Active Listening

You already understand diversity very well given that it's woven into the DNA of the Kellogg Foundation as you say, but I know you also believe in continuous learning. What are you currently doing to consistently, constantly improve your understanding of diversity?

Thank you, it's a journey we all have to continue in this effort. There is no perfect knowledge base that we can achieve because it evolves. I love it we're doing right now with our board, and so I will start there. This year, our board decided that we wanted to go even deeper than we have been on understanding the communities that we serve, and so we've embarked on a learning journey where in a month, we will invite panels of a different ethnicity and then go very, very deep with these panels. Our first panel was the Latinx community and the panel was facilitated by Maria Inahosa, and we invited some of the most influential leaders of the Latin X community to come and spend an afternoon with our board and eventually, our staff to help us understand from their perspective what issues they were facing, how their communities were thriving, what gaps they were seeing in their communities, and how philanthropy could be a trusted partner in their work. We then have had one with African-Americans and movement builders around the Black Lives Matter movement. Again, a curated panel of some of the most talented people in the African-American space speaking very deeply about their perspective on the journey of slavery in this nation and how that continues to be the burden of our nation and particularly on the backs of African-Americans in this nation, and again, a space of learning so deep and profound. We are doing the Asian and Pacific Islander community curating a panel to go very deep and to understand from their perspective how we can be better partners and serve them. So, our foundation, I think we understand that we can't do the role of Mr. Kellogg and be that servant leader unless we continue to learn and understand, and be agile in the space of how communities are faring in any particular moment and how we can support them and be their partner.