Ford Foundation

More than any other foundation, the Ford Foundation in the 1960s created the notion of the action-oriented foundation dedicated to addressing major social problems. “When the Ford Foundation flowered into an activist, ‘socially conscious’ philanthropy in the 1960s,” notes Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, “it sparked the key revolution in the foundation worldview:  the idea that foundations were to improve the lot of mankind not by building lasting institutions but by challenging existing ones.”³

In 2016, the Ford Foundation announced that it was undergoing a dramatic reorganization. It announced that its grantmaking would be in seven areas: civic engagement and government, free expression and creativity, equitable development, gender, racial, and ethnic justice, inclusive economies, Internet freedom, and youth opportunity and learning.⁴

Early History

The Ford Foundation was created in January 1936 as a response to the Revenue Act of 1935, which imposed estate taxes of 70 percent on estates of over $50 million. Because the Ford Motor Company was a family-held business, in which Henry Ford and his son Edsel held, between them, 96.9 percent of Ford stock, it was particularly vulnerable to high estate taxes, which could force the family to sell Ford Motor shares to retain family control. In 1935, then- U.S. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg (R-Michigan), said, “There need be no speculation as to what will happen to the great Ford industrial enterprise under this proposed tax confiscation. It will be driven into diversified ownership, which can come only through enormous stock sales to the public.”⁵

The Ford Foundation was created to preserve family control of Ford Motor. The car company’s shares were divided into two classes: non-voting Class A stock, which amounted to 95 percent of all stock, and voting Class B stock, which accounted for the remaining five percent. The Class A stock would be willed to the Ford Foundation, while the Class B stock would be retained by the Ford family to ensure family control of Ford Motor Company. The foundation stayed small until after Henry Ford’s death in 1947, after which, by the term of Ford’s will, the foundation was endowed with hundreds of millions in Ford stock. ⁵

Henry Ford, according to historian William Greenleaf, donated $37.6 million to charity during his lifetime, with his favorite causes being Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan and the Henry Ford Hospital (now the Henry Ford Health System) in Detroit.⁶ But in 1948, while Henry Ford’s will was still in probate, his grandson, Henry Ford II, signed a document stating that the Ford family would exercise no more influence on the foundation than any other board member would. In 1952 Henry Ford II told the Cox Committee, a House committee investigating foundations, that this decision was made because “this trust was so large that our family should not have control of it.”⁷

Henry Ford II regretted this decision for the rest of his life. He was chairman of the board of the Ford Foundation from 1948-1956, and a trustee until 1977, when he resigned over the foundation’s anti-capitalist drift. “In effect, the foundation is a creature of capitalism,” Ford wrote in his resignation letter, “a statement that, I’m sure, would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of philanthropy . . . I’m just suggesting to the trustees and the staff that the system that makes the foundation possible is very much worth preserving.”⁸

The Ford Foundation, freed from any restrictions on how its vast wealth should be spent, has gone through several phases in its spending. In 1956, after sales of Ford Motor stock added $550 million to its endowment, the foundation awarded $198 million to private hospitals, $90 million to private medical schools, and $260 million to private liberal arts colleges to raise faculty salaries. “The purpose of the huge giveaway was unabashedly political,” note historians Leonard Silk and Mark Silk. “The hospital grants were deliberately arranged so that there would be some Ford money flowing into every Congressional district.”⁹

Activism and the Bundy Era

The Gray Areas Program (1959-1965)

Seeking to reduce poverty in what Ford Foundation program officer and future Johnson administration official Paul Ylvisaker called the “gray area” between cities’ central business districts and suburb, the Ford Foundation funded inner city poverty-fighting programs from 1960 onwards. A review of Gray Areas programs by Peter Marria and Martin Rein commissioned by Ford and published in 1973 found that most were modestly successful, although Ford’s programs in Philadelphia never got off the ground and the ones in New York directly subsidized militancy against landlords and other businesses.¹⁰  The program’s lasting result, however, was in inspiring the Johnson administration’s War On Poverty, with Ford Foundation program officers frequently consulting with Johnson administration planners on programs that could be devised.¹¹  In Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, the late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) credited the Gray Areas program with being the intellectual inspiration for federal programs including the Job Corps, Head Start, and Volunteers in Service to America (now part of AmeriCorps).¹²

More than any other foundation, the Ford Foundation in the 1960s created the notion of the action-oriented foundation dedicated to addressing major social problems. “When the Ford Foundation flowered into an activist, ‘socially conscious’ philanthropy in the 1960s,” noted Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, “it sparked the key revolution in the foundation worldview: the idea that foundations were to improve the lot of mankind not by building lasting institutions but by challenging existing ones.” ¹³

