Overview

W.K. Kellogg established the foundation that bears his name in 1930 on the brink of the Great Depression. It was the next logical step for a man who had for many years contributed to a broad range of charities. In creating the Kellogg Foundation, Mr. Kellogg sought to make his giving more focused and purposeful. As he admitted at the time, “It has been much easier to make money than to know how to spend it wisely.”

For much of the 1930s, the Kellogg Foundation worked near its hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan. Most of the Foundation’s early work revolved around the Michigan Community Health Project. The MCHP served seven counties in south central Michigan. It was a comprehensive effort that targeted K-12 education and public health in rural communities where one-room schoolhouses and outdoor privies were still the norm.

During the early years of World War II, the Kellogg Foundation expanded its grants beyond Michigan and beyond the United States. More than 450 study fellowships for Latin American health professionals paved the way for extensive programming in the Southern Hemisphere. In war-weary Europe, the Kellogg grants help to revive and modernize farm economies.

By time the Foundation reached its 25th anniversary, the organization had seen considerable growth. The organization’s assets stood at $124 million. Its annual “payout,” the amount spent for charitable purposes, had skyrocketed from $26,000 in 1930 to $4.4 million in 1955. In its programming, the Foundation focused on key areas of post-War concern: the need for more nurses and health care administrators, and the demand for more two-year, community colleges.

This steady growth continued during the 1960s and 70s. By the Foundation’s 50th anniversary in 1980, the organization was among the world’s largest foundations. Since the 1930s, the Foundation had expended nearly $500 million to improve health, agriculture, and education on four continents.

In the mid-1980s, the Foundation solidified its international reputation by expanding its programming into southern Africa. In the face of apartheid, college bursaries (scholarships) from the Kellogg Foundation gave unprecedented opportunities to black South Africans. New program areas – philanthropy and volunteerism, and food systems and rural development – reflected an evolution of the Foundation’s grantmaking, based on changing social needs.

The 1990s brought the boom years of the “new economy.” Like most modern organizations, the Kellogg Foundation was quick to exploit the benefits of information technology: improved record keeping, communications, and workplace efficiency. But the Foundation’s grantmaking also sought to narrow the digital divide – the millions of people who lacked access to technology, because of poverty, illiteracy or geographic isolation.

As its 75th Anniversary approached in 2005, the Kellogg Foundation’s assets stood at nearly $6 billion. And during those 75 intervening years, the Foundation spent more than $3 billion to help people help themselves.

In 2007, the Foundation’s assets have reached more than $8 billion. This, from W.K. Kellogg’s initial investment of $66 million. But as Mr. Kellogg once said, “dollars do not produce character.” Today, the Kellogg Foundation story is best told in the faces of healthy children, or in the sight of young pines reclaiming a once-barren hillside. It is here that the legacy of one quietly generous man speaks loudest of all.