Ford vs. Ford

In 2024, the Ford Foundation gave the same amount of money ($750,000) to a fringe communist-inspired publication called Hammer & Hope that it gave to the famous Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan. Though the foundation’s nearly $15 billion endowment originated from wealth created generations ago by legendary automaker Henry Ford and his son Edsel, it has since become a near-archetype of left-wing ideological capture in Big Philanthropy.

Virtually every American is familiar with Ford Motor Company, a prominence which has no doubt helped the Ford Foundation become one of a handful of private foundations that might credibly claim to be a household name. Despite their shared name and history, there is no formal connection between the corporation and the foundation—they are completely separate from one another. This was long true of the Ford family as well: Henry Ford III’s election as a trustee in 2019 marked the first time that the foundation had a Ford serving on its board since 1976.

There is, however, another private foundation that remains officially affiliated with Ford Motor Company—Ford Philanthropy. Its grantmaking priorities paint a rather stark contrast with those of the Ford Foundation, in that they tend to more closely reflect the sorts of traditional charitable causes which the American public would broadly associate with the purpose of philanthropy. There is a qualitative difference in the two foundations’ grantmaking that rivals the quantitative one.

Tale of the Tape

Name	Ford Philanthropy	Ford Foundation
Year Established	1949	1936
Affiliated with Ford Motor Company?	Yes	No
Headquarters	Michigan	New York City
Grants Paid (2024)	$43.1 million	$840.8 million
Net Assets (2024)	$199.6 million	$14.9 billion

Despite their common origins, both foundations make a point to emphasize the independence of the Ford Foundation. Ford Philanthropy’s website states:

Founded in 1949, we are a not-for-profit organization funded and made possible by Ford Motor Company profits. Although the Ford family founded the Ford Foundation in 1936, Ford Philanthropy and the Ford Foundation are separate entities that operate independently and have no relationship to one another.

The Ford Foundation similarly explains:

The Ford Foundation is not connected to the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Foundation and Ford Motor Company are two separate and legally unrelated entities whose operations are completely independent and have been for more than 50 years. There is not any financial authority, decision making nor funding relationship between the two organizations.

Ford Philanthropy is directly funded by Ford Motor Company, which has in recent years made an annual contribution of $50 million. In 2024, Ford Philanthropy paid out approximately $43 million in grants and ended the year with net assets of $200 million.

The Ford Foundation receives no new contributions—its grantmaking is funded through investment returns from its endowment. In 2024, the Ford Foundation paid out more than $840 million in grants and ended the year with net assets of $14.9 billion. Ford Philanthropy reported no paid staff in 2024, while the Ford Foundation had approximately 300 employees who were paid at least $50,000 (the highest-paid of whom made over $4.7 million).

Ford Philanthropy describes its purpose as “expanding access to opportunities and resources that empower people to pursue their dreams.” Its priorities include food, healthcare, and transportation, as well as education, entrepreneurship, and career development. It also hosts the official volunteering efforts of Ford Motor Company employees, who may request paid time off to do so.

The Ford Foundation’s mission is “guided by a vision of social justice,” and it considers inequality in “political, economic, and cultural systems” to be “the defining challenge of our time”—one which is central to everything the foundation does. Its grantmaking programs include support for activists fighting to “achieve lasting political and social change” by “challenging xenophobia, standing up for black lives, and interrogating the equation of police and prisons with community safety.” The Ford Foundation’s “commitment to shifting repressive power dynamics” is rooted in a belief that “race, gender, class, disability, and ethnic identity are deeply connected—often inextricably so,” and its U.S. civic engagement grantmaking strategy asserts American democracy must be “redefin[ed]” by those “who bear the brunt of inequality,” in order to combat (among other things) “rising nationalism rooted in racism, misogyny, and authoritarian tendencies.”

Comparative Grantmaking

While the scale of the two foundations’ grantmaking is dramatically different, it is nevertheless interesting to compare Ford Philanthropy’s largest 2024 grantees with similar-or-larger Ford Foundation grantees.

By far the biggest single recipient of Ford Philanthropy money in 2024 (over $11.3 million—more than a quarter of its total grantmaking) was GlobalGiving, which functions as an intermediary to handle the foundation’s international grantmaking. The Ford Foundation gave more than twice this amount (nearly $23 million) to various projects and programs housed at the New Venture Fund, the largest of the major left-of-center nonprofits which were then being managed by Arabella Advisors. This included the $750,000 it gave to Hammer & Hope, which was fiscally sponsored by the New Venture Fund at the time.