Population Control

Ford frequently collaborated with the Rockefeller Foundation, both in funding population-control programs and in lobbying for more government spending on population control after these programs were taken over by national governments and international agencies from 1965 onwards. The best estimates are that Ford spent $150 million on birth control programs between 1958-1983, with funding peaking at $25 million in 1969.¹⁴

Legal Education

Ford money helped create the “public interest” law movement, with tens of millions going to organizations supporting minorities (such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund or MALDEF) as well as environmental legal groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and Earthjustice. Cato Institute fellow Walter Olson refers to Ford as “the Johnny Appleseed of litigation liberalism” and notes that funding activist lawyers has been a key theme of Ford’s grantmaking for decades.¹⁵

For over half a century, the Ford Foundation has operated behind the scenes to flip American law schools into operatives of 1960s-style “social change.” Other large organizations like the Carnegie Corporation of New York, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and the MacArthur Foundation have followed the Ford Foundation’s path, and the result can be seen in landmark Supreme Court decisions, the abundance of politicized “legal clinics” across college universities, and the courts’ growing willingness to defer to “international law.”^{16 17}

School Choice

Ford grants in 1967 and 1968 of $334,000¹⁸ encouraged the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district in New York City and two other districts to implement “community control,” where parents in the district were given more power over local schools. Unfortunately, the mostly African-American parents in Ocean Hill-Brownsville used the power to fire members of the United Federation of Teachers, who were mostly white and Jewish. Every time the parents’ council tried to “fire” teachers, the teachers went on strike, the third time for five weeks. Ultimately, in November 1968, Mayor John Lindsay (R; later D) abolished the parental councils. note]Martin Morse Wooster, Great Philanthropic Mistakes, second edition (Washington:  Hudson Institute, 2010), 144-162. See also Vincent J. Cannato, The Ungovernable City:  John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York:  Basic Books, 2001). [/note]

After the Patman Committee

The “community control” debacle and other political excesses led to an investigation of Ford and other foundations by an investigative committee of the House of Representatives in February 1969 led by then-U.S. Rep. Wright Patman (D-TX). The U.S. Senate (but not the House) passed a bill calling for an elimination of most of the ability of foundations to fund political activity and a 40-year term limit on foundations. Washington Post reporters Laurence Stern and Richard Harwood noted that under the Senate’s proposal, “perhaps 70 percent of Ford’s present activities in the field of  ‘national affairs’ and ‘social development’ would be outlawed, leaving the foundation little to do with its wealth but hand it out to symphony orchestras, Community Chests, and Ivy League colleges.”¹⁹

The Tax Reform Act of 1969 ultimately imposed a payout requirement on foundations and some restrictions on foundation support of political activity. Responding to the changes, the Ford Foundation shifted from funding large-scale welfare programs to smaller ones. It was a leading advocate of “individual development accounts,” which encouraged low-income households to save by matching funds saved by families below a given income threshold. Ford sought to use this program as a pilot scheme for a universal, government-funded child allowance.²⁰

Mid-1990s through the 2010s

As right-leaning organizations began to win victories restricting the application of affirmative action programs, the Ford Foundation invested heavily in efforts to defend them. Among its grantees were the Regents of the University of Michigan, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. These grantees used Ford funds (including some grants of over $5 million) to block efforts to check the growth of affirmative action in Michigan and other states, hold conferences where activists could network with each other, and conduct campaigns against nominees of the George W. Bush administration to district and circuit courts. One Ford-opposed nominee was William H. Pryor Jr., who was confirmed and later was widely reported to be one of President Donald Trump’s finalists for the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy ultimately filled by Justice Neil Gorsuch.²¹

Ford also supported the World Conference Against Racism, providing grants for several organizations to attend this conference. The conference, held in Durban, South Africa in August and September 2001, is best known for a debate over a clause that equated Zionism with racism.²² Although this clause was ultimately removed from the final declaration, both the American and the Israeli governments formally withdrew their delegations. Conservative commentator George Will referred to the conference as “a United Nations orgy of hate directed at Israel and the U.S.”²³

The Ford Foundation continued its grants to abortion-advocacy groups, with substantial grants given in the 2000-04 period to Catholics for a Free Choice (now Catholics for Choice), the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the International Women’s Health Coalition.²²

In 2007, Luis A. Ubinas became Ford Foundation president. Ubinas, formerly a consultant with McKinsey and Company, was best known for offering buyouts to 30 percent of the foundation’s staff after the foundation’s endowment plunged from $12 billion in 2007 to $9.5 billion in 2010.²⁴  He resigned in 2013, with his six-year tenure the shortest of any Ford Foundation president since the 1950s. “He didn’t exercise the muscle that someone at Ford might have,” Georgetown University Public Policy Institute senior fellow Pablo Eisenberg told the Chronicle of Philanthropy. “One wondered what his vision of philanthropy and of activism was.”²⁵

