Indigenous, Afro-Descendant, and Traditional People’s (IAT) organizations are key partners in several Ford Foundation program strategies at the forefront of social, political, cultural, and environmental transformation. They do critical work to address some of the most urgent challenges driving inequality worldwide. Supporting their organizational development and resilience is key to the sustainability of the social justice ecosystem. 

The Ford Foundation’s Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD) program focuses on supporting social justice organizations as they become stronger and more resilient by providing long-term and flexible grants, as well as targeted institutional capacity building. As part of this initiative, the BUILD team has worked in partnership with our regional offices in Mexico and Central America, West Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, the Andean Region, and East Africa to explore how the concept of strengthening organizations and networks looks different for institutions based in the Global South and rooted in Indigenous and/or traditional cultures, and how philanthropy can best support them.

Sophia Hernández Reyna
Program Officer, Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD)

Sindis Meza
Senior Program Officer, Andean Region

Carlos Avellan

Since 2019, the BUILD program has supported the Caribbean Central American Research Council (CCARC) to facilitate a cohort of self-identified IAT organizations and networks to foster organizational development practices based on their views, needs, and priorities. The ideas emerging from this space help the BUILD program reflect on its capacity-building model, which includes sharing common ground and discussing issues that are of interest to IAT organizations. Their “cosmovisión”—a Spanish term widely used by Indigenous and traditional communities to refer to a set of beliefs, values, and knowledge systems that give meaning to the lives of people and communities—about institutional capacity building is part of a broader agenda for organizational capacity strengthening. 

Bilateral and collective discussions with grantees, convenings, and internal conversations at Ford have led to significant lessons on how Ford can support IAT organizations. Broadly speaking, we have learned to challenge our assumption that this type of capacity-building work is inherently positive; there can be unintended consequences, even with the best of intentions.  Philanthropy’s implementation of this work needs to be done while taking the following considerations into account:

Carlos Avellan

Taken together, the lessons from the work of the IAT cohort have rippled across Ford’s broader work. The consultants who have facilitated this work and its participants have encouraged us to be more flexible and responsive to individual organizational needs and broaden our cultural understanding to center Global South voices, practices, and perspectives. We continue to learn how best to accompany IAT organizations in their institutional strengthening processes, and the IAT cohort continues towards a more robust, holistic, and strategic way of doing so. We also welcome joint reflections and conversations with other funders who are interested in supporting and learning about this type of work as part of our commitment to convening leaders through shared values and across geographies and issues.

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At times it feels the only certainty in our world is how many uncertainties we face. From the existential threat of climate change to widening economic disparities and challenges to democracy, our global social order feels more fragile and irresolute than ever. These rapidly changing times present us with many opportunities to reimagine a more just world, to work together to establish new systems of equality and prosperity—but they also threaten to divide us more than ever, to separate us through misinformation and othering or structural exclusion and dehumanization. Addressing the polarizing forces that exacerbate these divisions can be one way to help create a more just future.
Polarization is a hyper-problem: one that disrupts a society or political system’s ability to solve almost any other kind of problem. It prevents progress on crises that we in philanthropy are trying to solve. It can threaten many crucial elements of functioning society, including disrupting democratic elections, blocking productive policies, stoking hate speech, and entrenching discrimination. Left unchecked, it can accelerate authoritarianism, civil war, and genocide. Our partners at the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT) define polarization as “a prominent division or conflict that forms between major groups in a society or political system and that is marked by the clustering and radicalisation of views and beliefs at two distant and antagonistic poles,” though there is not one universally accepted definition of the term.

Shireen Zaman
Program Officer, Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD)

Dabesaki Mac-Ikemenjima
Senior Program Officer, West Africa

Ford Foundation

At the Ford Foundation, we see how polarization exacerbates inequality around the world. We recognize its presence in every place and on every issue that we work on. And so we know that if we hope to end inequality, we must understand polarized contexts better so we can counteract them when they unfold and mitigate them where they already exist. We must learn more about how to reduce this problem so we can withstand it as a society, and work around it to achieve the shared dignity and prosperity we seek.  

The Ford Foundation’s Global Initiative on Polarization, in partnership with IFIT, is a five-year effort to examine the harmful impact of polarization around the world. Launched in November 2021, it is working to create a global network of grantees, an ecosystem of learning, and a strategic set of effective practices, case studies, and tools that will help social justice leaders offset polarization and its impacts. The initiative aims to improve civil society’s ability to anticipate and counter polarization by identifying and connecting people who are working to combat it in different global contexts, and accelerating their ability to develop, test, and share effective practices. It also focuses on catalyzing new and enduring relationships and attracting additional resources into this field. Our methodology includes funding convenings and other opportunities for cross-collaboration; the development of knowledge, research, and resources; and supporting grantee organizations in multiple regions in the world. 

