Al Mitchell is no farmer. When he was growing up in North St. Louis, he said, he didn’t even know what a weed was: “I just thought that was bad grass.” But the path that led him to his current position as president of the Monsanto Fund started on a farm more than 8,000 miles away from his hometown.
Already the general auditor for Monsanto at the time, in 2008 Mitchell was nominated for an Eisenhower Fellowship by a fellow Monsanto executive and awarded the prestigious research opportunity. He chose to study in South Africa. As an African American who came of age in a deeply segregated St. Louis, Mitchell followed Nelson Mandela’s rise from political prisoner under apartheid to become his nation’s first black president.
Mitchell wanted to study how South Africa was “dealing with a lost generation because of apartheid from an educational perspective,” he said. He also wanted to study “corruption and its impact on the ability of a country to make economic gains.” Finally, he wanted to study the process of land being returned to small landholders who were forced to decide between selling their new land to developers or – as Monsanto would prefer – going into the sustainable agriculture business (and possibly becoming a seed client of the company).
Mitchell spent five months in South Africa, mostly in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durbin. While he was there, Deborah Patterson, then president of the Monsanto Fund, the company’s philanthropic arm, connected him with Buhle Farmer’s Academy. The Monsanto Fund donated the academy some land and has awarded it grants for operations. The academy is located in Delmas, a small farming town about an hour northeast of Johannesburg. Mitchell was invited to speak at a graduation there.
“I did not know what I was walking into,” Mitchell said. “I walked into a barn facility. Everybody’s family was there. One student was a 15-year-old kid. Another was a 73-year-old former featherweight champion boxer. All the families were applauding and cheering. I was so moved.”
When he returned to St. Louis, Mitchell told Hugh Grant, Monsanto chairman and chief executive officer, and other executives about the experience. “Everybody should go out and see this,” he told them, “and then they would understand what we do and the impact it has on other people.”
He had been bitten, hard, by the philanthropy bug. Patterson noticed and went to work on him. She helped him get on the boards of directors of several area non-profits, including College Bound. “That hit home,” Mitchell said. “The kids were in impoverished neighborhoods, in the city and North County.” Mitchell knew both; he grew up in North St. Louis and, later, in Ferguson – “a mere five blocks away from Ground Zero,” he said. “I could see myself in them.”
Patterson, it seemed, could see herself in Mitchell. “I am connected to St. Louis and making sure it’s a thriving community and, much like Deborah, I think I can be a model for folks who come from similar backgrounds,” he said.
When Patterson thought of retiring, Mitchell looked like a fitting successor. Grant and other top executives – including Janet M. Holloway, senior vice president and chief of staff, and Steve Mizell, executive vice president of human resources – remembered Mitchell’s pep talks after returning from South Africa.
“They all knew I had a desire to move in this direction,” Mitchell said. “They approached me about it, and I willingly accepted.” March 15 was Patterson’s last day on the job, and the Monsanto Fund’s Board of Directors officially approved Mitchell’s appointment as president shortly thereafter.
Ensuring a thriving community
The Monsanto Fund was founded in 1964. Over the last 50-plus years, it has awarded more than 15,000 community grants and supported more than 6,000 schools across the country, not to mention projects like Buhle Farmer’s Academy all over the world, wherever crops are grown. Over the last five years, the Monsanto Fund has contributed $28.5 million in St. Louis and $100 million globally. Over the last three years, those numbers are $17.3 million in St. Louis and $65 million globally.
With more than 4,000 employees working at Monsanto’s St. Louis headquarters, many local Monsanto Fund programs focus on K-12 math and science education, as well as local arts organizations, where the mission is funding access for people who might not otherwise experience the arts. The fund recently launched a new focus area concerned with nutrition, food security, and malnutrition in mothers and children.
“We work with organizations externally that support the mission of the Monsanto Fund, which is to ensure that we have a thriving community where our employees live, where our customers live and where we do business,” Mitchell said.
The Monsanto Fund is a separate entity with its own tax accounting, and Monsanto “has no say so, more or less,” in how the fund spends the money the company pays into it, Mitchell said. “The business can’t profit from what we do with the fund.”
For one-time grants of up to $25,000, the president of the fund is empowered to make grant-funding decisions, Mitchell said, though all applications are scored according to the same set of criteria to help judge their merits and impact.
Any grant for more than $25,000 or for multiple years requires approval by the fund’s Board of Directors, which is comprised of Monsanto Company executive team members; its chair is Nicole M. Ringenberg, Monsanto’s vice president and controller.
