Our Differences Make Us Stronger: A Story about Racial Healing Circles

A story about sharing our identities and making new friends from La June Montgomery Tabron, the President and CEO of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

La June and her best friend, Jenefer, love going to school in Detroit. They’re in the same class, and they always sit together at lunch. La June is Black and Jenefer is White, and they don’t notice that all the other kids are sitting with friends who look like them.

But when Jenefer moves away, La June doesn’t know where to sit. She feels different. A new girl, Eva, moves into Jenefer’s old house, and everything about her feels different to La June, too.

At school, La June’s teacher tries something new: changing up the seats at lunch time. After, he gathers the class into a circle to talk about why it was hard to sit with different people, what they learned about each other, and how they can share more in the future. La June and her classmates start to understand that sometimes it’s comfortable to be around people who are like us, but we begin to build a community when we learn about people who are different.

Reflecting the transformative racial healing practices that the W. K. Kellogg Foundation promotes and celebrates around the world, Our Differences Make Us Stronger shows young readers that sharing our stories, listening to others, and learning about our differences are the first steps to building a stronger community.

La June Montgomery Tabron is both the first woman and the first African American to serve as president and CEO of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the world. In 2023, Inside Philanthropy named Tabron one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in US Philanthropy, and the New York Times named her a Groundbreaker at its annual Dealbook Summit. She has spoken at the Aspen Ideas Festival, The Atlantic Festival, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Essence Festival of Culture, and the University of Oxford. She lives in Battle Creek, Michigan.

TeMika Grooms is a Georgia-based writer and illustrator creating stories with a belief that all children should be able to see themselves as the hero within the pages of a book. In 2021, she was selected as an Illustration Mentee in the We Need Diverse Books Program and was a member of the first cohort for the Highlights Foundation and The Brown Bookshelf Amplify Black Stories program.