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Today, as part of our 3 Things series, Michigan Radio’s Christina Shockley asks Sterling Speirn, President of the Kellogg Foundation, for his ideas for what we can all do to help improve the state. Sterling’s first idea is to eat healthy and live actively.

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Sterling believes Michigan is an active state and offers excellent opportunities to eat healthy as the second most agriculturally diverse state in the country. “We have fabulous access to all these fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the growing months. We’ve also had a renaissance of farmer’s markets. Sterling says the Kellogg Foundation has been been working for a couple of decades to improve the food supply in urban neighborhoods all over Michigan.

Speirn’s second idea is to get involved in public problem solving.

He wants average Michigander’s, folks not usually involved in local politics, to get involved. He says this is important because “sometimes politicians, as well meaning as they are, want to tell us that if we just elect them, they will solve these problems, and we’re all vulnerable to this wishful thinking.” By getting involved Speirn says we learn that “we can’t solve our problems without making hard choices.” He continues, “But I think when ordinary people get past the wishful thinking and struggle, they discover that one, we have a huge amount in common, and making those hard choices is a lot more possible if regular people struggle with that in a sort of grassroots way. And then they can send better signals to our elected representatives as to what we would actually tolerate or be willing to accept in terms of sacrifice or priorities.”

Sterling’s third idea has to do with early childhood education.

Working with the Kellogg foundation, Sterling has been trying to get communities to organize for early childhood success. “There’s been a quiet revolution in the last few years among people in the educational realm, first of all, trying to redefine education reform which is so often targeted at our K-12 public school system, but saying education reform really has to start by defining education as truly starting at a child’s birth. And, it’s exciting because even the U.S. Department of Education has now defined something called ‘early learning’ as that which occurs between the ages of birth and age eight.”

Sterling favors an approach that works toward everyone in a community asking the question, “What are we doing for the young children in our neighborhood?”

“From birth to age eight when a child finishes third grade we know all the studies we’ve seen from the Nobel laureates in early childhood and the test scores we see of our third graders, if a child is on grade level by third grade, the chances of them graduating high school and going on to secondary education are much greater than if they’re behind by third grade.”