New Orleans Just Got a Multimillion-Dollar Gift to Fight Racial Inequality
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation announced today that it is donating $4.7 million to 10 community-based organizations—two in Mississippi and eight in New Orleans—to promote racial equality and combat structural barriers of racism for young people of color.
William Buster, director of the Mississippi and New Orleans programs at the foundation, said the investment is an extension of work it has been doing for years. “We believe that this work is squarely within the foundation’s work, because this also is about young boys of color improving their educational outcome by removing the barriers,” he said. These barriers include, but are not limited to, family poverty (39 percent of children in New Orleans live in poverty, almost double the national figure), employment discrimination (studies have repeatedly shown that nonwhite applicants are less likely to be hired than their white counterparts with identical résumés), and lack of educational advancement opportunities (the U.S. is one of only three Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries that funds schools serving wealthy populations better than schools serving poor ones).
