Kellogg Foundation Taps Community-Fund Leader as New CEO

For Sterling K. Speirn, the past few weeks have been busy. Not only did Mr. Speirn get married, but he also

announced that at the end of this year he will depart as president of the Peninsula Community Foundation to lead one of the largest philanthropies in the world: the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in Battle Creek, Mich.

Mr. Speirn says joining Kellogg will nourish a love for philanthropy that he first discovered almost 20 years ago.

After working a variety of jobs — including teaching English to seventh and eighth graders and serving as a law clerk at the U.S. Department of the Interior — Mr. Speirn’s professional life changed in 1986 when he joined Apple Computer to direct its national computer-grants program.

“I felt when I discovered organized philanthropy when I was 38 I really found the vocation that was my calling,” he says.

After four years at Apple, Mr. Speirn joined the Peninsula fund, in San Mateo, Calif., which increased its assets from $60-million to $611-million during his 15-year tenure, thanks in part to the technology boom that generated massive amounts of wealth for local entrepreneurs and business executives.

As head of the community foundation, Mr. Speirn established the Center for Venture Philanthropy, which sought to bring business practices to grant making.

While some nonprofit officials have dismissed so-called venture philanthropy as a marketing tool, the center has raised almost $14-million to fight poverty, promote childhood literacy, and help the environment.

Mr. Speirn says that although he enjoyed his work at the Peninsula fund, he could not turn down the opportunity with Kellogg when he was approached by an executive-search firm.

“One of my long-term career goals, or fantasies, was that I might complete the triple crown of working in corporate philanthropy, community philanthropy, and then private philanthropy,” he says.

In addition, Mr. Speirn, a Detroit native, says he liked the idea of returning to Michigan. “Going back to my home state was a chance to go full circle,” he says.

Mr. Speirn will earn $425,000 in his new position, replacing William C. Richardson, who has served as the Kellogg Foundation’s leader since 1995. Mr. Richardson announced his retirement in December.

While Mr. Speirn will be leading a worldwide organization with assets that are almost 12 times as large as Peninsula’s, Kellogg’s trustees said they chose him because of his expertise in supporting charitable causes locally.

“Speirn understands that much of the change we see today happens at the local level,’’ said Hanmin Liu, chairman of the Kellogg Foundation, in a statement. “Importantly, he brings to the foundation experience and understanding of giving at the local level.”

While Mr. Speirn says it will be a challenge to run Kellogg, he is enthusiastic about his new role.

“To work with the scale of resources that Kellogg has just gets my creative juices and my passion to serve the common good really flowing,” he says. “I’m 57 and newly married. I still have a tremendous amount of excitement for both learning and meeting new people and trying new things.”

In an interview, Mr. Speirn discusses his new position, including how it might be affected by his recent marriage to Diana Aviv, a charity official from South Africa who in 2003 became chief executive officer of Independent Sector, a Washington coalition of nonprofit groups and grant makers.

What attracted you to the Kellogg job?

As I began to examine the Kellogg Foundation’s work more closely, I was really surprised and excited to see that in all its areas of work, except the international portfolios, I had some pretty substantial experience myself.

Where I have the least experience, but probably more excitement because it’s so new to me, is the international work that Kellogg is doing. And there, chatting with the staff, I said, “Well, I’m marrying a South African so I’m trying to work on that.”

How will your skills as a fund raiser help you at Kellogg?

All those ideas about understanding how both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors work — how do you leverage resources, how do you raise money, what are the likely sources — are the kinds of technical assistance that Kellogg staff do for their grantees. So I think coming from that work will enable me to both understand the challenges and lend some ideas and creativity.

On another front, the Kellogg Foundation is quite collaborative with other foundations, and figuring out how to bring other partners to the table is something we’ve done at the community foundation for years. You always ask, Are there other local family foundations? Are there individual donors? Those skills will be helpful to me in the years ahead.

With your background in venture philanthropy, how will you balance tradition versus innovation at Kellogg?

One of the joys of pursuing this position was learning about Mr. Kellogg’s legacy as an entrepreneur and an inventor. So there’s a spirit of being entrepreneurial at the Kellogg Foundation. A lot of our venture philanthropy has either been entrepreneurial or, as entrepreneurs do, looking for other people’s good ideas and taking them to markets where they haven’t been applied before. We at Peninsula never thought there was one kind of philanthropy that was better than another. It always had to be like technology, what’s the appropriate philanthropy for this situation? So Kellogg has embraced, like we have, multiple approaches to the issues they’re tackling.

What’s your first step at the foundation?

I’m definitely going to be on a learning curve and asking for people’s advice. It’s kind of fun to be the newest employee because I’ll get to go around and ask questions. There’s a certain freedom of being new and I’m hoping people will give me good and candid answers and bits of wisdom and things you don’t often hear during the pre-employment interviews.

Does your marriage to Ms. Aviv cause any concerns about a conflict of interest?

At the community foundation, I have been a member of Independent Sector since 1990. So I was glad I’d been a long-time member when I started dating Diana. Now since Kellogg has been a major supporter of IS, I’ll just want to be very transparent with the board and staff. There’s no self-interest here. It has to be all about the sector.

ABOUT STERLING K. SPEIRN, INCOMING CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF THE W.K. KELLOGG FOUNDATION

Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Stanford University, in California, in 1970. Three years later he received his law degree from the University of Michigan Law School, in Ann Arbor.

Previous employment: Before joining the Apple company as grant maker, Mr. Speirn managed a local nonprofit health center in Arcata, Calif., was a lawyer with Legal Aid of North Carolina, and was a construction worker during his summers off from college.

Favorite poet: Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate.

What he likes to read for fun: Crime novels.