As we work to better understand polarization and support a proactive, productive network around its mitigation, the Global Initiative on Polarization has already yielded many lessons that provide some guideposts for our work. These learnings include:

1. To stem polarization, it is essential that we understand what can catalyze it—including our own actions.

As social justice leaders and funders, we must learn how to better identify in advance the major causes of uncertainty that can stoke polarization around the world, including climate change, pandemics, and migration. These phenomena can create divisions, especially in societies facing economic, racial, and other inequalities. We must prepare people working on these issues to anticipate and handle polarization so they are not caught unprepared by it.

This also means helping advocates become sophisticated about the work of “conflict entrepreneurs”—a term coined by author Amanda Ripley for people who are skilled at weaponizing identities and sowing division. They use polarizing tactics to distract from other problems, and they understand how to activate binary thinking (“us” vs. “them”) and create an “enemy other.” 

Understanding the causes of polarization also requires those of us in philanthropy and social justice movements to turn the mirror back on ourselves. At Ford, we fund ideas, individuals, and institutions, and we see clear inequities and injustices that we seek to change. Reducing polarization requires us to not be neutral. Yet in this work, we must be diligent to ensure we do not make polarization worse through our own actions or rhetoric. Too often, those of us in philanthropy and social justice can fall reflexively into verbiage about “winning” the “fight,” language that can have harmful consequences. This awareness must also extend to the organizations we support; in philanthropy, we must all be aware of funding solutions-oriented and transformative work, not just doubling down on one viewpoint.

2. When it comes to polarization, how we work matters.
With such large-scale cooperative goals in mind, the Global Initiative on Polarization has been designed with a collaborative, cross-program structure. Many of the grants are nominated and co-designed by a Ford regional office or program team, including several in the Global South; this allows for greater recognition of local community leaders and recognition of sensitive regional contexts. 

This was also a key reason why Ford partnered with IFIT on this initiative: For more than 10 years, IFIT has been actively involved in places that are managing polarizing conflict, including Colombia, the Middle East, and Mexico. IFIT has long-term understanding of mitigating conflict and established networks of place-based people who are doing that work as well. 

Another throughline of the initiative’s learning activities is engaging seriously in thought leadership with young people to understand how they think about these issue areas, as they will be the ones in decision-making power someday. This, we hope, will soften inclinations toward thinking in dichotomies and seed opportunities for people to think across sectors.  

3. Funding strategies to reduce polarization means working at the intersections of issues.

At Ford, we know that polarization intersects with every issue and inequality we are working to end, so this is reflected in our initiative’s grantmaking. Our Global Initiative on Polarization funds organizations working both within issues that Ford has long worked on—including natural resources and climate change, gender justice, protection of civic space, and development of ethical technology—as well as organizations working specifically on polarization itself. 

This means some of our initiative’s grantees are studying how polarization works within climate change and protecting gender justice, and some study polarization itself as their chief concern. Some grantees are studying how to prevent polarization in the context of fair and democratic elections in Ghana, like the Media Foundation for West Africa, or they are studying how artificial intelligence can polarize societies, as the International Panel for the Information Environment does. Or they are focusing on how polarization feeds into identity-based violence, like Over Zero, or evaluating the ways in which intersections between religion and democracy have exacerbated polarization in Brazil, like the Institute for Studies of Religion.

This said, we do not aim to create a sector of social justice or philanthropy that treats polarization as a separate issue; rather, we believe we must better prepare the people working on issues that are most likely to be polarized—especially climate, gender, and democracy. We must help them identify when polarization is emerging, weave this knowledge into their existing work, and respond with strategies and networks that are efficient in minimizing it.  

4. Reducing polarization is long-term work—and it will require language of unity and inspiration.
It’s not realistic to think that, through this initiative or any other, we’re going to end polarization. Polarization is a natural phenomenon that happens in societies, and it can ebb and flow but, like conflict, never be escaped entirely.

A clear lesson from the initiative so far is that people working to reduce polarization must present societies in polarized contexts with an idea of what they’re moving towards that is strong and compelling enough that people are willing to let go of rigid concepts or grievances they’ve previously prioritized. The question to all advocates and funders in the polarization space should be, “What are you moving towards, and how do you communicate that?” 

This sort of long-term work is what philanthropy is uniquely positioned to support. Just as the long-term uncertainties that feed into polarization aren’t going away, the stalwart natures of philanthropies, with our patient capital and nongovernmental structures, must aid and abet the work that will steer society through the challenges of polarization. At Ford, we will continue to make investments throughout the life of this special initiative and prioritize continued learning, as well as using our partnerships and resources to help support the crucial, collective work of reducing and managing polarization.

The post Closing the Divide: Inside Our Global Initiative on Polarization appeared first on Ford Foundation.

