“Here’s a challenge: Find a figure in American philanthropy more inspiring, more knowledgeable, or better able to articulate both the vast import and fundamental limitations of this great national tradition than Darren Walker. The president of the behemoth Ford Foundation for the last decade, he has a story that reaches from rural poverty to corporate law to Wall Street to community organizing in Harlem to his current perch atop a $16 billion dollar organization that he has leveraged into perhaps the greatest force for social justice worldwide,” said Laureen Powell Jobs for Town & Country. 

“His day job involves overseeing a sprawling network of grant­makers doling out hundreds of millions of dollars annually to work that promotes social justice in every facet of life, from voting rights to disaster relief to the arts. But his role as an ambassador for these causes is equally notable. Walker’s charming ability to serve both realism and optimism in the same breath when confronting even the thorniest questions (for instance, how does one remedy inequality with the very wealth that stems from it?) is what has captivated world leaders, celebrities, and changemakers alike. Walker sat down with his friend, the philanthropist and Ford Foundation board member Laurene Powell Jobs, to contemplate these very things.”

Read the full interview here.

From Sustainable Arts Foundation: 

Our reading and dialogue with colleagues have sharpened our focus on the unjust distribution of wealth in this country. In solidarity with the groundswell of efforts toward decolonization, we feel compelled to spend down our foundation’s assets.

SAF was started with funds inherited from Tony’s grandfather, who in the early 1900s bought land and oil rights in Central California, profiting from the state’s 19th century genocide of its Indigenous people and dispossession of their land. This land in present-day Kern County, the ancestral home of the Yokuts, Chumash, and other Indigenous people, shares its history with nearly all of California’s land: it was stolen from its original inhabitants, who were forcibly removed through murder and enslavement.

We no longer feel entitled to use this money.

We remain deeply connected to and supportive of the creative parent community we have served for the last thirteen years. However, our need to address the source of our funding has brought us to a new resolve.

We are returning the foundation’s remaining funds to the communities from which they were taken. We will announce these unrestricted grants—to local tribes, California Native programs, and Native-led national organizations—as they are finalized.

We see this as an expansion of our mission and a shift in how we work for it.

The spirit of sustainability in the name of our foundation calls for approaches that downplay commodification and competition and instead lift up all creative practices. We intend to build community and work for structural reforms which will have a greater impact than our grantmaking ever could. We are developing partnerships with others working for a more equitable, anti-racist future. Ultimately, we hope that capitalism—and the compensatory philanthropy it relies on—is replaced by a more just distribution of wealth.

This work may outlive us, but as parents we have developed great patience, and a deep commitment to the generations to come.

Caroline and Tony Grant

Read the full announcement here.

“Nonprofit leaders perceive lobbying, as it is currently practiced and understood, as corrupt conduct that exerts undue influence to the detriment of fair, impartial, and effective policymaking. The popular imagination associates lobbying with dodgy deals in smoke-filled back rooms,” said Alberto Alemanno for Stanford Social Innovation Review. 

“But lobbying can actually be an antidote to such secret bargaining. A right that democracies guarantee, lobbying is about providing ideas and sharing concerns with policy makers to make them—and the whole policy process—more responsive. It enables society to tackle the root causes of the major challenges facing us, not their symptoms. In fact, lobbying is one of the most effective ways to enact political, economic, and social change.”

Read the full piece here.