The Giving Review: The Ford Foundation’s new strategy, and what it isn’t saying about the old one

This article first appeared in the Giving Review

It acknowledges that previous grantmaking, “in many instances,” failed to produce sufficiently enduring change. Will it now reflect a reconsideration of why?

Last week, the 90-year-old Ford Foundation announced its much-anticipated new strategic plan. Under the previous strategy, introduced during Darren Walker’s presidency roughly a decade ago, Ford identified inequality as the defining challenge of its time. The new one, under Walker’s successor Heather Gerken, makes the protection and strengthening of democracy its central organizing concept.

In a report to the board of trustees but publicly released with the announcement, How We Meet This Moment, Gerken writes, “We are reorganizing the foundation around a smaller number of priorities; instead of dividing our attention among 19 defined programs and 28 lines of work, we will focus on seven interconnected funding areas in order to execute at sufficient scale to meet the problems before us.” She also promises fewer, larger grants and more multiyear general-operating support.

Gerken broadly describes the shift using both “continuity-and-change” framing and diplomatically abstract spheres of meaning, including in the labels of the seven new areas, to be expected in such circumstances. As part of a larger new-president’s-reorganization genre that includes an inherent respect for institutional history, it’s pretty good.

An initial external critique would be along the lines of “That’s all well and good, very nice, but it remains to be seen” what this all means. And that would be true, of course, but maybe a little too easy to offer; actual grants effectuating the strategy have yet to be made, much less even decided upon.

The shift does seem as if it may be more consequential than a routine, regular ol’ reorganization of grantmaking categories. It explicitly changes at least the foundation’s stated, however abstractly, understanding of what its philanthropy is meant to accomplish.

Private conversations and reviews

A more-interesting and -helpful insight on the shift’s explanation might be to leave what remains to be seen to the future and wonder about what just plain isn’t seen as of this “moment,” but must have occurred in Ford’s consideration and preparation of it.

According to the report, after all, “Our work was informed and inspired by years of accumulated experience and insight derived from countless conversations inside and outside the foundation, steady and consistent outside reviews, and critical perspectives of staff across the foundation.”

If not just because of a change in executive personnel, why the shift? What did these private conversations, reviews, and critical perspectives conclude was “wrong,” or maybe even just wrong-headed, about the old strategy, in the previous “moment”? What has Ford learned from it? How will it apply that which it has learned in this next moment?

It is possible for strategies to survive and be applied in different moments; happens all the time. Why not here and now, in this one?

In keeping with the genre

Amidst the necessary abstractions, there could perhaps be a little bit of a hint. This is “a time for humility,” according to Gerken’s report. “We must acknowledge that, in many instances, we failed to enact change that was enduring—that the tents we built were not big and sturdy enough to hold in today’s challenging climate.”

It doesn’t “remain to be seen” what that means. Gerken and Ford know. They’re just not including much about that in this document—for good reason, in keeping with the genre.

It’s at least plausible for an outsider to conclude this might mean that, after looking back, Ford or some in and around it now recognize that it sees the risks incurred, the damage done, by marginalizing itself too much on the progressive left. There has been and is risk and damage, the thinking could reasonably be, in purposely or effectively distancing itself from those who’ve thus given rise to popular, populist?, discontent with it, its funding, and the activities of those who receive it.

They were not in the tax-incentivized Ford’s now self-admittedly small tents, after all, and they haven’t and don’t much agree with what has been in them—and there’s an understandable, though I understand Ford might not think so, policy reaction against much of what’s been coming out of them.

In a subsequent passage, the report says that, looking forward, “We will do our best to welcome critical perspectives and create space for deliberation, dissent, and debate. We also will create more space for learning and introspection.”

Since looking forward, just how pluralist the new, humbler, more democracy-protecting Ford’s promised democratic pluralism will actually be is one thing that does fit within the remains-to-be-seen category.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-giving-review-the-ford-foundations-new-strategy-and-what-it-isnt-saying-about-the-old-one/