Darren Walker Era

Ubinas’ successor, Darren Walker, became Ford’s tenth president in 2013, with a resume that included time as a trader at UBS; as a program officer and president of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, which promotes development in Harlem; as a program officer at the Rockefeller Foundation; and as a Ford Foundation vice president.²⁶

Walker went on the record excoriating the founder of the Foundation, Henry Ford himself, as “one of the twentieth century’s most virulent American antisemites.” He added: “all of us engaged in building a fairer, more just America ought to embrace our responsibility to speak out about this ancient strain of inequality—this category of caste—exactly as we call out racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia.” ²⁷

Detroit

In 2013, the foundation announced that it would donate $125 million over 15 years to bolster Detroit’s pension fund as the lead donor with other foundations, including the Kresge, Charles Stewart Mott, and Knight foundations. This money, matched by the state of Michigan, ultimately amounted to over $800 million. In return, the city agreed to convert the Detroit Institute of Arts to a nonprofit organization and not sell any of the art.  ^{26 28}

Hudson Institute fellow William Schambra warned in a 2014 Chronicle of Philanthropy opinion piece that the deal could set a dangerous precedent. He wrote, “Some of America’s leading foundations are now deeply engaged in Detroit politics, ‘giving’ and ‘taking’ like any municipal power broker,” Schambra wrote, “meeting requests they never before would have considered, and making demands they never would have dared. Although they deny they are setting precedents, they clearly are. They may live to regret them.”²⁹

The foundation continued to fund some of its long-time donors. The foundation devoted tens of millions of dollars to organizations supporting President Barack Obama’s choice for U.S. Supreme Court, then-federal Judge Merrick Garland, after the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. These groups included the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (which had received over $11 million in Ford Foundation grants since 2000), the Alliance for Justice (with over $4 million in Ford grants), and People for the American Way³⁰

Inequality Mission

In 2015, the foundation announced a re-orientation to focus towards ways of reducing inequality. The foundation declared that it would focus its grantmaking on seven areas, including civic engagement, Internet freedom, and inclusive economics. Walker wrote that “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”³¹

As part of this refocus, the Ford Foundation announced in 2016 that it would lead a six-year effort to raise $100 million for the Movement for Black Lives, an organization designed to receive grants for groups involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. Allies of the Ford Foundation in this effort included the foundations associated with left-of-center billionaire George Soros, the NoVo Foundation, and the Hill-Snowdon Foundation. ³²

Funding Protests

The foundation has funded organizations closely associated with violent activists, such as the Southern Vision Alliance, which has ties to Charlotte Uprising, a group that led protests at the 2020 Republican National Convention where police officers were assaulted. ³³³⁴³⁵ The foundation has also given financial support to Dream Defenders, a group that practices various forms of disruptive protesting such as blockading bridges and threatening to incite civil unrest. ³⁶³⁷ Additionally, the foundation has donated to the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a legal group that defends violent activists. ³⁸

Relationship with China

In December 2024, the Washington Examiner released a story about an October 2024 report from government agency Government Accountability Office (GAO) which alleged that between 2013 and 2021 the People’s Republic of China (PRC) spent roughly $679 billion in up to 165 countries due to a “global infrastructure initiative” that would allow it to “leverage debt against developing countries to extract political concessions and given the Chinese Communist Party a massive global telecommunications foothold.” ³⁹

A separate story by the Washington Examiner also alleged that the Ford Foundation, between 2020 and 2023, has spent over $10 million in grants towards PRC and Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-affiliated entities in the development of said global initiative. A spokesperson for the Ford Foundation claimed such grants paid were meant to help the Ford Foundation “ensure that China’s impacts in the world are equitable…[and] help advance this aim by supporting research and knowledge sharing that promote equitable and sustainable investment and development finance practices.” ³⁹

One $150,000 grant in 2020 was given to the Beijing Normal University for its “Belt and Road School, ” a local initiative that the GAO’s 2024 report alleged was meant to increase “the foreign presence of Chinese state firms, create new markets for PRC goods, and secure access to strategic commodities for the PRC’s economic development. The BRI is considered by some observers to pose a significant challenge to U.S. economic, political and security interests around the world.” ³⁹

Biden Community Violence Intervention Collaborative

In June 2021, the Biden administration announced a program to combat rising gun violence and violent crime using a collaborative composed of government and nonprofit organizations funding community violence intervention (CVI) measures. The Ford Foundation was reported to be a funder of the collaborative, along with California Endowment, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and the Kellogg Foundation. Other foundations funding the initiative include the Kresge Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Emerson Collective, the Heising-Simons Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. CVI strategies “act as an alternative to heavy-handed policing” by focusing its efforts on the minority of citizens who are perpetrators or targets of violent crime. CVI treats violence as a communicable disease rather than a violent crime and attempts to stop the “spread” of violence. ⁴⁰