The Challenge

While many social justice organizations are dedicated to challenging oppressive systems, they often find themselves embedded within the inequities they aim to combat. Working to dismantle systems while living in them can cause burnout and antipathy, impacting the field’s ability to mobilize and retain vital staff and volunteers. Without a roadmap to navigate these challenges, many social justice organizations are forced to grapple with these organizational struggles on their own.

What We Did

The Ford Foundation’s Civic Engagement and Government U.S. program, in partnership with Aurora Commons and Change Elemental, developed the Navigating Change initiative. The initiative convened nearly 200 civic engagement and democracy organizations to explore pathways to manage new organizational structures and leadership transitions, aligning their operations with their values. Collectively, their experiences represent a shift in the social justice sector toward more equitable, democratic ways of working. This article shares lessons learned and lived experiences of the 600 people who participated in the Navigating Change initiative, highlighting how social justice leaders are transforming traditional models of organizational culture, strategy, and leadership structures by introducing new, values-driven approaches.

The post Navigating Change Toward an Equitable, Democratic Future appeared first on Ford Foundation.

The Challenge

Inequality and climate change are inextricably bound to how natural resources are governed. The extraction of natural resources—metals, minerals, forests, and fossil fuels—particularly from the lands of local and Indigenous communities in the Global South—can have devastating impacts on livelihoods and the environment. Also, these efforts are often owned and controlled by people far removed from the most impacted communities.

Rural, Indigenous, and low-income communities usually receive few benefits from natural resource extraction, yet they bear a disproportionate burden of the social, economic, and environmental risks. They are also particularly vulnerable to displacement, conflict, environmental harm, and the impacts of climate change.

Moreover, the past few years have seen the emergence of trends that underscore the importance of making the link between climate action and social justice more visible. These include:

• The urgency to stay within a  1.5 °C planetary temperature rise has created global pressure to phase out fossil fuels and move towards energy transition. This is causing a rapid increase in demand for ‘rare earth’ or ‘transition minerals,’ resources that are crucial for renewable energy sources, such as cobalt, nickel, and copper. Sourcing these materials has huge implications for communities that inhabit lands that are rich in these resources. 
• Organizations and movements in the Global South are calling more vocally for resources and data around climate change. This includes mobilization by youth like the climate strikes that started in 2018 and have since built momentum.

What We Did

Beginning in 2019, our 10-year Natural Resources and Climate Change International Strategy (NRCC-I) has sought to support efforts to ensure that natural resource governance and climate change actions increasingly serve the public interest and reflect the collective rights and aspirations of impacted rural, low-income, and Indigenous Peoples’ communities—particularly in the Global South.

• The strategy focuses on reducing inequalities in areas related to land rights, impacted community voices, distribution of benefits from extractive activities, and governance and financial accountability of natural resources management mechanisms. 
• We support impacted communities and grassroots leaders and networks (including through our BUILD program); the development of positive narratives sourced from the voices of communities to raise the key roles they play in protecting forests and land; and the mobilization of financial resources for community and grassroots organizations and networks.
• We have issued a total of 773 grants to 553 grantees, with total allocated funds of approximately $241 million USD. Our strategy has been multi-level, from the global to the local, with grants made from our New York, Andean Region, Brazil, Mexico and Central America, Indonesia, Southern Africa, and West Africa offices.

In late 2022, we engaged Dala Institute to evaluate NRCC-I’s work between 2019-2022. That report measures our progress toward strategy outcomes, unpacks key strategic learnings, and makes recommendations for a path forward as the strategy undergoes a refresh midway through its 10-year working period.

What We Learned

The evaluation found several areas of notable progress as a result of NRCC-I’s work. First, NRCC-I support enabled our grantees and their collaborators to foster stronger communication with impacted communities, offering new avenues for people to add their voices to decisions about natural resource governance. NRCC-I’s support also strengthened other civic institutions and civil society organizations working on natural resources governance, as well as other organizations representing impacted communities. For a set of NRCC-I grantees, Ford’s support strengthened their litigation to advance rights related to equity-centered natural resources governance, and protected the interests of most impacted communities. Moreover, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, many grantees described NRCC-I support as a crucial factor in keeping their organizations’ and their communities’ efforts alive.

Second, NRCC-I’s support helped grantees advance justice claims and rights for local communities, including stopping encroachment, realizing customary rights, and winning claims to benefits. As recounted by grantees, community leaders, and others involved,  legal battles were fought and won against extractive companies for their breach of territorial claims, the damages they caused to impacted communities, and the distribution of benefits rightly owed to affected communities. Though the extent varied, impacted communities with support from grantees made progress in gaining tenure, access, and/or usage rights to forested land.

Third, through NRCC-I’s support, grantees and community collaborators convened diverse stakeholders to establish collaborative spaces and networks, resulting in expanded opportunities to advance the ultimate objective of collective governance.

Finally, NRCC-I support helped promote narratives aimed at gaining public support and generating pressure for high-level actions for equitable natural resource governance.

