Redefining Leadership in Uncertain Times

During its 96-year history of supporting the health, happiness and well-being of children and families, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) has always centered community as the true leaders of the work. From the time he established the foundation, Mr. Kellogg and his advisors recognized that communities know what their children need in order to achieve success and are in the best position to improve conditions. Since that time, the foundation has woven cooperative planning, intelligent study and group action into a unique community engagement approach — one which integrates community voice with lived experience, data, research and analysis.

At the second in-person gathering in Washington, D.C., fellows from each of WKKF’s U.S.-based priority places (Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico and New Orleans) and the national cohort gathered to discuss how WKKF’s community engagement approach informs their community-based work on behalf of children and families. We heard from Christina Andrews, executive director and assistant professor for the University of Arizona’s Wassaja Carlos Montezuma Native American Health Center; Debra Giles, chancery court judge in Mississippi; Kenlana Ferguson, executive director of the Michigan Transformation Collective; Scott Patterson-Alatorre, director of the family services division for the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department; and Zakenya Neely, director of strategic partnerships and market solutions at the National Association for Family Child Care, in Louisiana.

The conversation was both sobering and energizing as these leaders shared their insights on how to navigate today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, which has been a recognized framework for several decades, along with their strategies for supporting children when the system fails them and where they find hope and inspiration.

Kenlana Ferguson participating in a group session at the gathering in Washington, D.C.

How can leaders effectively combine cooperative planning, intelligent study and group action to create meaningful impact in their communities?

Christina: The first thing that comes to mind around cooperation is the need for cultural humility. Western researchers think they know what’s best for the tribes, but each tribe has a different way of thinking, a different philosophy. People need to listen to the Tribes first, they need to understand the Tribes’ struggles and issues and they need to understand the Tribes’ relationships with the federal government.

Scott: I think it is also honoring that people are walking in two worlds. In the work I do in New Mexico, what comes to mind is around equitable and collaborative inclusion. When we do it poorly, we set aside a two-hour listening session for 23 sovereign nations about a rule that we’ve already made in private—a rule that impacts children, women and families. When we come from a place of cultural humility, we ask people what they need and what would move the needle.

Debra: As a judge, I’m focused on being fair and impartial, but with the youth court system in Mississippi people aren’t effectively trained to present information to the court system in a way that allows the court to make a decision. The court ends up in the role of pulling everyone together to think about how we effectively help children and families achieve family reunification and rehabilitation.

Kenlana: We have positioned ourselves as a backbone institution focused on collective impact. It’s really a model of collaboration where we can acknowledge and understand the capacity of folks who are doing the work, take on some of the labor of building the infrastructure and come into a space where we can leverage what’s been built to create together collectively. Racial healing and relationship-building are built right in.

A class four fellow reviewing the handout explaining the VUCA exercise.

How is VUCA showing up in your community?

Zakenya: When we were introduced to VUCA, it reminded me of a time my organization was awarded a $450,000 grant that ultimately did not materialize. We were deflated and disappointed but the pivot had to happen. We ended up partnering with Stearns Bank who awarded us $100,000, which we got into the hands of 10 family childcare educators to strengthen their programs. When life gives us lemons, we make lemonade. That’s how we show up.

Christina: The states don’t know how to deal with Tribes and the Tribes don’t know how to deal with the states because we never do. So, what we’re doing is bringing Tribes together to oversee our own health care. We’re creating a structure, the Tribal Administration Service Office, where we’re going to oversee federal funding because we know our people and what they need. That’s how we’re making systemic change.

Scott: VUCA is showing up in agility at the state level as well as with volatility at the federal level. In New Mexico, our division of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department is moving to multi-year contracts instead of one-year contracts so providers can know, at least for the next three years, what level of funding they have.

Debra Giles, alongside other class four fellows, listening to one of the sessions.

What implications does the VUCA world have on the children or the community?

Debra: It has a significant impact. What we have going on nationally does not allow children to be children. If I have four children at home, I have to work two jobs. Who is home with the children? It’s the older children who have to get up, do their own homework, take care of the younger children, get them bathed, fed and off to school. At school the teacher asks Little Johnny to sit in his chair and do his work, but Little Johnny is exhausted and he’s hungry. That’s when the behavioral problems come in. It’s having an astronomical effect on our children—nobody is stopping to realize our children are not allowed to be children in the society in which we live now. That’s the biggest challenge.

Zakenya: In Louisiana, only 30% of children in the 2 to 4 age group are ready to enter kindergarten. That creates uncertainty and inconsistency in the structures and systems that support children. Then there’s the trauma that children have to deal with, and the education and equity piece of it and then it just becomes this cyclical impact of how children end up in society inside trauma responses. If we invest in early childhood and provide the fundamentals, we make certain that all those social and emotional developmental needs are met, which produces productive citizens.

Kenlana: Our community is forever changed with the needs of our children not being met now. So we’re in this cycle of take away, give back, take away and give back. That does not produce the long-term stability that children need to develop into healthy adults. We have a lot of adults now wounded from resources that weren’t available to them when they were children and their basic needs were not being met.

Scott: We need to recognize that we’re actually teaching three generations, four generations back based on neuroscience. We’re expecting parents, who have never been equipped to nurture because of systemic racism, to provide something they have never had. Twenty years from now, we’re still going to be treating four generations back and now we’re going to be treating the fifth generation. We won’t have actually watered the seeds that we needed to plant from the start.

Christina: What is coming to my mind as a child growing up on a reservation is that the land and everything, it’s who we are. We have survived but on the west side of the Tohono O’odham Nation, we have villages that still just have one pipe that services the entire village. We don’t have running water. We live in traditional homes, many people don’t speak English, let alone understand concepts like school, or even what is a nurse or a doctor. They don’t have that knowledge now, in 2026, and there’s never been one medical doctor from the Tohono O’odham Nation, ever.

Zakenya Neely and other fellows sharing time together in between sessions.

As a result of this session, what might you begin to do differently to better respond to VUCA challenges?

Debra: Stop working in silos. It’s important that we come together and partner, looking at the root of the problems and start fixing them from the ground up. A seed grows two ways: down and up. So we’ve got to start over and start fixing down in order to go up.

Christina: One thing: pathways. But they have to come from us, the Tribal people. We need to be the ones to go out and then come back and remind our people of our traditional ways of being a human being.

Zakenya: Organizations need to lean into their values. That should supersede VUCA and give you that North Star when there’s chaos and uncertainty. Values help us lean into clarity.

Scott: I think we can start by acknowledging that colonization is still happening. It’s active, and we make decisions from there. We need a way to avoid treating “no” as a complete sentence. If there is a “no, you can’t do X,” what can we do instead to still accomplish the same goal? For example, how do we get a family’s needs met if the funding is gone? We come together and say “okay, that money is gone, let’s go get other funding.”

Kenlana: Tell the truth about the history that created the current conditions. And then, really study your community. Start with place-based work, understand the community deeply and really look at those upstream conditions, while you’re also attending to the current needs of folks.

The fellows’ conversation was both sobering and galvanizing. They spoke candidly about the adverse impacts of generational trauma and the systems that fail the children and families they are meant to support. But they also spoke about concrete strategies to address these challenges — strategies grounded in cultural humility and trusting communities to solve their own problems. They remind us that even in the most volatile and uncertain times being guided by our values carries us and the work forward.