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[MUSIC]
Carleen: Hello, I’m Carleen Rhodes, president and CEO of Minnesota Philanthropy Partners.
Welcome to our “Who Inspires Us” video series where we interview leaders who are
making a difference in our communities. Today, I’m interviewing Reatha Clark King, a
locally and nationally recognized philanthropic and educational leader who served as
president of the General Mills Foundation for 14 years. Welcome, Reatha.
Reatha: Thank you.
Carleen: I’m so glad you’re here.
Carleen: You’ve been a chemist, a professor, a college president, the head of a major corporate
foundation. Could you tell me what you think the common thread is
in all those roles that you’ve played?
Reatha: I would say that the common thread is commitment, commitment to excellence, and
insisting on doing work that you enjoy and doing it well. Those are the common threads.
Carleen: You grew up a long way away from Minnesota in rural Georgia in the 40s, and I
understand that you worked in the fields on your aunt’s farm. Were there any early
kind of learnings in your growing up years that really have influenced you over time?
Reatha: Yes, there were many. And I think, believe it or not, they were not the academic
learnings that I gained early on that influenced me so much. It was the personal
development and style. They were stylistic and learning values. They were values.
Learning to love working hard and learning to do well whatever you did. Now from my
[unintelligible] grandmother I learned at age 2 that if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
So my passion for excellence, my pursuit of excellence and insistence on quality, that
was learned naturally because I learned it so early in life from our community people.
They had an expression, “Don’t half do anything.” Now that doesn’t sound
like it’s good English, but we got the point.
Carleen: I know a lot about how you’ve stood out in the community and it’s really a lot about
caring for other people, stepping in. I mean, it’s not just an excellent job,
but it’s really a strong passion for the people.
Reatha: Absolutely. We learned early on that caring for each other made a difference to our
community. And if you were born a Baptist like I was, you know you learn that caring
for each other is important for your own development, your spiritual development, as
well as your community well-being. So caring. Caring and sharing.
Sharing, which is a carry over to philanthropy.
Reatha: My philanthropic spirit.
Carleen: Well, I know part of your preparation for life started when you were 4 years old in your
first educational situation. And I understand it was a one-room school that the Mount
Zion Baptist Church hosted. Tell us a little bit about how that sparked your love of education.
Reatha: Oh, that was such a wonderful experience because, first of all, we had our teacher, a
tremendous teacher named Ms. Florence Frazier who was such a role model for us. She
was well spoken, as we would say today; fun; and very observant about us young
people, especially those of us who had leadership qualities. We not only learned the
subjects well, learned whatever she taught us—like myself at 4 years old—
but we could teach other children.
Now in that one-room school house with all seven grades being taught by one teacher,
Mrs. Frazier, she would work with a group of students and then she would put the
smarter students in charge of another group of students to help them learn their ABCs,
their multiplication tables, or whatever she wanted us to share with them. So Ms.
Frazier became an advocate. We use that word today, “advocate.” And she was a
mentor, but we didn’t use that word fancy word then.
She just encouraged us.
Carleen: Well, Ms. Frazier put you on a path, and you actually ended up graduating from your
high school as valedictorian and you went on to Clark College, and that was at a time
when not a lot of women went to college and definitely not a lot of women of color went
to college. In addition to Ms. Frazier, what helped you get on that path? How did you
get to that place?
Reatha: Well, it was determination, desire for better work with better pay. That was a driving
force. But Ms. Frazier there did something else for me as a girl student. She raised
expectations of me to perform and to try different fields. The stereotype for women
then, as you implied, were different. She was going against the odds by encouraging
me as a woman to study different subjects, to do different things.
The problem was we were told what we shouldn’t do.
We shouldn’t study chemistry. We shouldn’t study the sciences. We shouldn’t commit
ourselves to a long period of study for a career because we should be looking to get a
husband. We should be going out trying to marry. So as my aunt told me, “No man
would want a woman with more education than he has.” So Ms. Frazier raised
expectations, and those expectations and my belief in her helped me look aside from
the don’ts that I was receiving because I was a woman, because I was an African-
American or a colored person back then, which we were called.
So we call that succeeding against the odds, but who helps you do that?
Ms. Frazier planted some seeds to help me do that.
