There are changes afoot at the Ford Foundation: Darren Walker, its president, announced in a recent blog post that the foundation intends to build a new focus on inequality and a commitment to provide more general operating support. Hilary Pennington has been closely involved with these changes, and tells Caroline Hartnell what is behind them.

Caroline Hartnell: What are the main features of the Ford Foundation’s new philanthropy program?

Hilary Pennington: The infrastructure that supports philanthropy has grown much more robust than it was when the foundation started its grantmaking for philanthropic support many, many years ago. Now that we have an opportunity to re-launch our grantmaking in support of philanthropy, the interesting question is, what does the field need now that it perhaps didn't need then?

We've identified two things we think will be priorities in our future work. One is the issue of transparency and better information flows between grantmakers and grantseekers. That's why we've made the investment in the Fund for Shared Insight, and why we're so interested in feedback loops and net promoter scores. Philanthropy works too much like a line. It starts with a foundation that thinks it has a strategy; the money then goes to a grantee; then the grantee uses that money to try to influence something that makes the world better for a community or a group of people. It should function much more like a loop.

The second thing is a continued interest in the diversity of leadership in the sector — in philanthropy itself, in philanthropic support organizations, and in the kinds of organizations we support. We believe that the best solutions are going to come from the people and communities who are closest to the problems that we're trying to solve. How can we get more of those people into positions of influence in the sector and support their voices so that they have the greatest impact?

Caroline Hartnell: Does the Ford Foundation itself collect or use beneficiary feedback? 

Hilary Pennington: David Bonbright just did a learning session for our program officers on constituent feedback loops, and a number of them are figuring out ways to try to incorporate that more fully into their work. I would say the program officers who work on sexual and reproductive rights, for example, have a fair number of ways of getting constituent feedback, but it's not as uniform across the foundation as we'd like.

Caroline Hartnell: What role do you see for community philanthropy in the foundation's overall vision?

Hilary Pennington: It's a form of philanthropy that is highly synergistic with the values we were just talking about. It moves resources and voice closest to the ground, to the people and the communities who are closest to the problems and the solutions. It's something we're looking at very seriously — we've made a couple of small investments in the Global Fund for Community Foundations, for example. At the moment, our mandate for the philanthropy grantmaking is to restart in the United States, and we're not doing a lot of global programming. But philanthropy and the growth of the philanthropic sector is a big priority for a number of our regional offices, particularly in parts of the world with growing wealth and a lot of new donors — China, Nigeria, India, South Africa, Brazil — so it was a seed investment for learning that we thought would be important to make.

Caroline Hartnell: Are you trying things out in the U.S. first and then planning to expand? Or don't you know yet?

Hilary Pennington: We don't know yet. First, we need to see how far our resources go.

Caroline Hartnell: Darren Walker recently announced that, in the future, all Ford Foundation money will go toward reducing inequality and that every grant will be looked at through that lens. What does that mean in practice?

Hilary Pennington: Let's take higher education as an example. Over many years the Ford Foundation has supported knowledge development in higher education, but today we wouldn't do that just for its own sake. We would be interested in the ways that universities can help reduce inequality. That might have to do with the kinds of students they enroll, or the kind of research they do, or the role they play in the communities where they're located. Or if you take climate change, we would look at the impact on poor communities and how we could give them more voice in decisions about natural resources.

By virtue of applying that lens, there will be lines of work or grantees that we fund now that we wouldn't in the future. And new ones that we need to fund that we don't yet fund.

Caroline Hartnell: How will that affect the philanthropy program? 

Hilary Pennington: I think the kinds of things that we've been looking at — transparency, stronger feedback, greater diversity of leadership — probably line up well with a focus on equality and social justice. The goal for our philanthropy work is more resources, better deployed, for social-justice causes. In the area of more resources, we're thinking of ways to entice new donors into social-justice issues. "Better deployed," we think, has to do with better feedback loops and greater effectiveness.

Caroline Hartnell: How do you see your role in regard to stimulating more resources? 

Hilary Pennington: We'd be thinking about how we partner with new donors. Most newcomers think of setting up their own organizations, but there's so much that could be done through both informal and formal partnerships.

Caroline Hartnell: Does Ford's focus on inequality include investment of assets?

Hilary Pennington: As you know, we were one of the first philanthropies to do program-related investments, and we have now made a big commitment to expand our impact investing.

Caroline Hartnell: Does that come out of the endowment or out of grant funds?

Hilary Pennington: Each year we have a current allocation that is for our program-related investments, or you could say impact investing, that is above and beyond our program grantmaking.

Caroline Hartnell: How does the increased funding for general operating support relate to the inequality focus?

Hilary Pennington: Inequality is really the what and why of our future focus, but there's also the question of what organizations need more of in order to be able to do their work effectively. Inequality issues are endemic and they won't go away quickly, so we feel that it's going to be very important to give more resources that help build stronger and more effective partner organizations.

Caroline Hartnell: Bill Gates once said that becoming like the Ford Foundation would be the worst possible outcome for the Gates Foundation, and more recently David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy has castigated Ford for its high overhead costs. What is your response to that?

Hilary Pennington: I think Bill Gates was thinking about the Ford Foundation's tendency to spread a little money over a lot of things, and at times that has probably been David Callahan's critique. What we are moving toward now is focusing on fewer things in a deeper way, with deeper support for the grantees we work with and more flexible support — we believe that's very important.

But if you think of the ecosystem of philanthropy, we're more catalytic than strategic. Strategic might mean you have a set of interventions that you identify and stick with, such as developing better seeds or better vaccines. For the kind of issues we work on — structural discrimination, for example, or accountable and effective governments — we believe that investing in people and ideas and institutions is really important.

What we hear from our grantees through the Center for Effective Philanthropy's Grantee Perception Report is that they particularly value the time our program officers spend helping them to understand trends, get a broad perspective on a field, and access greater opportunities and resources. What they want is more time from those program officers. That kind of value is hard to provide in a completely lean foundation. I'm not being defensive about overhead costs, but I think we need to ask more complex questions about the path to impact.

Caroline Hartnell is editor of Alliance magazine.

Hilary Pennington is vice president of the Ford Foundation’s Education, Creativity and Free Expression program. She leads the foundation’s work on school reform in the United States and higher education around the world, next-generation media policy and journalism, and support for arts and culture. She also oversees the foundation’s regional programming in four offices based in Africa and the Middle East.