that the complexity of such arrangements can introduce new challenges.

“I don’t know any organization with a matrix structure in the corporate world that doesn’t struggle with it,” Mr. Kramer says. “They are very difficult to make work because people generally need clarity about what they’re responsible for and whom they’re reporting to.”

In addition, staff members from different departments might approach problems in very different ways. Still, if the foundation succeeds, Mr. Kramer says, it could develop much more innovative ways to address persistent social ills.

Mr. Speirn says the Kellogg foundation carefully developed its plan for the reorganization over the course of 18 months, with support and suggestions from its trustees. Still, he expects challenges, particularly in developing new ways to communicate and dealing with the fact that most charities are organized to focus on a single cause. The foundation will also need to revamp its budgets, technology, and other systems to reflect the changes.

“It’s going to be a period of co-creation and discovery,” Mr. Speirn says. “We’ve created this framework. We are now going to hand it over to our staff and partners to discover how this framework is going to work.”