Our Process & Tools

Overview

The Kellogg Foundation’s mission-driven investing program began with a simple hallway conversation. Normally, such an important concept might take several months to percolate through the leadership channels and several more to be fleshed out into a comprehensive paper. Instead, the idea gained traction through informal discussions on the benefits and pitfalls of using endowment dollars to earn financial returns while driving mission impact.

Those discussions were the beginning of an important and ongoing methodical process to leverage social change. While mission-driven investing had simple beginnings, it marked a new chapter in the history of the Kellogg Foundation as the Foundation sought to develop a disciplined approach to advancing its mission through social investing.

Since October of 2007, the Foundation has have been focused on rapidly prototyping and testing a new approach to driving mission impact for the benefit of vulnerable kids.  Throughout this “action learning” process, we have been committed to sharing information on both the process we used and the tools we developed. Our goal is to ensure that the field has an opportunity to learn from our experience. We believe that greater communications about what it takes to start and implement a mission-driven investing program within the industry can lead to more robust and direct opportunities for all.