Council on Foundations

When did you join the Association of Black Foundation Executives? Now that's some- I mean we probably should start with what--how did you first get involved on the board of the foundation (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) Oh, Kellogg [W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Battle Creek, Michigan].$$Yeah, Kellogg.$$Let's see. When did I go to Kellogg? I think it overlapped a couple of years with the Board of Regents. And I wanna say '89 [1989] I went on the board--no, I think it was probably '88 [1988], I went on the Board of Regents--on the board at Kellogg. And the CEO at that time was Russ Mawby [Russell Mawby]. And I had friends from about, oh, maybe 1986 or 1985 was the first time, maybe '85 [1985]. A friend of mine called me and said, "You know, I was in Washington [D.C.] at a meeting. And Russ Mawby, the CEO at Kellogg Foundation came over and asked me if I knew Wenda Moore [HistoryMaker Wenda Weekes Moore]." And I said, "So what did you say?" He said, "'Yes, I know Wenda Moore,' and we talked and chitchatted a little bit, and he wanted to know what you were interested in. And I told him, it's easier to talk about what she isn't interested in." And I said, "Oh, isn't that nice." So I, you know, hung up, and then I told Cornell [Weekes Moore's husband, HistoryMaker Cornell Leverette Moore]. And Cornell said, "They're probably after you, they're looking at you for the board." And I said, "No, it can't be." And I thought, oh! So then I went to look up the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and I thought oh, this is nice. I'd heard a little bit about it; never heard another word. Four, five, six months, eight months go by. Another friend calls. "I was at a meeting, and I met Russ Mawby," and I said, "And I bet Russ Mawby said, 'Do you know Wenda Moore 'cause you're from Minnesota?'" (Laughter) She said, "How did you know?" So by then I was just--anyway, this goes on, three or four different people. And the next thing I know, Peter Magrath [C. Peter Magrath], the president of the University of Minnesota [University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota] said, "Wenda, I have to tell you. I was at this meeting and Russ Mawby--." I said, "Peter, please spare me." I said, "I've been hearing for two years about Russ Mawby asking people about me" (laughter). I said, "I'm gonna--," and he said, "Oh, you've heard it before?" I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Well, maybe they're looking at you for the Kellogg Foundation." I said, "Well, I might have thought that a couple of years ago." I said, "Now I don't know what to think, and I'm not concerned about it." Anyway, I'm getting my children [Lynne Moore Nelson, Jonathan Moore and Meredith Moore Crosby] ready for school one morning, and the telephone rings. And this man says, "I'm calling from the National School Boards Association. We have just received a grant from the Kellogg Foundation." I'm thinking, oh, gee (laughter). And he said, "They've suggested that as one of the advisors to the project that we've been funded for, that we contact you and ask you to serve along with three other people to be the, like the overseers or the advisors of this project because we're very interested in increasing the competence of people who serve on school boards. We think they need to be exposed to governance issues. We think they need a larger tool box of strategies to deal with the issues so that we can increase the effectiveness of school boards." And I said, "Oh, thank you." I said, "That's--what a compliment." I said, you know, I gave him my address. I said, "Please send me some information, and I'll let you know." And I said, "By the way, who was it at the Kellogg Foundation that suggested that you call?" So he gave me the name, and I said, "Okay, you send the information, and I'll look at it." I hung up the phone.$When you look back on your career, how do you think the role of women has changed in the foundation community?$$Well, I can tell you at the Kellogg Foundation [W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Battle Creek, Michigan], it's changed a lot. It's changed in the way we view women in the field, and the way we view our responsibility towards women. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I had an opportunity here, Hillary Clinton [Hillary Rodham Clinton] at the White House when President Clinton [President William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton] was president, and this was just before the women's conference [Fourth World Conference on Women] in Beijing [China], UN [United Nations] world, women's--UN world, yeah, the world's women's conference in Beijing. It was the world conference in Beijing. I think it was ninety--'95 [1995]. At any rate, Hillary said that--no, it couldn't have been '95 [1995], '85 [1985] probably [sic. 1995], all right. I'm not gonna worry about the date. At any rate, she invited a number of people from foundations to say that the government was not going to be able to send the number of women that they normally sent to these world conferences. The last one had been at Nai- the previous one had been at Nairobi [Kenya], and they had sent a delegation headed by Maureen Reagan, but this time, they weren't--[U.S.] Congress was not going to fund that. And she wanted foundations to do it. So I went, I heard it and I went back. And Russ Mawby [Russell Mawby] who was the president of the Kellogg Foundation at the time, said that if I could go and head the delegation, that he would consider having us bring together a group of women. And it was the first time at Kellogg that they were really willing to say, maybe women might be different and might be worth some funding and some focus that would be different than in the past 'cause we didn't, we just didn't talk about it at Kellogg. And so we had staff identify women in our, who'd been grantees, who could take advantage of this, who could come back, go to the conference in Beijing, come back and share it with their groups. And that's what we did, but we did more than that because when we came back to the foundation, we decided that we were going to begin to focus more on women, the needs of women and girls; that there were real inequities, in the grant dollars focused on women and girls. And really, if you wanna move a community forward, it's the women who need to be the focus in a lot of ways. So I think it's really been different since then. And we don't shy away from talking about, at the Kellogg Foundation, racial inequities and racial inequality or equality around your sex, the fact that women are, are treated differently. So that's a good thing.