20-05-2025
La June Montgomery Tabron
In 2023, almost a decade into her tenure as president and CEO of the $9.4 billion W.K. Kellogg Foundation, La June Montgomery Tabron commissioned a year-long 'listening tour' with its more than 2,000 grantees. Not content to keep doing what she'd been doing, she wanted ideas about how philanthropy could have a greater long-term impact on children by imagining the world in 2035.
The report, published in April 2024, is heavy on suggestions to combat systemic racism, climate change, and gender-based violence. Montgomery Tabron's enthusiasm for many of the specific proposals—improving Black maternal health care, say, or investing in financial incentives to encourage people to become home health care providers—reflects her pursuit of new ways to be of service.
Montgomery Tabron's dedication to these issues is reflected in two books she published this year—a memoir, How We Heal, which details her ascent from life as one of 10 siblings in inner-city Detroit in the 1960s, and a children's book, Our Differences Make Us Stronger. More than half of Kellogg grants now go to groups led by people of color and her larger goal, she says, is to level the playing field for all children as early as possible. 'We didn't start out with a quota,' she said on The Commons podcast in January. 'We started out in earnest saying, 'Who do we need to lift up to sustain the changes that we want to achieve?''
