The W.K. Kellogg Foundation supports children, families, and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society.

The well-being of children is central to this mission, and because children live in families and communities, these need to need to be healthy too. So economic equity and opportunity are woven throughout all our work. More specifically, we have a firm commitment to racial equity meaning that a person’s racial identity should not predict their life outcomes and that all people should have opportunities to succeed and thrive. It’s one thread of what we call our DNA—racial equity, community engagement, and leadership.

For us, it’s about the ability of a family to be self-sustaining – this means having access to a living wage, the mechanisms for building intergenerational wealth, power of choice and livelihood, and a stable environment where kids can get a quality education, healthy food, and a nurturing opportunity-rich environment. We want to see families become contributors to their communities and have agency to build a life and a community they want to live in.

My portfolio addresses family economic security, specifically long-standing inequities in the labor market. We focus on workers in low-paid, precarious jobs and try to elevate job quality as an input for job security—so it’s not only about job access, but access to jobs that provide a sustaining wage, benefits, retirement, and advancement. Jobs that are dignified.

According to a Brookings Institute study in 2019, Meet the Low-Wage Workforce, more than 53 million people—44% of all workers aged 18-64—are low-wage workers. These workers face chronic financial insecurity, and both Latino or Hispanic and Black workers are overrepresented. This is the legacy of structural racism. What excites me is that we’re turning the page.

A big part of my portfolio focuses on worker power—increasing agency around pay, structures, benefits, building leadership, empowering people to help shape their work, contexts, and communities. We’re shoring up the capacity of work justice organizations to represent people of color and workers’ rights.

One of our grantees is the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health. They support a network of 26 grassroots worker organizations providing leadership development, peer support, and strategic communications so that workers know their rights and can identify situations where organizing can be a tool for advocating for better enforcement and labor protections.

This work gets to the heart of how we think about and value work. There was a window in the pandemic when we had a new-found appreciation for essential workers, but society moved on and they continue to work in unsafe, low-wage conditions. We support their ability to come together to say, we deserve better. It’s powerful long-term work.

In the US we have a myth that if you work hard enough, you’ll make it. And it’s just not true. We’ve created systems and structures that keep people down.

We’re working against this, and another of the most persistent and harmful narratives—about the value of some occupations, especially those that have benefited from people of color, and relied on low-income labor to make a profit (like domestic work, caretaking, agriculture, early childhood). This narrative has us believe that domestic work, for example, is less valuable than practicing law or designing a bridge. We just accept it and by accepting it, we lose our power. We get stuck, blind to what’s possible, unable to devise creative solutions and figure out pragmatic ways of making these jobs high-quality. Often the approach is, let’s get people out of these bad jobs. But that’s not a viable solution; we need these jobs.

So how do we shape an economy that doesn’t accept that some people won’t benefit from it? For example, how can we design an early childhood system that is high quality and compensates workers in a fair way?

Being fairly new to philanthropy, I’ve appreciated the opportunity to connect with my peers in different types of philanthropic institutions. Whenever I participate, I always come away with new insights on how to approach my work. Everything EOF does is well thought out and intentional about helping philanthropic professionals think about issues in new, different, and practical ways, through the lens of experience and other experts. It always feels productive.

As a Latinx immigrant woman, I’ve often been in spaces where I’ve felt no power. Being a grantmaker has changed that to an extent—there’s a lot of privilege and power that comes with working in an institution with resources. So, a question I have is how do we shift that dynamic and share power with the communities and the folks we serve and partner with? Maybe even shift power to?

Can we even imagine a world where we don’t need philanthropy? And if we can, how would we get there? How do we let go and become more effective and equitable in how we do the work? How do we show up differently for the communities we work with?

My 9-year-old son, Augie. I love watching him grow, learn, and question. He has lots of aspirations for changing the world we live in. Seeing his energy motivates me to change the world for the better.

He has lots of questions about the work I do too. Recently he asked me why we didn’t just give the money directly to children. It’s a good question; one that pushes me to think deeply about how the work I do benefits children. He is a constant reminder that we’re not here for us. We’re here because we want to see a better world for children.