Activities Since 2020

Between 2022 and 2024, the Ford Foundation gave $650,000 to As You Sow, a left-of-center advocacy organization that engages in shareholder action to pressure companies to adopt various left-of-center positions under the banner of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices. ⁴¹

Social Bond

In June 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ford Foundation issued a $1 billion social bond — the first such instrument offered by a nonprofit on the United States taxable corporate bond market — to nearly double its annual grantmaking from approximately $550 million to over $1.1 billion in 2020 and 2021. The bond proceeds were designated for left-of-center social justice and creative expression organizations. From those proceeds, the foundation committed at least $180 million specifically for what it described as “racial justice advocacy,” bringing its total two-year commitment in that area to $330 million. ⁴²

Ford described its racial-justice grantmaking as cutting across seven program areas: voting rights and civic engagement, worker rights, immigration, criminal justice, gender and reproductive rights, the role of technology in society, and local governance. Named grantees under the racial justice initiative included the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCHR), and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. ⁴³

Climate and Environmental Activism

In 2021, the Ford Foundation announced it was divesting from fuel-energy companies and seeking to invest its endowment instead in “climate friendly investments.” Then-foundation president Darren Walker said at the time: “Although just 0.3% of the Ford Foundation’s endowment is directly invested in fossil fuel companies, we take our duties as fiduciaries seriously and we’re mindful that if we put restrictions on our investments, we may forsake some amount of return for future generations.” ⁴⁴

In the years following 2020, the Ford Foundation significantly expanded its environmental grantmaking under a program it rebranded as “Natural Resources and Climate Justice,” framing climate policy explicitly as a vehicle for advancing what it described as “climate justice” for Indigenous peoples, “Afro-descendant communities,” and rural populations. Between 2019 and 2022, the program issued 773 grants to 553 grantees totaling approximately $241 million. At the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in November 2021 (COP26), the Ford Foundation joined a coalition of governments and philanthropies to announce a collective pledge of $1.7 billion from 2021 to 2025 to support land-tenure rights for Indigenous peoples and local communities, framed as a climate measure. Over the first half of that five-year pledge, Ford approved $87 million in funding toward that commitment. ^{45 46 47 48}

The Sunrise Movement Education Fund, the charitable affiliate of the left-wing climate activist organization that staged blockades of the White House grounds and protests outside the offices of Democratic lawmakers, received $250,000 from Ford in June 2022. The Sunrise Movement received another $650,000 for “training and organizing.” The Sierra Club Foundation received $300,000 from the Ford Foundation in 2024. The Climate and Land Use Alliance (CLUA), which funds advocacy for restricting the use of traditional energy sources, received three grants from Ford over the 2021 to 2025 period totaling $24.3 million, with the largest single grant of $21.3 million designated to advancing land resource rights for Indigenous peoples and to contribute to “climate change goals.” ^{49 50 51 52 53}

The foundation also channeled climate funding through intermediary organizations. Oxfam America received 11 grants from Ford totaling $15.85 million in the 2021 to 2025 period, with the largest grant of $6 million designated for the “Climate Media Collaborative for Economic Justice and Community Rights.” As of 2026, the foundation’s natural resources program described its strategy as supporting “The transition away from fossil fuel-dependent energy systems and towards clean, sustainable models,” which it said “offers a unique chance to deliver justice for communities that have historically suffered harm rather than benefited from these systems.” Its strategy included support for policies related to the phase-out of traditional energy sources, with the foundation funding efforts to restrict the use of oil, gas, and coal and channeling resources to litigation and advocacy groups alongside its international grantmaking. ^{54 55 56}

Louisiana Against False Solutions (LAFS)

From 2020 to 2025, the Ford Foundation was one of the top 30 donors to members of Louisiana Against False Solutions (LAFS), a coalition of left-wing advocacy groups dedicated to achieving a “transition away from fossil fuels.” This funding was detailed in a March 2026 white paper published by the center-right Pelican Institute for Public Policy. ^{57 58}

LAFS is a membership-based network of Louisiana-based as well as national environmental groups that oppose traditional energy infrastructure in the state, with a particular focus on blocking projects and pipelines associated with carbon capture and sequestration. A Pelican Institute review of Foundation Directory data found that out-of-state donors directed at least $115.5 million to LAFS member organizations between 2020 and 2025, which represented 98.4 percent of the total funding those groups received over that period. Donors were concentrated primarily in California, Washington, D.C., and New York. As of April 2026, LAFS was a fiscally sponsored project of Foundation for Louisiana and was comprised of 12 Louisiana-based organizations. According to LAFS’ website, the group was comprised at the time of more than 20 organizations. ^{57 59}