Going forward

The evaluation identified three key learnings related to conceptual clarity, embedded assumptions, and context that enables and/or limits progress toward the targeted outcomes. NRCC-I is reflecting on these lessons as we refresh the strategy. 

Clarifying how concepts are understood: NRCC-I works with the assumption that there is a unified understanding of complex concepts across the program. However, there are differences in interpretation of these concepts across and within regions, sectors, and levels. Having varying interpretations of these concepts affects the approaches employed across the program, making it challenging to have a unified understanding of how NRCC-I’s approaches and achievements work together as an international program. Some of the key concepts that could benefit from stronger clarity are:

• Perspectives on inequality: What does inequality look like within multiple dimensions of natural resources and climate change?
• Interpretation of outcomes: How can outcomes be formulated collaboratively and be used to signal the extent of change?
• Framing the collective(s) and the ultimate objectives: Who is meant to benefit from NRCC-I’s work, and to what end?

Revisiting assumptions: The evaluation also identified learnings related to the assumptions in NRCC-I’s strategy. NRCC-I could consider making the following assumptions and connections more explicit:

• Connections between land rights and inequality:  We have seen progress toward obtaining and securing formal recognition of land rights, with the extent of progress dependent on the contexts in each region and the substance of the claims. However, where advances were made toward rights recognition, there was not always a discernible pathway from when these rights were formally recognized to how, or if, the recognition was then practically realized, and what the recognition meant for reducing inequality. 
• Connections between climate change and inequality:  NRCC-I’s work has concentrated on climate mitigation rather than adaptation. NRCC-I has provided support for work that focuses on the role of forests and communities,  including Indigenous Peoples and local communities, in mitigating further carbon emissions. Its strategy elaborates aligning this focus with inequality reduction from the viewpoint of climate change as a global issue. However, the ways in which the connections translate to local levels are not expanded upon.
• Connections between inequality and climate justice:: Notions of justice have informed the work and practices of NRCC-I. These include (re)distribution of financial and economic resources, recognition of cultural norms and sensitivities, and representation of varied sociopolitical participation., NRCC-I’s work also emphasizes intersectionality, the idea that people experience inequality in many ways and some groups are disproportionately disadvantaged based on multiple inequalities they experience simultaneously. Without emphasizing justice in the strategy, the way that NRCC-I approaches these concepts becomes difficult to discern, and there is inconsistency in how often notions of justice are considered to be important for the program as a whole. 

Incorporating different contexts when working globally: The implications and logics of NRCC-I working at different levels and how it goes about the various contexts are not always made explicit. The evaluation found that outcomes materialized differently due to varying contextual conditions and interpretations, particularly surrounding regional or country, sectoral, and level contexts. Some of those factors were:

• Regional or country context: Ways of working of the state and (geo)politics
• Sectoral context: Land governance, extractives, and energy
• Level context: Local, national, regional, and global

The evaluation also pointed to key strengths in NRCC-I’s work and approach that were areas to continue in the refresh:

• Enabling flexibility and agility in how grants are being used
• Being willing to take risks and support movements
• Fostering trust with and among civil society actors
• Convening ability and expertise in recognition for rights issues in natural resources and climate change

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The Challenge

International development and cooperation investments rely heavily on evaluation as a critical tool for assessing the effectiveness of interventions and determining future investments. As such, they hold significant power in decision making around programming designed to reduce inequality. And yet, the field of evaluation has too often reflected back all the forms of power imbalance and cultural biases that continue to exist in Global North and South dynamics. Who conducts those evaluations, what questions they ask, and the methodologies they use are all determined by the interests of those with greater power. As a result, evaluation can further compound and exacerbate the inequality that many international funders aim to combat.

What’s in the Report

The Ford Foundation commissioned the Global Change Center, Praxis UK, and the Praxis Institute for Participatory Practices to conduct an analysis that examined the status of evaluation in international development and cooperation, identifying ways to ensure more equitable practices. This report outlines a number of tactics that are increasingly associated with centering equity in evaluation, mitigating North/South power dynamics while changing how evaluation is conducted.

The post An Analysis on Equity-Centered Evaluation in International Cooperation appeared first on Ford Foundation.

It began with a painting. In 2017, philanthropist Agnes Gund was inspired to take a stand against mass incarceration after experiencing three powerful works of art: Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, Bryan Stevenson’s memoir Just Mercy, and Michelle Alexander’s nonfiction book The New Jim Crow. So she sold a favorite artwork that she had displayed for decades in her home, Roy Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece, and from its proceeds contributed $100 million to a new grantmaking program that would address inequality in the criminal legal system by aligning the narrative power of art and the momentum of policy change around justice reform.

