The Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation (WRF) Board of Directors recently voted to award a $150,000 matching grant to the Clinton School Center on Community Philanthropy at the in support of their W.K. Kellogg America Healing Initiative grant.
The two-year grant will fund the Center’s plan to strengthen philanthropy’s approach to racial equity. The Center will design annual programs to help a diverse set of community leaders create racial healing and equity networks among local and regional philanthropists.
“Children, families, and communities of color in Arkansas are disproportionately poor, under-educated, and economically disadvantaged,” said Dr. Sherece Y. West, President and CEO of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. “In order to fully address those inequalities, attention must be paid to longstanding racial and ethnic disparities and barriers to opportunity.”
The Center on Community Philanthropy, as a grantee of The America Healing Initiative of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, aims to reduce poverty for vulnerable children and their families by researching structural racism and disseminating those findings to key decision makers and policy leaders. The Kellogg grant requires local match funding and partners who share the value of racial equity and social justice.
“This grant, along with support from the Kellog Foundation, will increase our capacity to talk about and proactively address the vestiges of institutional racism in our state,” said Dr. Charlotte Lewellen-Williams, Director of the Center for Community Philanthropy.
About the Center on Community Philanthropy:
The Center on Community Philanthropy at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service explores the concept of philanthropy as the kind of giving and sharing from within that is characteristic of positive change and long-lasting development in impoverished communities. The Center provides a forum for broad debate and exploration of the newest and most effective ways that philanthropy can challenge and transform conditions of poverty, injustice, and the lack of opportunity in the South.
About the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation
For over 35 years, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation has worked to make a difference by helping to build and sustain the organizations that serve and strengthen Arkansas. Through grantmaking and strategic partnerships, we are working even harder to help close the economic and educational gaps that leave too many Arkansas families in persistent poverty. Working together, the needle can and must move from poverty to prosperity for all Arkansans. For more information on the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, go to www.wrfoundation.org.
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