The Kellogg Foundation CEO shares her own life story to foster more racial healing
La June Montgomery Tabron believes that many Americans have a desire for racial healing. They just don’t know how to start.
“It may sound mysterious or challenging,” says Montgomery Tabron, the first woman of the WK Kellogg Foundation and its first Black CEO. “But it’s actually very simple.”
It starts, she says, with a conversation – with people from different backgrounds sharing stories so they can understand each other better. So when Montgomery Tabron founded the ‘Truth, Racial Healing.’ wanted to explain & Transformation” work and its creation of the annual National Day of Racial Healing, which was set to take place on January 21 this year, she realized she had to do it by sharing her own story.
That’s what she does in a pair of books released earlier this month — “How We Heal: A Journey Toward Truth, Racial Healing and Community Transformation from the Inside Out,” a memoir that traces the steps from her childhood in Detroit to the leading one of the world’s leading philanthropic organizations. prestigious foundations, and “Our Differences Make Us Stronger,” a children’s book about connecting with others outside our comfort zones.
“I wanted to use the healing methodology that we use, which is through storytelling,” she said. “I think people connect through stories. And this became a book with very interconnected stories.”
The Associated Press recently spoke with Montgomery Tabron about her books and the Kellogg Foundation’s racial healing work. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Yes. There were several places in our portfolio where we had the same reaction: if it hadn’t been for the healing work, a situation could have escalated, especially in Buffalo. That work wasn’t just about connecting people, it was also about affirming everyone as part of the process, affirming everyone’s value. They felt it was a moment to show up in a very different way that honors healing. It was about grounding them in their humanity and using those principles of trust, mutual respect and shared understanding as a way to express their own grief and healing in that moment.
It was a process. In many ways it was cathartic because my own healing journey was also happening while writing the book. I touched on moments in my life that I hadn’t fully processed or fully healed from. There is nothing like going through the healing journey you write about. I think it adds a level of authenticity to the writing itself.
It was, but that made it even more important for me to do this. I wish I had a book like that at that stage of my life, so I’m telling the story. But more importantly, I am sharing the power of healing with a very young audience that I believe will help them navigate the country and the world.
Teaching young people how to communicate across differences and showing them that this can result in strong relationships and shared understanding is the start of the work. It is work that, for those who practice, can lead to making connections and building strong and trusting relationships. I hope we also find out that we (adults) can do it too. It’s not too late to have these conversations, and especially right now, it’s imperative that we have them.
I think it calls for this more than ever. When I think about the attacks on DEI, I attribute the attacks to a lack of understanding, a lack of shared purpose, and a gap in empathy. And what the book talks about is exactly how these types of disagreements need to be reconciled and can be reconciled through a healing process and healing conversations. I believe that through dialogue we can come closer to understanding why such an attack would happen and have a conversation about whether there is a shared belief underneath that would align us and take us to a different place where you can solve the problem. So I look at that particular topic and say it needs a healing framework as much as many of the most important conversations we’re having in this country right now.
What we have always hoped is that people will take action. And we hope that both books can be used as tools to show what action looks like. We want people to not only hear and understand my story, but also see their story in the book and understand that part of this process is telling your story and feeling comfort in telling your truth, regardless whether or not this suits someone. someone else’s story. We then want them to take collective action. What can we do together within our family, within our community, within our organization, within our groups of friends? What can we do to help others and participate in showing others through conversations and dialogue that there are other paths that they may not envision?
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