Helena Huang
Project Director, Art for Justice Fund 

Art for Justice Fund, launched in collaboration with the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, did a few things differently from the start. Notably, it was built as a time-limited initiative: a five-year program that would go on to give expeditiously, react nimbly, and build substantial coalitions among artists, advocates, and allied donors. By our launch, thanks to the extensive network of friends and supporters who rallied behind Gund and our president, Darren Walker, we had roughly 20 other large donors, many individual art donors and philanthropists and some institutional funders and newer corporate leaders. Art for Justice then raised over $27M through 300-plus donations from individuals, businesses, and artists. With this additional $27M, we extended the fund for a sixth and final year, which helped recoup the time we lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our strategy was to bridge the divide between policy change and art as social change. We suggested to criminal justice funders, “Look what you can accomplish when you support narrative change. Might you consider adding a strategy related to the arts?” Likewise, we were saying to arts funders, “You’re interested in doing more social justice work. Might you support ending mass incarceration as a theme?”

Of course, no one could have predicted how much uncharted territory Art for Justice would have to navigate between 2017 and 2023. The ever-changing social and political landscape and historic events dramatically impacted our work, presenting new challenges and opportunities along the way. Like the rest of the world, the program had to reassess its path and its priorities amid COVID, the murder of George Floyd, the global sweep of Black Lives Matter, and more. But these moments of social tumult pushed the fund to respond with even more urgency, agility, and collaboration than before. When we began the project, our singular goal was moving funding toward the movement to end mass incarceration, and after our first grantee convening in New Orleans in 2018, our emphasis on building an intentional community grew. In 2020, this community rallied in support of one another and grew: We directed funds toward stopping the drastic spread of COVID inside prisons and jails. We connected people who were grieving and eager to improve their communities, from painters to policymakers to business executives.

With Art for Justice now concluded, I am proud of the many accomplishments that its leadership team—which included Agnes Gund, Catherine Gund, Sonia Lopez, and Darren Walker—achieved together, and grateful for the many times we were challenged, surprised, and humbled along the way. In six years, we made over 450 grants totaling $127M, with 38 of those over $1M. Major policy victories were secured and new narratives were advanced. And, in the greatest development none of us anticipated, the fund truly demonstrated what advocates, artists, and allied donors could accomplish together: inspiring a creative community to rise, with hundreds of artists, organizers, and donors collaborating on new events and initiatives in their shared passion to end mass incarceration.

The benefits of a ticking clock

The idea for the five-year timeline originated with Agnes Gund, with a central thesis of reparations—the perspective that these funds were not ours to guard. Our role as funders was to move these resources to the people working on the frontlines with the most at stake, who knew the issues best, and were devoted to solutions and alternatives to our current criminal legal system. This meant centering the leadership of formerly incarcerated leaders and prioritizing support for organizations led by directly impacted people. In the end, 44% of Art for Justice’s grant dollars were allocated here. 

From the start, we ran Art for Justice like a campaign. We had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and our attitude was that this wasn’t about building infrastructure that was going to last forever. It was about moving money to people who can create impact now.

Tanya Coke, director of Ford’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice program, quickly wrote a strategy that encompassed this perspective and addressed the three drivers of mass incarceration: 

• Too many people going into prisons, which requires bail reform
• Too many people being incarcerated for too long, which requires sentencing reform 
• Too many people going back into prisons, which requires eliminating barriers to reentry and creating opportunities for education, housing, employment, and voting

From there, we established our core fundamental principles:

• Bridging art and advocacy to drive cultural change: Advocacy in the movement to end mass incarceration typically works toward policy changes. Art for Justice highlighted the power of art as a complementary strategy to this, one possible of changing minds and shifting broad cultural narratives around the criminal justice system.
• Centering people directly impacted by incarceration: People from Black and brown communities and people with lived experience in the carceral system are essential to disrupting the dominant narratives around mass incarceration, especially considering the United States’ history of slavery. Formerly incarcerated and directly impacted artists and advocates are best positioned to transform systems of injustice. Funders can make space for artists in social movements by emphasizing the contributions of those with lived experiences and convening artists and advocates to strengthen their collective impact.  
• Practicing movement allyship as a funder: Those with power and privilege must use it to support and advocate for people with the most at stake who are bringing new ideas and solutions. For funders, this means getting behind them and their opportunities to advocate and create.

We engaged directly and regularly with movement leaders, both as artists and activists, and they told us what was helpful and what wasn’t. This was crucial information, and funders less deeply engaged with their grantees don’t always have access to it. 

Some of our earliest grants supported arts programs in prisons and writers who addressed the carceral system, thanks to Elizabeth Alexander and, later on, Margaret Morton as directors of Creativity and Free Expression at Ford. We were also supporting more organizations working to advance criminal legal reform. Soon, through our conversations with movement leaders, we saw how formerly incarcerated artists were hungry for opportunity—and that often, individuals can be more nimble and work more quickly than organizations. That really affected our funding going forward, and we took inspiration from Mural Arts’ fellowship programs for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists and an early Rauschenberg Foundation residency for artists focused on the carceral system.