The Ford Foundation’s contributions to LAFS members during the period totaled nearly $1.3 million, according to the report. ⁵⁷

Abortion

For decades, the Ford Foundation has been a major funder of organizations that advocate for abortion access. Terming abortion access “reproductive justice,” the foundation explicitly stated, “Our focus is on the policies impacting people who are already pregnant and facing barriers to either having an abortion or giving birth.” ⁶⁰

Between 2017 and 2020, the Ford Foundation’s Advancing Reproductive and Gender Justice program made 123 grants (roughly amounting to $59 million) to 66 organizations that it described as supporting efforts to advance access to abortion and other reproductive health services, with a stated focus on “women of color” and “low-income women.” In October 2020, using proceeds from its Social Bond program, the foundation approved a multi-year grant of $7.5 million to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a left-of-center litigation organization that has challenged abortion restrictions in courts across the United States and internationally, with the grant period extending through September 2025. In May 2024, it granted another $750,000 to the Center. ^{61 62}

Beyond its direct grantmaking, the Ford Foundation played a coordinating role in the philanthropic effort to preserve abortion access following the 2018 confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which advocates expected would lead to further restrictions. The foundation organized a “collaborative effort of nonprofits and funders” beginning in late 2018 that sought to align philanthropic funding in advance of what the foundation described as “a potential repeal of Roe v. Wade.”⁶³

Ford’s Reproductive and Gender Justice strategy stated that its grantees, such as Forward Together and All* Above All, used foundation funding to “leverage Reproductive Health Equity Acts in Oregon and Illinois to expand access” to abortion and “broaden the definition of reproductive health” to include services for illegal immigrants and transgender individuals. ⁶⁴

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which returned the regulation of abortion to individual states, the foundation declared that it would increase funding for access to abortion services. A significant portion of this funding was channeled through intermediary organizations. The Arabella Advisors-managed New Venture Fund received $1.1 million from Ford for “advocacy, civic engagement and strategic communications to increase and expand access to abortion,” and a further $625,000 for a “pooled fund to equip LGBTQ+, women’s rights and reproductive rights/justice movements to undertake strategic communications and narrative work.” In 2024, Inside Philanthropy wrote that a “main priority” of Ford’s was to provide “support for organizations advancing reproductive health care and justice in states where there are abortion bans,” as well as other grants to “support reproductive health policy” to “strengthen the field through cohesion with other social justice causes and movements.” ^{65 66 67}

Immigration

The Ford Foundation’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice program funds organizations working toward what it described as “an affirmative path toward immigration justice, inclusion, and belonging,” including advocacy and communications work focused on expanding access to the United States for immigrants and refugees. Among the foundation’s largest immigration-related grantees in the post-2020 period, the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) received more than $12.6 million from Ford between 2021 and May 2025. The CPD has advocated for “sanctuary city” policies that restrict local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities and was among the organizations that produced a 2020 report calling for defunding police departments. Community Change (formerly the Center for Community Change), received more than $5.9 million in Ford funding from 2021 to 2025. The National Women’s Law Center, which has opposed federal immigration enforcement measures, received more than $6.9 million from Ford from 2021 to 2025. ^{50 68 69 70}

The Ford Foundation’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice strategy formally prioritized funding organizations that opposed restrictions on immigration enforcement, referring to goals such as expanding access to legal
“protections and rights” for immigrants and advancing what it described as a path toward “immigration justice, inclusion, and belonging.” ^{50 71}

Criminal Justice Funding and Advocacy

In June 2021, the Biden administration announced a program to combat rising gun violence and violent crime using a collaborative composed of government and nonprofit organizations funding community violence intervention (CVI) measures. The Ford Foundation was reported to be a funder of the collaborative, along with the California Endowment, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and the Kellogg Foundation. Other foundations funding the initiative include the Kresge Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Arnold Ventures, the Emerson Collective, the Heising-Simons Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. ⁴⁰

CVI programs were described by their proponents as alternatives to traditional policing that treat violent crime as a “communicable disease” to be contained through social interventions rather than law enforcement activity. The collaborative drew criticism from some law enforcement groups and right-of-center commentators who argued that the approach sidelined traditional policing in favor of spending on nonprofit organizations aligned with the “defund the police” movement that emerged following the death of George Floyd in May 2020. Ford’s stated approach to criminal justice in the same period emphasized ending cash bail, reducing incarceration rates, and restricting cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. ^{72 73}