On the domestic side, Ford Philanthropy gave at least $500,000 to fifteen different nonprofit recipients in 2024, some of which also received funding from the Ford Foundation that year:

• Ford Philanthropy gave $5 million to Henry Ford Health, a major Michigan hospital system established by its eponymous benefactor. The Ford Foundation also gave $3.4 million to Henry Ford Health, though this was considerably less than the $5.2 million it gave to the ACLU Foundation or the $5 million it gave to the Collaborative for Gender + Reproductive Equity, a major pro-abortion advocacy and funding network.

• Ford Philanthropy gave $2 million to the United Way for Southeastern Michigan, whose charitable footprint extends across Metro Detroit. The Ford Foundation gave just $100,000 to the United Way for Southeastern Michigan—less than it gave to support Drag Queen Story Hour in San Francisco. At the same time, the Ford Foundation sent more than $2.8 million to the National Women’s Law Center, a heavily politicized activist group which argues that federal policy should be to “tax the patriarchy” and contends that “abortion is love, community, and justice personified.”

• Ford Philanthropy gave more than $1.7 million to the Governors Highway Safety Association, whose purpose is to reduce traffic accidents and injuries nationwide. The Ford Foundation gave nearly twice this amount ($3.35 million) to Community Change, a major left-wing activist group which declares that “poverty abolition is essential to undoing the violence of systemic racism, misogyny, and white supremacy in our country,” and works to “bridge the worlds of grassroots organizing and progressive politics to change the systems that impact our communities.”

• Ford Philanthropy gave more than $1.2 million to an educational nonprofit called the Henry Ford Learning Institute. The Ford Foundation gave more than twice this amount ($2.6 million) to a group called UltraViolet, which employs what it calls “full spectrum feminism” to rewrite “the rules of the patriarchy,” disrupt what it considers to be “the everyday sexism, misogynoir, and transmisogyny women and gender expansive people face,” and “hold institutions, corporations, and politicians accountable to anti-racist Feminist”

• Ford Philanthropy gave $1.2 million to Feonix-Mobility Rising, which helps expand access to transportation for those without it. The Ford Foundation gave approximately twice this amount (nearly $2.4 million) to the Color of Change Education Fund, the 501(c)(3) arm of an activist group which has declared that “policing is a violent institution that must end” and which supported a campaign to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with additional left-of-center justices during the Biden Administration.

• Ford Philanthropy gave more than $1.1 million to the Gleaners Community Food Bank of Southeastern Michigan, which distributed 53.1 million pounds of food in 2024. This was approximately the same amount of money that the Ford Foundation gave to the Decolonizing Wealth Project, which contends that philanthropy is a white supremacist product of colonization, slavery, and capitalist oppression – its founder has asserted that philanthropic money has “been twice stolen: once through the colonial-style exploitation of natural resources and exploited labor, and the second time, through tax evasion.”

• Ford Philanthropy gave $1 million to the TechForce Foundation, which supports education and career development for professional technicians. The Ford Foundation gave three times this amount ($3 million) to support the Black Feminist Fund, which seeks to “radically change the way Black feminist movements are funded” so that they can work to “transform societies, systems, cultures and economies.” The Ford Foundation also gave nearly $3 million to the Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism, which in turn makes grants to “women, trans, non-binary, disabled, LGBTQI+, Black, Indigenous and other activists” so that they can challenge the “oppressive systems” of “capitalism, patriarchy, [and] white supremacy.”

• Ford Philanthropy gave $1 million to the Children’s Hospital of Michigan Foundation. The Ford Foundation also contributed $1 million, though it gave over three times more ($3.3 million) to the Drug Policy Alliance, an activist group that supports the blanket decriminalization of drug possession, including an Oregon ballot measure which did so in 2020. That measure was subsequently reversed by the state legislature in 2024, amid a spike in overdose deaths.

• Ford Philanthropy gave $836,591 to the United Way of West Tennessee. The Ford Foundation gave more than twice this amount to the Center for Law and Social Policy ($1.76 million), an activist group which contends that “anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation advances the underlying ideological and political goals of white supremacy,” and to the Transgender Law Center ($1.71 million), which

• Ford Philanthropy gave $680,000 to the Detroit Institute of Arts museum. The Ford Foundation gave $350,000 directly to the museum, plus an additional $8.33 million to the Foundation for Detroit’s Future in order to assist the museum in navigating the aftermath of the city’s 2013 bankruptcy. This was the third-largest single grant the Ford Foundation reported on its 2024 Form 990-PF, behind only the $15 million it gave to the immigration-focused Abundant Futures Fund at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and the $12.7 million it gave to the criminal justice-focused Justice and Mobility Fund at Blue Meridian Partners.

