Kellogg: Science 'Prizes' In Cereal King's Funding Box

Perhaps the biggest splash of all in the science philanthropy stream last year was made not by one of the high-profile science endowments such as Rockefeller or MacArthur, but by an immensely well-heeled midwestern organization known mainly for its community action programs. In this case, the beneficent snap, crackle, and pop was supplied by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Mich., an offshoot of a company long-associated with Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes. In a dramatic departure from its longstanding pattern of funding regional health, education, and agriculture projects, Kellogg committed $20 million to the National Academy of Sciences last April—one of the largest grants ever conferred by the foundation in its 59-year history. Does such bounteousness signal a shift in focus for the foundation that will benefit other segments of the science community in the future? Kellogg Foundation president Norman Brown sees this as a possibility, but he is restrained in spooning out details. In recent years, he points out, the foundation’s corporate parent has met with “extreme success and prosperity in the stock market.” Furthermore, the Kellogg Foundation—which holds a 33% stake in the company and ranks as the nation’s third largest philanthropy with some $3 billion in assets—is currently contemplating expanding its financial support to new areas. And indeed, Brown concedes, the funding of applied scien- tific research is among the areas that the foundation is exploring. However, while a keen interest in significantly boosting science support might seem evident from the foundation’s impressive contribution to NAS, Brown does not want observers to overreact to the gift. As he puts it, “The NAS grant should not be taken as an indication that we’ll be pouring a lot more money into the science area.” The huge grant came about, he explains, largely as a result of the NAS’s being in the right place at the right time. “We had large increases in resources at the time NAS approached us,” Brown explains. Also, Kellogg had made previous, smaller contributions to NAS’s Institute of Medicine and Board on Agriculture, and according to Brown, “we had been very impressed with the leadership of NAS.” Thus, Kellogg transferred $4 million to NAS with the promise of matching whatever amount up to $16 million that NAS secures from other funding sources by the end of 1993. Brown points out that while the Kellogg Foundation has traditionally focused on “community action” programs, it is by no means a newcomer to science funding. He notes, for example, that Kellogg has over the years supplied more than $20 million in funding support to the Biotechnology Institute in East Lansing, Mich. Indeed, if a dramatic shift toward the backing of science projects has taken place, it wasn’t with the NAS grant, but rather back in 1986 when the foundation started funneling some of its wealth into science education, an area that Kellogg foundation executives describe as an “emergent programming opportunity.” What this means, Brown says, is that the foundation began at that point to “experiment” with science education, although Kellogg has not yet officially added this area of interest to its list of “established programs. Currently, the “experimenting” centers on identifying ways in which philanthropy might support measures to improve the woeful state of science literacy among the nation’s youth—an objective that both nationwide scholastic tests and surveys have identified as a major educa- tional imperative. Eventually, the foundation aims to accomplish this new goal by “doing rather than studying,” according to Russell G. Mawby, the foundation’s chief executive since 1970. One of Kellogg’s purposes in science education is to leam some of the best ways to train science teachers, says Henri Treadwell, the foundation’s program director for health and science education. Another purpose is to learn more about students’ attitudes toward science. This “research” on training and attitudes is not being carried out in a laboratory or through extensive testing of students, but rather through devising and observing programs such as the Science and Environmental Education North Program at the University of Michigan’s Biological Station in Pellston, Mich. Last year, Kellogg issued a three-year $234,000 grant to this station to offer elementary and high school students direct contact with nature— field trips to study ecology and the breeding habits of wild animals, for example. The program also reached some 250 teachers in the region through conferences and in-service workshops designed to update educators’ knowledge of the science that they are teaching. Since it was established in 1930 by breakfast cereal king William Keith Kellogg, the foundation has honored its founder’s desire to focus on programs such as this-ones that help ordinary people meet basic needs. In 1987, for example, the foundation’s largest grants were awarded to the Maternity Center Association in New York City, which received $1.9 million to establish birthing centers in low-income minnority communities, and to the University of Missouri, which received $1.7 million to develop services that might help the elderly remain in their homes. Over the past half decade, it has distributed approximately $1 billion to a wide variety of organizations, ranging from community welfare organizations to large universities. The grants have ranged in size from one-time gifts of a few thousand dollars to multiyear grants in the millions of dollars. According to Kellogg’s Treadwell, participatory science education programs such as the one currently underway have a better chance of being funded than do projects involving basic scientific research. However, Treadwell says, “That’s not to say that we’re prescriptive in terms of what kinds of proposals should and shouldn’t be submitted. What we like to emphasize is that we’re looking for proposals that show promise for a strong collaboration with the community. The proposals we’re moved toward funding are those that experiment with a number of ways of improving science knowledge and literacy. They also show a desire on the part of the scientist to bring in as many community organizations as possible so that everybody can become part of the educational process.” In general, the foundation believes that society’s problems are far too complex to be resolved by any one institution, profession, or discipline. So the foundation is increasingly supporting projects in which coalitions of professions or institutions use multidisciplinary methods to solve problems or where scientists open their labs to visiting students. As a matter of policy, the foundation does not set a ceiling on the amount it is willing to spend in any one programming area, including the emergent area of science education, according to Nancy Sims, Kellogg’s executive assistant for programming. Whether science education evolves into a major funding category, Treadwell says, will depend largely on the kinds of imaginative proposals Kellogg. receives from scientists and educators. Treadwell adds, “Our science education program will be driven by the ideas submitted, and the success of the program will be determined by the quality of those ideas.” Julia King is a freelance writer based in Ridley Park, Pa.

Kellogg: Science 'Prizes' In Cereal King's Funding Box

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March 1989

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