Under its Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice program, the Ford Foundation funds what it described as “community safety” initiatives that it characterized as alternatives to policing and traditional criminal justice enforcement. Named U.S. grantees in this area include the Vera Institute of Justice (VIJ), which has advocated for reducing incarceration rates and restricting immigration detention, and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, which opposes mandatory minimum sentencing. Family Values @ Work, a labor-aligned advocacy organization, received $8 million from Ford from 2020 through 2023. Re:Power, a left-wing civic organizing training group, received more than $2.9 million in Ford grants from 2022 to 2025, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice received more than $6.9 million over the same period. ^{74 50 75 76 77 78 79}

LGBT Advocacy

The Ford Foundation is a financial supporter of Funders for LGBTQ Issues, a network of over 100 foundations and corporations that collectively direct approximately $200 million annually toward LGBT causes. Funders for LGBTQ Issues reported that $258.1 million in grants were awarded to LGBT communities in the United States in 2022 alone, including $48.1 million specifically to transgender advocacy organizations, representing a 34 percent increase from 2021. As of 2026, Ford’s website noted that the foundation makes a “concerted effort to support organizations led by women, people of color and the LGTBQ+ community.” ^{74 80 81}

The gender justice advocacy organization UltraViolet received over $3 million between 2022 and 2025 from the Ford Foundation for its “gender justice” work. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has litigated extensively on behalf of transgender policy preferences and against state abortion restrictions, has received substantial funding from the foundation across multiple program areas. ^{82 83}

The Ford Foundation’s international Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice program committed more than $266.5 million to 290 partner organizations through 409 grants between July 2020 and November 2024, with a stated focus on funding organizations led by and for “women, girls, LGBTQI+, and gender-diverse people in the Global South.” ⁸⁴

Second Trump Administration

According to a May 2025 Wall Street Journal article, the Ford Foundation was one of several nonprofit organizations informally partnering to discuss efforts in preventing their tax-exempt statuses from allegedly being revoked by the Second Trump Administration. Being convened by the MacArthur Foundation, the “coalition” also consists of the Gates Foundation as well as the Charles Koch Foundation and the Council on Foundations. ⁸⁵

As of September 2025, the Ford Foundation was listed as one of several organizations, including the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, funding a new media-based initiative started by the Public Media Co. intended to provide $100 million towards roughly 1,600 local radio station and media groups following the National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) losing federal funding earlier in the year. ⁸⁶

On October 28, 2025, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent letters to the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Gates Foundation requesting to know how they were complying with national tax laws amid allegations that all three had previously provided funding to organizations and other entities with reported connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and affiliates. Each letter argued that “to maintain tax exempt status, an organization’s activities must be charitable in nature and may not directly support or promote the interests of a foreign government…I am writing today to ask you whether these reports are true or not and, if true, how your organization’s conduct comports with 501(c)(3) requirements.” ⁸⁷ According to the news release from Sen. Grassley’s office, between January 2020 to December 2024, the Ford Foundation had allegedly donated nearly $10 million to state-run and CCP-affiliated universities with ties to the “Belt and Road Initiative” as well as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). ⁸⁷

In the lead-up to the 2026 U.S. elections, the Ford Foundation was identified as a major philanthropic actor supporting democracy-related initiatives, including election protection and civic participation efforts. While widely expected to play a leading role in funding such work, the foundation had not publicly disclosed detailed information about its grantmaking strategy or funding allocations as of early 2026. Reporting indicated that some funding in this area may be distributed through less transparent channels, consistent with patterns observed in prior election cycles. ⁸⁸

BUILD Initiative

In 2016, the Ford Foundation launched its Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD) initiative, a multi-year program designed to provide five-year general operating support grants to left-wing advocacy organizations worldwide, with the stated goal of strengthening their long-term institutional capacities. The first round of BUILD grants, running from 2016 to 2021, sent $1 billion to roughly 350 grantees in more than 30 countries across all the foundation’s issue areas. ^{89 90}

A second round of $1 billion in BUILD grants was committed beginning in January 2022, with grants running through 2026. Over its 11-year existence, BUILD made grants to 574 organizations in 47 countries, with individual grantees receiving five-year commitments ranging from approximately $2 million to more than $10 million. The program was by invitation only, open exclusively to existing Ford Foundation grantees. Notable BUILD grantees included Demos and the National Employment Law Project. ^{91 90 92 93}

In late 2025, incoming president Heather Gerken announced that Ford would discontinue BUILD, concluding the program after a decade-long, $2 billion commitment. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that some nonprofit leaders questioned the decision, noting that independent evaluations had consistently found BUILD effective and that its termination added uncertainty for left-wing advocacy organizations that had built multi-year budgets around the grants. ^{91 94}

