OVERVIEW: The General Mills Foundation predominately gives to initiatives in the areas of sustainable agriculture and food systems. To a lesser extent, the foundation supports higher education and the local Minneapolis community.
IP TAKE: The General Mills Foundation’s grantmaking reflects its parent company’s interest in food production. The foundation maintains a strong interest in protecting the habitats of pollinators, conserving watershed areas and improving soil quality of U.S. farmlands. This is not an accessible funder as it does not accept unsolicited applications making it a difficult funder to crack. While a number has been provided below, this is also a challenging funder to get a hold of. To get on this foundation’s radar, it will be important to network with corporate employees at the highest levels. It sometimes conducts joint giving with the General Mills Corporation, which is common for corporate funders that have a foundation.
PROFILE: Based in Golden Valley, Minnesota, the General Mills Foundation is the philanthropic offshoot of the General Mills food company. General Mills, which operates multinationally, is best known for its breakfast cereals but owns several other recognizable food brands, including Yoplait and Betty Crocker. The foundation’s grantmaking reflects its parent company’s “food expertise,” focusing on food security and sustainable agriculture. Grantmaking also supports the cities and towns in the U.S. and Canada where its General Mills maintains operations, mainly in the area of K-12 education.
Grants for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security
The General Mills Foundation invests in sustainable and regenerative agriculture, as well as in food systems with the broad goals of increasing food security and advancing agriculture in the U.S. Food security funding focuses on providing high-quality and high-nutrition foods to people in need in the U.S. and abroad.
Grantees tend to be large, well-established organizations, including Feeding America, the Global Food Banking Network, the Food Recovery Network and the World Food Program.
The foundation’s agriculture funding aims to “strengthen the food growers from which we source key ingredients,” and focuses on the protection of pollinator habitats and watershed areas and the improvement of soil health.
General Mills committed $4 million to a five-year joint project with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Xerces Society to protect large swathes of pollinator habitats across the U.S. The foundation also made a $5.5 million commitment to improve soil health in the U.S., working with the Nature Conservancy to produce the Soil Health Roadmap, which aims to improve the quality of soil of more than half of U.S. farmland by 2025.
Other sustainable agriculture grantees include Partners in Food Solutions, Second Harvest Heartland, SeaShare, the National Wheat Foundation and the Land Institute.
Grants for Higher Education
The General Mills Foundation does not name higher education as an area of interest, but tax filings suggest an interest in this area.
Prioritizing its home state of Minnesota, the foundation has given to the University of Minnesota, Dunwoody College of Technology and Wallin Education Partners, an organization that supports college students with high potential and financial need.
Higher education grantees outside of Minnesota include the United Negro College Fund, Scholarship America and Auburn University’s Campus Kitchen Project, which creates community service projects for college students in the areas of food distribution, nutrition education and culinary training for unemployed adults.
Grants for the Greater Minneapolis Area
A significant portion of General Mills’s grantmaking broadly supports the Minneapolis area; however, recent interests have concentrated on human services, food, youth and K-12 education. The foundation’s Hometown Giving works to alleviate hunger and to support local early childhood and K-12 education programs for at-risk children. Past Minneapolis grantees include Way to Grow Minneapolis, the United Way of Greater Twin Cities, the Northside Achievement Zone and the Minneapolis Foundation.
Other Grantmaking Opportunities
Although it is not a grantmaking program per se, the General Mills Corporation supports public and private K-12 schools via its ubiquitous Box Tops for Education program, through which the company donates ten cents per purchase to consumers’ schools of choice. Since its inception in 1996, the program has given over $900 million to public, private and charter schools in the U.S.
Important Grant Details:
General Mills Foundation grants range anywhere from a few thousand to over $3 million, with an average grant size of about $25,000. The foundation makes about $24 million in grants a year.
This foundation does not accept unsolicited applications for funding, choosing instead to work with preselected organizations in its areas of interest. General inquiries may be directed to the foundation’s staff at (763) 764-2211.
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