• Ford Philanthropy gave $658,250 to the Detroit Public Schools Community District Foundation, to support the city’s public education system. The Ford Foundation gave considerably more than this ($900,000) to support the far-left Movement for Black Lives, which among many other things demands the total abolition of police and prisons, a government-driven “radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth,” public control over the use and distribution of resources, and new racially-restricted federal aid programs.

• Ford Philanthropy gave $650,000 to Team Rubicon, a national disaster relief nonprofit. The Ford Foundation gave more than this ($800,000) to Detention Watch Network, which advocates for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a wholesale end to the practice of illegal immigrant detention in the United States. By decriminalizing illegal immigration, Detention Watch Network seeks to further its broader fight against “racialized oppression” and “racism, xenophobia, discriminatory policing, and mass incarceration.”

• Ford Philanthropy gave $615,000 to Feeding America, the country’s largest network of food banks. The Ford Foundation gave more than this to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, an activist group that called the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle a “fascist rally” and attacked vice president J.D. Vance as “reprehensible,” a “charlatan,” a “menace,” a “compulsive liar,” and a “Trump-certified white nationalist.”

• Ford Philanthropy gave $600,000 to the American National Red Cross. The Ford Foundation gave more than this ($666,800) to fund the University Consortium on Afro-Latin American Studies at Harvard University, so that it can “transform higher education across the Americas” to prepare “a new generation of educators to produce the antiracist cultural shift toward equity and inclusion that we need.”

• Ford Philanthropy gave $500,000 to the Michigan Thanksgiving Parade Foundation, the nonprofit responsible for organizing the annual America’s Thanksgiving Parade in Detroit. The Ford Foundation gave the same amount to the NDN Collective, a radical Native American activist group which has demanded that the United States government close Mount Rushmore National Memorial—calling it a “symbol of white supremacy and colonization”—and retrocede the “stolen Lakota land” back to the Sioux.

Other traditionally charitable six-figure grantees of Ford Philanthropy in 2024 included Breakthrough T1D (diabetes research), the Detroit Food Academy (culinary education and youth mentorship), the Pope Francis Center (homelessness support), Ride for Ride (youth transportation), SER Metro-Detroit (job training), the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Henry Ford’s historic Fair Lane home, World Central Kitchen, and the Salvation Army.

Other major left-of-center activist groups that received seven-figure grants from the Ford Foundation in 2024 included the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, the Center for Popular Democracy, Demos, If/When/How, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the People’s Action Institute, UnidosUS, and many more.

Final Thoughts

This comparison, of course, can only be taken as far as it goes. Ford Philanthropy’s 2024 grantmaking was not totally free of recipients with ideological agendas (the $60,000 it gave to the Tides Foundation, for example), while the Ford Foundation also gave to some facially charitable causes (its support for the Detroit Institute of Arts, mentioned above). There is also an inherent subjectivity to all of this. Still, the general point holds: the qualitative difference in the two Fords’ grantmaking is profound.

It seems reasonable to at least partially attribute this to Ford Philanthropy’s formal affiliation with Ford Motor Company. The vast majority of American households have at least one automobile, and Ford would doubtless prefer that its official philanthropic work pleases—rather than offends—this ocean of potential customers. It has a direct incentive to conduct its grantmaking in accordance with the general charitable instincts of the car-owning American public.

The Ford Foundation operates between no such guardrails. With an endowment capable of self-sustaining its own growth in perpetuity, and grantmaking that is subject to no meaningful restrictions other than those imposed by law, it is largely free to deploy its vast resources to engineer society along whatever lines it fancies. The fact that its vision lies considerably to the left of that of the median American is of minimal relevance to this calculation. Indeed, it would seem a necessary condition for a foundation led by those with a “profound commitment to social change.”

The Ford Foundation’s 2024 grantmaking was nineteen times larger than Ford Philanthropy’s. If their endowments were exchanged, and the two foundations’ giving was re-scaled accordingly—while fully retaining their respective programmatic emphases—would the average American see this as a positive or negative net development for the charitable sector?

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/ford-vs-ford/