As a time-limited fund, we needed to make investments that could produce short-term wins, too, not just lay the groundwork for victories years down the line. This meant pursuing policies that could change lives soon, or narrative change that was going to pop and get attention from media and other funders. We had to make these kinds of trade-offs to create proof of concept—because then it might have a chance of attracting other funding that would enable the work to continue to evolve without our participation later. 

Then came 2020. It’s hard to overstate how, at least 20 years ago, criminal justice was one of the most unpopular issues in U.S. philanthropy. Very few were interested in working around prison reform or had much concern about what happened to people when they came home from prison. Then George Floyd was killed and a widespread racial reckoning happened, and our phones started ringing off the hook; people were grieving and protesting and they wanted to channel that in positive ways. We had new contributions at every level, from modest donations to staggering ones: Julie Mehretu donated a painting that was auctioned off for $6.5M; MacKenzie Scott gave us $5M that same week.

An unexpected spark

At a recent event, a prominent philanthropist told me that she thought Art for Justice had ignited the idea that artists and activists are more powerful together. 

We didn’t create this notion. Artists and activists have been doing work in partnership forever, but I do think something about our timing, something about our scale, something about Gund and Walker’s profiles, made this unique. Above all, we made some good bets on some extraordinary humans.

Still, this intersectional work is nascent, and hesitation to embrace the potential of art within the criminal justice reform movement persists. We learned this on the ground in Ohio, where we focused one case study conducted by our partners at Engage R+D. It revealed that, for criminal justice reform organizations favoring policy-centric strategies, using art as a tactic wasn’t considered viable before Art for Justice proved it to be. Grantees in Ohio credited Art for Justice as helping to make the case. As Tenille Patterson, executive partner at the Pretrial Justice Institute, told us, “I would credit Art for Justice with having a significant impact on us organizationally, shifting our openness to approaching how we do systems change work. There’s a greater awareness that artwork, storytelling, and advocacy works. It moves things along.”

For your blank canvas: Key takeaways on uniting art and advocacy

1. Let relationships form organically through trust—not transactions.
Some of our peers see the Art for Justice model as a means to raise money for their own initiatives. In the creative sector, artists are often asked to contribute their works and donate to myriad causes. But the artists who participated in Art for Justice gave their works on their own accord because of existing relationships with members of our leadership team, an affinity for Art for Justice’s mission, or both. This way of working—focusing on the relationships with our partners and the community—encouraged our Art for Justice staff to do the same and work to build the same trust that engendered people to want to come to us.

The art world can be very transactional. Gund would not allow Art for Justice to be that way. One of the ways in which she stands apart is that she is so relationship-based. Art for Justice followed her lead and tried to create relationships with participants that were rooted in authenticity and trust.

2. Use time constraints to challenge internalized biases.
Having a five-year window for grantmaking meant we had to move with urgency, including confronting our tactics that didn’t work. Initially, we decided we would direct 80% of our funds to policy advocacy organizations and 20% to supporting the arts. It was a page from traditional philanthropy, to put money in silos like this.  

But this turned swiftly into bean-counting; we were spending time discussing, “Well, would this grant get counted in the 80% criminal justice side or the 20% arts side?” I remember having one of these discussions in Gund’s dining room, and thinking, “Why are we doing this if we’re trying to create broader narrative change and do truly intersectional work?” This happens a lot with traditional philanthropy: You get caught up in feeding your own internal systems that made sense at one point, but may not anymore. 

That was an early frustration, but we addressed it—and those silos crumbled. The grants became more fluid, less rigidly appraised by those categories, because the work we funded spanned criminal justice and art. That was the point. 

Another pivotal, early moment came as we solicited proposals from artists. Our approach was to ask each, “How much money do you need to support this project?” The responses fell along race and gender lines: Black women artists requested the least, and white male artists asked for the most. Board member Catherine Gund recognized this internalized inequality for what it was and proposed that Art for Justice fund every artist fellow at $100,000. In this way, we worked as a team to disrupt our own internal structural barriers and the status quo.

3. Center lived experiences but be mindful of exploitative approaches.
In one of our case studies featuring collective work in Illinois, we elevated the importance of centering lived experiences—and we became better at recognizing the importance of managing the power imbalance and vulnerabilities inherent in working across different perspectives and experiences. Cultural narratives around the carceral system intentionally and profoundly dehumanize people most directly affected; conversely, centering people with lived experience in it elevates our humanity through mutual respect, authority, and trust.