Civic Engagement and Democracy Grantmaking

The Ford Foundation’s Civic Engagement and Government program, known as CEG-US, described its strategy as building “stronger and broader coalitions of people, organizations, and institutions” to reshape American democracy toward what it characterized as greater representation for “historically excluded” communities. The foundation’s U.S. strategy prioritized grantmaking in eight states: Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Minnesota, New York, and Texas. It focused on voting access, redistricting, and preparation for the 2030 Census. The CEG-US program explicitly stated a goal of counteracting what it described as “disproportionate influence” held by rural voters over the electoral system. ^{95 96}

In April 2026, within the first several months of Gerken’s tenure, the Ford Foundation announced it had directed $60 million from its presidential reserves to left-of-center organizations working on election administration and voting access. Recipients included the Campaign Legal Center, All Voting Is Local, Pillars of the Community, Veterans for All Voters, and the We the Veterans Military Foundation. Gerken, writing in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, framed the grants as a defense of election infrastructure against what she described as partisan interference. At the time, one recipient, the Campaign Legal Center, had been litigating against Republican-backed voter identification laws and campaign finance regulations in courts across the country during the second Trump administration. ^{97 98 99}

Future of Work(ers) Program

The Ford Foundation’s Future of Work(ers) program directed grantmaking toward strengthening labor union organizing capacity and advancing left-wing labor policy advocacy. The Future of Work(ers) program identified five strategies for its grantmaking: strengthening labor organizations, supporting advocacy for left-wing labor policy, incorporating a “worker lens” into technology governance, building the technical capacities of worker organizations, and advancing communications strategies on union power. ^{100 101 102}

In December 2022, the foundation joined the Biden administration’s Multilateral Partnership for Organizing, Worker Empowerment, and Rights (M-POWER) initiative, alongside the Open Society Foundations, Fundación Avina, and Humanity United. The U.S. government committed an estimated $130 million to M-POWER, which was described as “the largest federal commitment it’s ever made to advance workers’ rights globally.” The funders participating in M-POWER collectively reported investing more than $90 million in labor organizing initiatives in 2022 alone. ^{103 104}

Among individual grants in the program, the Ford Foundation provided a $150,000, two-year grant from July 2022 to June 2024 to LaborLab, an organization founded in 2021 with the stated purpose of generating information to promote unionization. Ford described the grant as providing “core support for LaborLab to generate information and raise awareness around the right to unionize.” This was followed by a grant of $300,000 from Ford to LaborLab in April 2024. LaborLab also reported receiving additional funding from national and local labor unions and labor federations in addition to the Ford funding. In a separate grant, the Ford Foundation committed $25 million over five years to support women-led global worker networks, guided by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), representing what it described as 2.1 billion informal workers. ^{105 106 107 108}

Controversies

Support for Forced Sterilization in India

According to the left-wing website Vox, Ford Foundation official Douglas Ensminger created large-scale sterilization programs in India, offering vasectomies to millions to halt population growth. In 1975, under influence from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi used emergency powers to appoint herself a virtual dictator of the country and declared a national emergency to implement a large-scale compulsory sterilization program, imprisoning dissenters. ¹⁰⁹ This event, known as The Emergency, was celebrated at the time by former president of the World Bank Robert McNamara: “At long last, India is moving to effectively address its population problem.” ¹¹⁰

Alliance for Global Justice

The Ford Foundation came under scrutiny in October and November 2023 for its financial support for the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), an Arizona-based nonprofit that serves as a fiscal sponsor for approximately 150 organizations worldwide, including Samidoun (Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network). Samidoun had been designated as a terrorist organization by Israel and Canada and was later sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in October 2024 as a “sham charity” that had provided material support to a Palestinian terrorist organization that participated in the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks. Samidoun shared staffs with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization. The AFGJ also sponsored the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. A complaint filed by the Zachor Legal Institute to the IRS in January 2023 accused the AFGJ of providing “material support” to terrorism by fundraising for the France-based Collectif Palestine Vaincra, a partner of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. ^{111 112 113 114 115 116}

Following a Washington Examiner investigation, the Ford Foundation announced in November 2023 that it would no longer fund the AFGJ. Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center, stated that “for years left-wing institutions like the Ford Foundation were warned that the radical Left was a hateful, divisive, and destructive movement” and that “the Ford Foundation deserves less than zero credit for at long last cutting ties with Alliance for Global Justice despite years of warnings.” Multiple payment processors, including PayPal, Stripe, Salsa Labs, and Deluxe, had stopped processing payments for the AFGJ in 2023, and Discover card had dropped the AFGJ in 2021, prior to Ford’s decision. ^{111 112 117 118}