Carleen: So before you worked at General Mills, you worked in science and business and
academia. Is there something that philanthropy can learn from those other fields of work?
Reatha: Yes, well, first of all I would say the analytical approach of a chemist. Philanthropists
are presented with situations, and your first task is to understand that situation
surrounding the donee, the potential donee or applicant. So chemists break apart the
elements of a situation and then we can put them all together again. So that’s
analyzing. And then in business, I’m reminded of a quality that you need or an attribute
that you need so much. And that is that of accountability.
Now that’s important for any field. Certainly, you learn that as a university president.
The president is accountable or has to be prepared to be accountable in every situation,
particularly if it’s controversial. And that’s a lonely seat. So that’s another quality and
required for strong leadership. Taking the heat and being accountable. Coming to
philanthropy, you’re all of those. It takes all of those qualities to succeed. But there’s
another quality that stands strong or high in philanthropy. And that is stewardship.
You’re a steward over key resources that you are trusted with managing and leading
others to use well. So that word stewardship I think is a very strong attribute that’s
needed to be a successful philanthropy.
Carleen: I think all of us who are Minnesotans are so proud of the traditions of philanthropy,
corporate and individual, etc. What do you think we need to do today to make it even
stronger or to keep it strong and make it stronger? The demands have grown. There’s a
lot of ways philanthropy could meet community needs. Do you have thoughts about
how we might make it even stronger?
Reatha: First of all, I think we have to keep tweaking how we do philanthropy. So this is how we
use these philanthropic resources that we are stewards over. And we still have that
word stewardship over the resources that we have that’s so important, how to do that
well going forward. I think that there’s some keywords we have to keep in mind, key
principles, Carleen. One, we want to use resources to catalyze. We want the use of the
resources to be a catalyst for progress by people.
Secondly, we want to work toward total engagement by the community, as much as
possible, bringing new ethnic groups into participation. For example, the Hmong people,
the Somalian people, as well as the African-Americans, the Hispanics, the Latinos, and
new immigrants yet to arrive. I’ll put it that way. Be open-ended about that.
Philanthropic institutions, and by use of philanthropic resources contributed by others,
we can be the watch for that kind of broad community engagement and help motivate
others to help it happen. I’m an inclusive person.
And I think if we want to tap into the brain’s strengths and to be a catalyst for progress
everywhere, then we’ve got to engage the community broadly. So thirdly, philanthropy
is a perfect enterprise, an institutional resource for some activism, not only to identify
the problems that exist—and to be a catalyst once you identify the solution—but to be
activists, to be a leader, to step forward and say, “Hey, let’s get
our heads together” to convene people.
I use that word activist sort of mildly. You can see I’m tiptoeing around it because I
don’t think the Internal Revenue Service wants us to use the philanthropic resources to
lobby other people. Lobby is too strong a word. But along with good leadership and
futuristic leadership comes some activism because philanthropists have a knowledge
base that should enable them to see further into the future than other people. So I
don’t see anything wrong with sharing with others what you see in the future. And I
don’t think there’s anything wrong with picking up the telephone and saying,
“We’ve just got to do something about this.”
Carleen: This has been a great conversation. I’m going to ask you one final question. We’ve had
such a good conversation about your passion for education and philanthropy. What else
should we know about what you care about?
Reatha: Sharing is a spirit that I developed early on in my impoverished community when
community people would share with each other. We didn’t have the money to share,
but when the lady next door came in from the next farm and asked my mother if she
could borrow a cup of meal or borrow two eggs, they had a way of sharing any kind of
resources they had. And that spirit, a desire to share whatever extra that you have.
Carleen: I think that’s our challenge today, don’t you?
Reatha: Yeah, yeah.
Carleen: To continue to figure out how we share what we have to make our communities strong.
Reatha: Now without philanthropic organizations or institutions, I think we have to get the word
out that it’s not just sharing money, but it’s sharing knowledge; it’s sharing insights;
sharing information. If we were to make a list of the assets we have to use to make
situations stronger, that list would extend far beyond dollars.
Carleen: Well, I want to thank you, Reatha, for sharing—
Reatha: Oh, you’re welcome.
Carleen: —so much today. It’s been really wonderful.
Reatha: Well, thank you. Thank you. I’ve enjoyed the conversation and I look forward to keeping in touch.