One of our grantees, Zealous, showed us that because the carceral system so devalues people, it is essential that artists, advocates, and funders take extra care to ensure that the storytelling opportunities they provide are not also exploitative. “There’s always a power dynamic to asking folks to share their stories, a high potential for extractiveness and exploitation even if inadvertent or well-intentioned,” Scott Hechinger, a leader at Zealous, told us. “How can aspiring allies have conversations with people with direct experience to ensure that we are true partners, to feel like we are engaging in mutual aid? When working with folks that are currently incarcerated, before even having the conversation, we endeavor first to work with local organizations or organizers, the people who already have built relationships of trust. We take the lead of local partners.”  

Ultimately, 53% of artists funded by Art for Justice were formerly incarcerated, and the program supported 78 organizations led by formerly incarcerated and justice system-impacted people.

4. Anticipate tension and differing views within social justice movements.
Building a community to end mass incarceration meant bringing many passionate leaders together. Not surprisingly, this meant differences in opinions surfaced—and we had to determine our place in these moments of conflict. In any movement, leaders and funders will face uncertainty and inconsistency—and, often, these ambiguities will lack a clear solution or timeline for resolution. This can be difficult to navigate, but a funder’s role is to be an ally to movement leaders. Art for Justice organizers needed to be diligent about considering how to best use our position, which meant navigating moments of tension with sensitivity and observation. When disagreements arose, Art for Justice had to decide when to leverage our experience, cede our power, take a stance, or stay neutral, always in service of moving the shared mission forward. 

5. Celebrate the tangible and intangible wins.
Art and advocacy are not always fields of clear victories. After all, how do you quantify a painting as a success? Often, the art world ascribes it a dollar value. However, Art for Justice wanted to achieve the tangible of directing money to the movement and impacting policy, as well as the intangible of creating narrative and cultural change.

This reminded us to uplift both types of wins as they happened. The tangible wins spanned dollars leveraged and policy. Our grantees secured important wins: The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth secured the freedom of 1,000 individuals who were sentenced to life without parole as children, and Youth First Initiative succeeded in closing six youth prisons and redirected more than $50M to community-based alternatives to incarceration. The Civil Rights Corps, Essie Justice Group, the Vera Institute of Justice, and others secured a major win when Los Angeles struck down its bail system.

We also celebrated the more philosophical victories. At No Justice Without Love, Art for Justice’s cumulative show at Ford’s Center for Social Justice gallery in New York, we embraced the tension of our curation. How do you display the works of world-renowned artists alongside Art for Justice creators? That in itself is narrative change, and its power was immediate. Not only were audience members seeing this and reacting, but the participants were seeing themselves differently and anew. I watched Halim Flowers, artist and former “juvenile lifer,” staring at his painting next to the work of Mark Bradford, a famed contemporary artist, at the Ford Foundation. It was clear then that seeing oneself differently is a form of narrative change. It is transformative.  

This commingling will continue on Art for Justice’s newly launched archival website here. It will serve as a digital record of work undertaken by the fund and its grantee partners, including case studies, an impact report detailing key metrics and policy wins, and lessons learned from our grantmaking. I hope creatives and advocates of all walks of life will use it as a resource.

What I’ve come to understand is the way in which narrative change can happen on multiple levels—at a cultural level, yes, but also the ways in which your mind can be pivoted. We had quite a number of these moments throughout Art for Justice, and I hope that those kinds of openings, pivots, and shifts will only continue to happen. And I hope that when people think about artists and activists making change in the world, Art for Justice will have played a role in elevating those possibilities and bringing more people into the fold. The work of transforming the criminal legal system continues, and the potential of art and advocacy together is limitless.

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Since its launch in 2015, the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression (CFE) program has worked collaboratively to invest in creative organizations and storytellers shaping a more inclusive, just world across three areas of focus: arts and culture, journalism, and documentary filmmaking through its JustFilms initiative. To assess the impact and alignment with the changing needs of the field, the foundation is conducting a series of evaluations around each area of focus under the CFE program. This evaluation report on JustFilms is one in a series of three evaluations to explore how arts and creative sectors can address inequality thoughtfully.

The Challenge

Film is a powerful force in shaping social narratives and public discourse, but historical marginalization, silencing, and exclusion of certain groups and communities ensure that many important stories are ignored, untold, or relayed in ways that reproduce harmful narratives. With greater investments and resources, today’s documentary ecosystem can advance social justice, expand artistic freedom, and ensure economic sustainability among documentary practitioners at the global, regional, and local levels.

What We Did

At its core, JustFilms believes that independent films play a powerful role in building a more equitable, democratic, and joyful world. To that end, JustFilms supports the production, sustainability, and engagement of social justice documentary filmmaking. Its grantmaking focuses on content funding (support for creatives working on specific films and regranting funds),  organization support (general operating support and core support for key field infrastructure), and institutional strengthening support (multi-year grants through the foundation’s Building Institutions and Networks [BUILD] program for field-stabilizing organizations). Other types of support include: network-building, leadership development, research and advocacy,  and criticism, curation and archiving initiatives. In 2021-22, a one-time Social Bond supported a select number of organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic to stabilize and strengthen key organizations.