Grantees Linked to October 7th Attacks

A June 2024 investigation by the Washington Free Beacon found that several Ford Foundation grantees in the Middle East and North Africa region, overseen from the foundation’s Cairo office, had celebrated or justified the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel. The review of the foundation’s active grants identified organizations whose staff members, events, and published materials promoted Hamas’s attack as an act of Palestinian “resistance.” One grantee, Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), held a panel discussion in November 2023 at which ARDD executive director Samar Muhareb voiced “gratitude to the martyrs of Palestine because they have shed light on many important issues,” and featured speaker Anis Al-Qassem, who argued that Palestinians have a right to commit acts characterized by Western governments as terrorism. The Ford Foundation’s executive director of its Middle East and North Africa program, Saba Almubaslat, oversaw the regional grantmaking under which these organizations received funds. ^{119 120 121}

The Ford Foundation, in response to the Washington Free Beacon’s reporting, stated that it supported organizations working to provide mental health and social services to families of the October 7th hostages and cited its grants to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Society for Yad Vashem as evidence of its opposition to antisemitism. ¹¹⁹

Separately, NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based watchdog organization, reported that in the 2023 to 2026 period, the Ford Foundation granted $3.2 million to Amnesty International and $2.15 million to SOMO (Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations), both organizations that NGO Monitor had documented as publishing reports characterizing Israeli military operations in terms that commentators contended crossed into delegitimization and demonization. ¹²²

The Ford Foundation’s history with grants linked to anti-Israel activity dates to at least 2000. In 2001, following the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, it emerged that Ford had provided over $35 million to Arab and pro-Palestinian organizations from 2000 to 2001, some of which were found to have links to groups espousing antisemitic positions. In 2003, then-foundation president Susan Berresford instituted new grant agreement requirements mandating that grantees certify they would not promote violence, terrorism, bigotry, or the destruction of any state. Critics argued the foundation continued to fund organizations engaging in anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns despite those requirements. ^{123 124}

Financials

The Ford Foundation was, for much of its history, the largest foundation in the United States, but by 2001, it had been surpassed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lilly Endowment.¹

As of 2024, its net assets had risen to roughly $14.9 billion. That year, it expended roughly $771 million on contributions, gifts, and grants paid. ¹²⁵

Leadership

President

As of February 2026, Heather K. Gerken was the president of the Ford Foundation, a position she assumed in November 2025. It was announced in July 2025 that she was to succeed Darren Walker. Prior to serving at the Ford Foundation, Gerken was the dean of Yale Law School and a Sol and Lillian Goldman professor of law. She also served as the head of Yale Law School’s San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project Clinic, was a professor at Harvard Law School, an associate with the Jenner and Block law firm, and previously clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. As of 2025, Gerken was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, and is a trustee of both Princeton University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. ^{126 127 128}

Darren Walker was the previous president of the Ford Foundation, serving in the role starting in 2013 through 2025. In July 2025, it was announced that Gerken would become the 11th president of the Foundation in November of that year. ¹²⁶ Prior to Ford, Walker was vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, was the COO of Harlam-based development group Abyssinian Development Corporation, and previously worked in international law and finance at both Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and UBS. As of 2025 he is on the board of Ralph Lauren, PepsiCo, the Obama Foundation, and Bloomberg Inc. He is also listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). ^{129 130}

Board of Trustees

As of March 2026, Francisco G. Cigarroa was serving as chair of the board of trustees for the Ford Foundation. He is a physician and previously worked as chief resident for Massachusetts General Hospital. He served in multiple positions with the University of Texas Health Science Center until being appointed director of pediatric surgery and pediatric transplantation and later president. He previously worked as chancellor of the University of Texas System from 2009 until 2015.  ^{131  132}

In April 2025, Richard R. Verma was appointed to the board of trustees. Verma previously served as U.S. Ambassador to India in the Obama administration and as United States Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources in the Biden administration, and was formerly a Ford Foundation trustee from 2022 to 2023. Verma was also expected to be appointed as chief administrative officer of Mastercard in May 2025 (where he previously worked as general counsel and head of global public policy). ¹³³

In March 2026, Jason W. Ingle was appointed to the Ford Foundation’s board of trustees. Ingle, the great-great-grandson of Henry Ford, is the founder and a managing partner of Third Nature Investments. He is also the founding investor of food systems financing project Desert Bloom Food Ventures, a founding member of social impact investing membership network ImPact, a co-founder of innovative agriculture technology venture fund Closed Loop Capital, and the founder of sustainable farming community nonprofit Greener Partners. ¹³¹

Other Leadership Positions

On January 14, 2026, Nicholas Turner was announced as the incoming executive vice president for programs of the Ford Foundation, while taking up the role officially in May 2026. As of 2026, Turner was the president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice, having worked in the role since 2013. Prior to joining Vera, Turner was a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation and an attorney and associate for the Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison law firm in New York City. In addition, he worked as a judicial clerk for the late Jack B. Weinstein, a United States District Judge in Brooklyn and as a staffer for the Washington D.C-based community advocacy group Sasha Bruce Youthwork.  ¹³⁴