One of the larger, multi-district education programs the fund supports is MySci, a collaboration with Washington University’s Institute for School Partnership (ISP) that equips elementary school teachers with instructional materials and professional development in science, technology, engineering and math. Monsanto Fund awarded a three-year, $1.9 million grant to ISP for the program last year, which was the fund’s largest gift in 2015. It will be used to develop a new 6th-8th grade science curriculum.
The Monsanto Fund also is responsible for Monsanto’s global corporate contributions, which are economic development investments tied to the company’s bottom line. Local examples are funding Forest Park Forever and the renewal of the St. Louis riverfront.
“These are things that still embrace what we want to do in terms of uplifting the community and making it thriving for our employees, customers and those we work with,” Mitchell said, “but that money gets charged to the business. Since it is tied to the company’s results and reported to the company, we tend to collaborate on how we spend the money.”
Up from accounting
Awarding some of Monsanto’s money to worthwhile projects in St. Louis and across the globe may be new to Mitchell, but he has been accounting for some aspect of Monsanto’s money for his entire 32-year corporate career. “It’s the only company I’ve ever worked for,” he said.
And he worked his way steadily up, from cost accountant in the Fibers Division of a plant in Alvin, Texas (1984-1988) to plant controller in the Detergents & Phosphates Division of a now-defunct facility in Long Beach, California (1998-1992) to a series of increasingly responsible positions at headquarters in St. Louis. His first director position was director of Finance – Animal Agriculture Business (1999-2003); his first vice president position was VP of Finance – North America & Latin America North Division (2004-2007). His final position with the company before moving to the fund was assistant controller (2011-2015).
Once Mitchell was hired by Monsanto, it looked like he knew what he was doing and where he was going, but his journey to that first job had its unusual and unpredictable moments.
As a graduate of Beaumont High School in Saint Louis Public Schools, Class of 1979, Mitchell set his sights on Michigan State University. It was said to have a good business school, and an aptitude test had revealed that Mitchell should pursue a career where he worked with numbers. But that wasn’t really why he chose the school.
“I was in love with basketball, and with Magic Johnson they had just won the NCAA championship,” Mitchell said. “He was a sophomore. He had two more years. I am going to Michigan State, Mama!”
But when he got to East Lansing, Magic was gone.
“He left!” Mitchell said. “After his sophomore year, he went pro. He left me hanging.”
After Mitchell graduated from Michigan State in 1983 with a degree in accounting, he learned the hard way that he did not know how to interview for a job. “I desperately tried to get a job from every company that came to Michigan State,” he said, but found no takers.
His mother, Mary Naylor, would still take him in. He moved back in with her in Ferguson and continued his job search. He saw an ad for an area cost accountant at Monsanto in Alvin, Texas, a place he could not find on the map. But his mother was influential.
“My mom said, ‘Son, you’re going to have to get out of my house,’” he said. “So I took all of the failures from my interviews at Michigan State and really prepared and studied hard, and I got the job.”
He spent nearly four years working for Monsanto in Alvin and about that same amount of time working for the company in Long Beach before moving home to headquarters. But while he was in California he made a new, lasting connection in St. Louis.
There was an accountant named Marsha at Monsanto headquarters whose duty it was to call the Long Beach facility with corporate entries needed for the ledger at that plant. Mitchell would take her call. “There’s no harm in being flirtatious on the phone if you think you’ll never see the person,” Mitchell said.
But in fact he did see her when he came home. His hometown was becoming stranger to him the longer he was away, and she would show him around the changing town. “Eventually,” he said, “we hooked up.”
She is Marsha Mitchell today. They are proud parents of a 17-year-old son, Julian Mitchell (attending Michigan State with the ambition to become a sports broadcaster), and a 12-year-old daughter, Teá Mitchell, a 7th grader at MICDS.
“I’ve had various accounting jobs that moved into management and analysis,” Mitchell summarized his career. “Now I’m leaving finance to move into a whole different space.”
He may have been bitten by the philanthropy bug at a farm academy in South Africa, but he is looking forward to investing Monsanto’s money in public schools here at home.
“Having been a product of the public school system, I have some emotion with helping people understand that you can complete public high school and still be successful,” he said – “but still understand what it takes.”
He now owns a piece of the earth in Florissant, but is no closer to being a farmer.
“I have no garden,” he said. “I don’t have time. I need to play golf.”
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