Ford Foundation

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The Ford Foundation is a Foundation (charity) based in New York City created to fund programs that promote democracy, reduce poverty, promote international understanding, and advance human achievement. The current president is Susan V. Berresford. She will step down in January 2008 and will be suceeded by Luis Ubiñas.

Since it was chartered in 1936, the Ford Foundation has operated as an independent, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization.

The foundation makes grants through its New York headquarters and through twelve international field offices. In fiscal year 2006, it approved $530 million in grants for projects that focused on strengthening democratic values, community and economic development, education, media, arts and culture, and human rights.

History The Ford Foundation was chartered on January 15, 1936 by Edsel Ford and two Ford Motor Company executives "to receive and administer funds for scientific, educational and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare". During its early years, the foundation operated in Michigan under the leadership of Ford family members and their associates, and supported such organizations as the Henry Ford Hospital, The Henry Ford, among others.

After the deaths of Edsel Ford in 1943 and Henry Ford in 1947, the presidency of the Ford Foundation fell to Edsel's oldest son, Henry Ford II. Under Henry II's leadership, the Ford Foundation board of trustees commissioned a report to determine how the foundation should continue. The committee, headed by California attorney H. Rowan Gaither, recommended that the foundation should commit to promoting peace, freedom, and education throughout the world. It provided funding for various projects, including the pre-existing network, National Educational Television, which went on the air in 1952. However, the Ford Foundation, with the help of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut it down and replaced it with the Public Broadcasting Service in October of 1970. The board of directors decided to diversify the foundation's portfolio and gradually divested itself of its substantial Ford Motor Company stock between 1956 and 1974. Through this divestiture, the Ford Motor Company became a public company in 1956.

Based on recommendations outlined in the Gaither report, the foundation’s grants began to include support for higher education, the arts, economic development, civil rights, and the environment, among other areas.

In 1951, Ford made its first grant to support the development of the public broadcasting system. These grants continued, and in 1969 the foundation gave $1 million to the Children’s Television Workshop to help create and launch “Sesame Street”.

In 1952, the foundation’s first international field office opened in New Delhi, India.

Throughout the 1950s, the foundation provided a series of arts and humanities fellowships that supported the work of figures like Josef Albers, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, E. E. Cummings, Flannery O'Connor, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Lowell, and Margaret Mead.

In 1976, the foundation helped launch the Grameen Bank, which offers small loans to the rural poor of Bangladesh. In 2006, the Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering micro-credit.

In the late 1980s, the foundation began making grants to fight the AIDS epidemic, which included support for the establishment of a $4.5 million program to improve AIDS education and treatment in communities around the country.

In 2000, the foundation launched the International Fellowships Program (IFP) with a $280 million grant, the largest in its history. IFP provides scholarships for students from poor communities outside the U.S. to pursue graduate and post-graduate studies at universities anywhere in the world.

Other than its name, the Ford Foundation has not had any connections to the Ford Motor Company nor the Ford family for over thirty years. Henry Ford II, the last family member on the board of trustees, resigned from the foundation board in 1976, encouraging foundation staff to remain open to new ideas and work to strengthen the country’s economic system.

Atrium Built in 1967, the Ford Foundation building was the first large-scale architectural building in the country to devote a substantial portion of its space to horticultural pursuits. This Atrium (architecture) was designed with the notion of having accessible urban greenspace to all, and is an example of the applications of environmental psychology. The building was recognized in 1968 by the Architectural Record as "a new kind of urban space". This design concept was later extended to include many of the indoor shopping malls and skyscrapers built in subsequent decades.

Critics The Ford Foundation supports many liberal causes and has been heavily criticized for many of the programs it funds for a variety of reasons.

In 1968, the foundation began disbursing $12 million to persuade law schools to make "law school clinics" part of their curriculum. Clinics were intended to give practical experience in law practice while providing pro bono representation to the poor. However, critics charge that the clinics have been used instead as an avenue for the professors to engage in political activism. Critics cite the financial involvement of the Ford Foundation as the turning point when such clinics began to change from giving practical experience to engaging in advocacy.

In 2005, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox began a probe of the foundation. Though the Ford Foundation is headquartered in New York City, it is chartered in Michigan, giving the state jurisdiction. Cox is focusing on its governance, potential conflicts of interest among board members, and its poor record of giving to charities in Michigan. Between 1998 and 2002, the Ford Foundation gave Michigan charities about $2.5 million per year, far less than many other charities. Cox is hoping that this probe will prod the foundation into giving more to Michigan charities.

The former Binghamton University professor of sociology, James Petras, and other critics accuse the Foundation of being a front organization for the Central Intelligence Agency. Petras names the exchange of high-ranking personell between the CIA and the Foundation, Ford Foundation's big donations to the CIA-front Association for Cultural Freedom, the former Foundation president Richard Bissell's relationship with Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Allen Dulles and involvement with the Marshall Plan during the 1950s, among other things. According to Petras, the Ford Foundation funds "anti-left-wing politics human rights groups which focus on attacking human rights violations of U.S. adversaries".

Another American academic, Joan Roelofs, in Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (State University of New York Press, 2003,) argues that Ford and similar foundations play a key role in co-opting opposition movements: "While dissent from ruling class ideas is labeled 'extremism' and is isolated, individual dissenters may be welcomed and transformed. Indeed, ruling class hegemony is more durable if it is not rigid and narrow, but is able dynamically to incorporate emergent trends." She reports that John J. McCloy, while chairman of the Foundation's board of trustees, "...thought of the Foundation as a quasi-extension of the U.S. government. It was his habit, for instance, to drop by the National Security Council (USA) (NSC) in Washington every couple of months and casually ask whether there were any overseas projects the NSC would like to see funded." Roelofs also charges that the Ford Foundation financed counter-insurgency programs in Indonesia and other countries.

In 2003, The Ford Foundation was critiqued by pro-Israel U.S. news service Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among others, for supporting Palestinian NGOs that, according to them, undertook anti-semitic and anti-Zionist activities at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism. Under considerable duress by several members of Congress, chief among them Rep. Jerrold Nadler, The Foundation apologized and then prohibited the promotion of "violence, terrorism, bigotry or the destruction of any state" among its grantees, itself sparking protest among university provosts and various non-profit groups on free speech issues.

Presidents

Edsel Ford (founder) 1936-1943
Henry Ford III 1943-1950
Paul G. Hoffman 1950-1953
H. Rowan Gaither 1953-1956
Henry T. Heald 1956-1965
McGeorge Bundy 1966-1979
Franklin Thomas 1979-1996
Susan V. Berresford 1996-2007
Luis Ubiñas 2008-

Source

References

Further reading

Frances Stonor Saunders (2001), The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New Press, ISBN 1-56584-664-8. Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War 1999, Granta (UK edition).
Edward H Berman The Ideology of Philanthropy: The influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations on American foreign policy, State University of New York Press, 1983.
David Ransom, The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid, pub. 1975, pp. 93-116 "1970 Ford Foundation : Building an Elite for Indonesia".
Bob Feldman, "Alternative Media Censorship sponsored by CIA's Ford Foundation?"
" Target Ford" (2006), by Scott Sherman in The Nation.
Ford Foundation, a philanthropic facade for the CIA Voltaire Network, April 5, 2004.
Time for Ford Foundation & CFR to Divest? Collaboration of the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations with the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Ford Foundation and the CIA A 2001 study by James Petras.