Ford Foundation president unveils the $18B philanthropy’s first technique overhaul in over a decade
The Ford Foundation on Thursday laid out a new strategy that reorients the 90-year-old grantmaker round what it calls the “preconditions for thriving democracies,” from the rule of regulation to reliable data and inclusive economies. Some have considered it the Ford Foundation’s most important strategic shift since 2015, when former president Darren Walker targeted the inspiration round preventing inequality.
The announcement additionally lands lower than two weeks earlier than the midterm elections.
“The Ford Foundation’s new imaginative and prescient is an evolution, not a revolution, of our work, and a mirrored image of this period’s quickly altering international panorama,” Gerken mentioned in an announcement.
Despite the title, the inspiration operates independently of Ford Motor Company. Edsel Ford (Henry Ford’s son) began the inspiration in 1936 with $25,000, and from the beginning it was meant to face other than the automobile firm. When Edsel died in 1943 and Henry Ford in 1947, the cash they left vaulted the Ford Foundation to the highest of the planet’s foundations, in accordance with a 2024 Fortune commentary co-written by Walker.
Henry Ford II, Edsel’s son, later steered the inspiration towards independence. The basis took on a world mission, added trustees from exterior the household, relocated to New York City in 1953, and finally offered its stake within the automaker, the foundation has said. Ford Motor Company has its personal charitable arm, Ford Philanthropy, which is funded by the corporate’s earnings.
Today, the Ford Foundation is headquartered in New York, runs 10 workplaces abroad, and funds greater than 2,300 grantees. Its endowment has grown from $13 billion in 2019, when it was freely giving greater than $600 million a yr, to $18 billion now, in accordance with the inspiration. Historically, the Ford Foundation supported civil rights lawsuits starting within the late Sixties and helped construct public curiosity regulation right into a area of its personal.
Fighting autocracy and inequality
The Ford Foundation frames its new plan as its reply to rising autocracy, widening inequality, and fading public belief.
“Conditions have modified since our final technique overview, and we’re marshaling all of our assets to reply to these new challenges whereas staying true to our legacy as a social justice basis,” Gerken mentioned in an announcement.
The basis expects to award about $700 million in grants in 2027, a determine that might rise, a Ford Foundation spokesperson instructed the Associated Press. The group can be altering the way it palms out that cash. It says it’ll amplify grants, commit extra money over a number of years, and increase basic working help. The basis cites many years of analysis and studying exhibiting that grantees with versatile, long-term funding have been higher ready for the sudden.
“Throughout the technique overview course of, it grew to become abundantly clear that this unpredictable and risky interval requires a lot from philanthropy,” Nicholas Turner, Ford Foundation’s government vice chairman of packages, mentioned in an announcement.
Grantmaking will now run via seven funding areas: democratic governance and the rule of regulation, inclusive economies, data as a public good, security and justice, gender equality, international cooperation, and racial justice. It will roll out methods for every in phases all through 2027.
The basis may also create a devoted racial justice fund. Its gender equality work may also increase to incorporate your complete vary of reproductive well being care, and its data work will attempt to affect how digital instruments get constructed, rolled out, and overseen.
The shift will price some present grantees their funding. The basis will finally wind down sure packages, however Turner instructed the AP it was “too early to say” which might be affected. He promised the inspiration would go away these areas “with respect and charm and care and help.”
The basis’s pivot comes because the Trump administration ramps up stress on nonprofits. President Donald Trump threatened final yr to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt standing, and earlier this month the administration proposed a rule that may strip faculties and personal faculties of that standing in the event that they run race-based packages, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported. Vice President JD Vance, whereas operating for Senate in 2021, argued that main foundations should lose their tax exemptions and referred to as the Ford Foundation and others prefer it “cancers on American society.”
Gerken pressured to AP that her group’s democracy work is nonpartisan, pointing to the millions of dollars the Ford Foundation has put towards teams defending election outcomes this yr.
“Our dedication to social justice and to communities which were pushed to the margins, denied equal justice or financial alternative, will stay a throughline throughout all of our areas of labor,” Gerken mentioned in an announcement.
