Investment Focus

Overview

Just as we award grants to advance our mission of improving the lives of vulnerable children, our mission-driven investing portfolio uses investments to reinforce that same goal.

For that reason, our mission-driven investments are selected on the basis of the investee’s potential to improve the conditions affecting vulnerable children and their families and to earn a financial return. Each investment has both a social and a financial thesis. The social thesis describes the existing condition – the problem – and the expected change. The financial thesis describes the business model and expected financial return.  

The Kellogg Foundation makes investments in both for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. This is very different from our grants program, which makes awards almost exclusively to nonprofit organizations. Whether structured as a nonprofit or for-profit entity, each of our mission-driven investing enterprises is expected to have a business model that is financially sustainable. We do not make investments in enterprises that are at the start-up stage of development.

Investment Focus

The Kellogg Foundation’s core mission-driven investing focus is to improve the lives of vulnerable children and their families. Vulnerable refers to children who live in impoverished situations – financial poverty being the most fundamental of concerns.

The mission-driven investment team actively seeks investments that align with the Kellogg Foundation’s grantmaking primary focus on educated kids, healthy kids, and secure families. In the U.S., investments also have geographic priority in Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, as well as New Orleans. All investments include an overriding commitment to racial equity, specifically the dismantling of gender and racial disparity.

In all cases, we seek to partner with other mission investors because we believe such collaboration can lead to more robust and leveraged investment opportunities.