Panel, Conference Presentation
The Power of Place-Based Philanthropy
Milken InstituteDiana Bucco, Cindy L. Citrone, Shirley Franklin, Wes Moore, La June Montgomery Tabron
- The W.K. Kellogg Foundation plans to celebrate its 90th anniversary while maintaining a focus on vulnerable children, launching a $25 million "Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation" effort to initiate racial equity work and committing to work in Mississippi, New Orleans, Michigan, and New Mexico for at least a generation to build trust.
- The foundation intends to address structural racial barriers through cooperative planning, anticipate results from a localized approach as it adapts knowledge from partners, and aims to establish tools and leading indicators to measure social change over a 25-year period.
- The Robin Hood Foundation expects to address generational poverty by reinforcing systems that touch children and families, utilizing a 1,100-member Design Insight Group to ensure community voices shape solutions, and intends to end specific issues with catalytic rather than permanent capital.
- The organization plans to function as a "Series A investor" by de-risking early-stage innovations such as needle exchanges and legal assistance before public sector adoption, with the expectation that narrative change will precede policy change to eventually translate successful place-based models into federal public policy.
- Specific predictions for the Robin Hood Foundation include the functional elimination of homeless veterans in New York City and a belief that closing the wealth and income gap in the South is necessary to shift national poverty numbers.
- Purpose Built Communities intends to work with 40 to 50 cities daily to build neighborhoods and schools, aiming to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty in approximately 800 high-poverty neighborhoods across the United States within a generation.
- The organization expects that providing the right interventions in these 800 neighborhoods will yield community change within a generation and anticipates that closing the wealth gap in the South will result in a major shift in national poverty statistics.
- The Pittsburgh Steelers and city partners plan to develop a mental well-being campaign using "Pittsburghese" and local figures like Ben Roethlisberger to teach coping skills to the entire city of Pittsburgh, while seeking "white space" opportunities to leverage local culture.
- The mental well-being campaign initiative expects to complete its current phase only when the organization is ready, while also anticipating that the organ donation campaign will lead to further partnerships and that listening to the "universe" will reveal entry points ranging from small opportunities to major long-term investments.
- The W.K. Kellogg Foundation anticipates that a new community-driven governance structure in the Jackson Public School District will lead to significant student achievement progress and believes building relationships with governors, mayors, legislators, and residents is essential to proving they are not engaging in "power plays."
- The panelists anticipate that successful place-based models can be adapted and evolved to achieve systemic change at the federal level, and expect that philanthropy can be unique by taking risks on early innovations that allow them to gain the "oxygen" needed to work.