A Legacy of Leadership Development
Letter from President and CEO La June Montgomery Tabron
A Legacy of Leadership Development
Letter from President and CEO La June Montgomery Tabron
In the dining room at the foundation’s headquarters in Battle Creek, there’s a telling display of photographs from the life of W.K. Kellogg.
From his early days, we see a photo booth tintype of a young, lanky "Will Keith," the record-setting broom salesman in a then stylish top hat. From his years as a business executive, we see a middle-aged "W.K." with the thinning hair and laser-intense gaze of a breakfast food pioneer who heads a far-flung economic empire. Finally, we see "Mr. Kellogg," the elderly philanthropist in his last decade of life. He still wears a three-piece business suit, but blinded by glaucoma, sits stoically beside his beloved seeing-eye dog.
Mr. Kellogg, by all accounts, was not the emotive type. Yet these images do evoke a quiet strength and integrity that were hallmarks of his life and leadership. As with all good leaders, he began with a powerful vision, and even as his eyesight dimmed, never wavered from it. For the Kellogg Company, it took the form of cereal factories and retail distribution chains that spanned the globe. For the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF), his vision centered on improved education, nutritious diets and accessible health care for vulnerable children and families, created and sustained by people who lived and worked in the community.
Both enterprises relied on financial capital and technical innovation to succeed. However, Mr. Kellogg considered the human factor as the most essential of all. In the late 1920s, when asked what he would do with his growing fortune, Mr. Kellogg replied in his usual succinct fashion, "I’ll invest my money in people."
We view leadership as essential to all we hope to achieve in communities on behalf of vulnerable children and families.
His belief that WKKF should help people reach their full potential, so that they can lead others to do the same, still undergirds our work. We view leadership as essential to all we hope to achieve in communities on behalf of vulnerable children and families. For what social change effort, in any age, has ever succeeded without it?
This was true in the 1930s, when WKKF’s Michigan Community Health Project helped make leaders out of local doctors, newspaper editors, teachers, farmers and social workers. It’s true today in our priority places of Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico and New Orleans, as well as Mexico and Haiti.
This legacy was part of the impetus behind the launch of the WKKF Community Leadership Network (CLN), announced in November 2013. For WKKF, its launch represents another step in our learning journey. We made significant investments in leadership development during the 1980s through 1990s, most notably in the well-regarded Kellogg National Fellows Program (KNFP), which was later renamed the Kellogg National Leadership Program (KNLP). Alumni of WKKF’s fellowship programs went on to serve with distinction as judges, doctors, nationally known journalists – their number even includes a U.S. surgeon general. We ended KNFP/KNLP in 2002, but continued to support leadership across all of our program areas.
Then, as we shifted some of our emphasis to place-based programs in 2008, the need for another kind of leadership program arose. We had built KNLP around annual groups of 45-50 fellows, selected from across the United States. With the CLN, we’ve taken more of a community-based focus to leadership development.
As a funder, WKKF has long collaborated with those leading change in their neighborhoods, towns, counties, states and beyond. Our work and our vision of change require people with a first-hand, personal knowledge of the needs of their communities. Of course, communities are never homogeneous. Recently, for example, we took the opportunity to ask residents of our hometown in Battle Creek about how they define a community leader. As you'll see in the video within this letter, their responses are highly varied.
Our inaugural class of 120 WKKF CLN fellows represents the kind of community leaders that the foundation seeks to develop. Of these, 96 belong to cohorts from Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico and New Orleans. They are complemented by 24 national fellows selected from outside WKKF’s priority places and are focusing on racial equity and healing.
The CLN fellows are diverse in age, gender, race/ethnicity, education and way of life. They include school principals, clergy, tribal leaders, community organizers, a newspaper publisher, a state senator and a NASA policy analyst. Some are formal leaders, some are informal leaders. Until recently, some never saw themselves as leaders. They are rising to the occasion in pursuit of a passion for social justice, racial equity, health, food, education and so on.
In this, we agree with author John Maxwell’s insight that, "Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another." And, on an individual level, we are helping CLN fellows develop attributes essential to exercising that influence: courage, vision, perseverance and collaboration.
When I think of WKKF’s leadership legacy, a scene from our founder’s life comes to mind exemplifying these attributes. The date was July 4, 1907, and W.K. had just watched his first factory, an old wooden building, burn furiously to the ground. To a lesser leader, it could’ve been devastating. His fledgling, one-year-old business had no capital to rebuild. With the ruins still smoking, W.K. told his employees to report for work the next morning. By the day’s end, he had arranged for an architect to begin plans for a much larger and safer factory. Then, with characteristic courage, he somehow drummed up the financing to make it a reality.
Today, confronted by the challenges manifest in Ferguson, Miami, Staten Island, Cleveland, Phoenix and elsewhere, that kind of courage is precisely what we need from our leaders and ourselves.
We need the courage to ask and devise practical, actionable answers to fundamental questions that go to the heart of the character of our communities and our nation.
We need the courage to ask and devise practical, actionable answers to fundamental questions that go to the heart of the character of our communities and our nation: How do we improve life outcomes for children? How do we unwind the long, deeply held racial biases that were wrongly legitimized more than 100 years ago by the Supreme Court in Plessy vs. Ferguson and – despite the progress of the past 100 years – are still displayed today by another case called "Ferguson"? How do we instill, in ourselves and our children, the recognition that black lives, like all lives, matter?
Finally, we need in all of our leaders the courage we have seen and will see in the CLN fellows as they act as leaders for change in their networks and in the places where they live. In an age of political fragmentation, they will work to unify communities and find collaborative solutions on behalf of vulnerable children. In an age when issues of race still divide, wound and impoverish our nation, they will pursue racial equity and racial healing as a way to build new consensus around our shared fate as Americans.
In raising leaders for such work, we expect both the fellows and their communities to grow and change. We are committed to building a new generation of leaders who can build and sustain long-term change. For the WKKF Community Leadership Network, our fellows will be (and already are) stewards and advocates of the collective good.
This same ethos guides WKKF’s leadership programming. It’s summed up in our credo "the practical application of knowledge to the problems of people." Our hands-on leaders will serve vulnerable children and families where they find them: in streets, schools, farms, clinics, gleaming capital buildings and dim church basements. They will lead by empathy and example – North Stars whose innate courage will inspire others to become the best of what they already know themselves to be.