Between 2017 and 2021, JustFilms:

• Awarded $27.3 million to 187 films through 223 content grants
• Awarded $44 million to 88 organizations supporting documentary infrastructure and filmmaking, including $25.2 million to eight organizations through the BUILD program
• Hosted or sponsored events to connect networks of individuals and organizations and provide space for creatives, thought leaders, and journalists to share ideas,  identify collaborative opportunities, and advance new narratives through film projects

What We Learned

1. JustFilms provided crucial funding to innovative documentaries and emerging media that were primarily created by diverse artists working to advance social justice stories consistent with Ford’s priorities.

JustFilms-funded films’ project leads were diverse with respect to gender, race and ethnicity, and career stage. For example, 63% of grants had BIPOC project leads; this representation significantly outpaces the rest of the industry where BIPOC filmmakers only accounted for 29% of a U.S.-based sample of documentary professionals¹.  JustFilms funding played a critical role in maintaining the independence of filmmakers’ creative choices, was fundamental in allowing grantees to engage in thoughtful and meaningful work, and influenced filmmakers’ capacity to attract new funding. 

2. JustFilms is broadly advancing equity and inclusion in the independent nonfiction film and emerging media fields through its financial support of BIPOC and People with Disabilities (PWD)-led organizations in the field.

By funding a wider array of BIPOC and PWD-led organizations, JustFilms aims to decentralize decision-making and reach individuals and organizations from communities historically not supported by the broader independent and commercial media ecosystems. Many interviewees, including programmers, curators, producers, scholars, and peer funders see these organizations as challenging the mainstream documentary world and influencing not only the narratives being created, but also the economic and ethical models of how films are created. Ninety-four percent of surveyed individual filmmakers and 78% of surveyed organizations described JustFilms’ contribution to the inclusion and centering of creatives of color in the documentary field as “significant” or “transformative.” JustFilms also supports emerging leaders through the Rockwood Documentary Leaders Fellowship, which brings together leaders working across the documentary field.

3. Justfilms funding and support helped connect audiences with social justice documentaries and emerging media.

JustFilms is especially important in the streaming age, according to interviewees,  who note that many streaming platforms, despite their global reach, in fact limit access to content and impact campaigns and are not sufficiently inclusive.  JustFilms grantmaking is helping advance social justice and narrative shifts through film, both in near-term change (e.g., building support for policy initiatives) and long-term change (e.g., encompassing bigger-picture narrative and cultural shifts). JustFilms’ support is significant for grantees wanting to contribute to social change and public engagement through their work.  At JustFilms, impact is defined broadly and determined by the filmmakers themselves. This can make it more difficult to measure “impact” and audience engagement with a single metric since the outcomes achieved by grantees are not tied to commercial market or mass media tools of measurement. JustFilms has supported a wide range of impact campaigns and is actively exploring new exhibition and distribution models that can reach a diverse audience beyond the mainstream in an effort to advance social justice.

4. JustFilms is contributing to more resilient networks of independent creators addressing field and social justice priorities from and focused on marginalized communities.

There is a great opportunity to coordinate resources and learning across the global documentary ecosystem, to create greater resilience, sustainability, impact and inclusion. JustFilms’ grantmaking and programming supports an emerging and expansive global network of individuals and organizations invested in collaborating on shared solutions to field-wide challenges. In particular, Ford’s BUILD program bolsters key field-building organizations and fortifies the resilience of these organizations to better serve their constituencies, and collaborate.

¹ Borum, C., & Harder, B. (2021). The State of the Documentary Field: 2020 Study of Documentary Professionals, Complete Data for Global and US Respondents. Center for Media & Social Impact, American University School of Communication, in association with the International Documentary Association, 14.

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Just over a year ago, we urged philanthropic leaders, impact investors, ESG investors, and forward thinking venture capitalists (VCs) to take a proactive role in holding tech companies accountable for unintended harms. Our piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) asked these stakeholders to do more than push back against or condemn an industry that can define, perpetuate, or exacerbate existing racial, gender, socioeconomic, and labor inequities. In fact, it implored them to be deliberate and thoughtful in their investments and to drive funding toward the next generation of “public interest” tech companies committed to doing good and innovating. 

Today, we find ourselves in the midst of an “AI boom,” and the red flags keep appearing. For the better part of a decade, visionary leaders like Safiya Noble, Ruha Benjamin, Joy Buolamwini, and Timnit Gebru tried to warn us about AI. They stressed that there were huge risks in companies racing to train machines with massive amounts of data without addressing the social, political, and economic inequities that would result. Mainstream scholarship has finally caught up. The Federal Trade Commission has also voiced its concerns, opening a July investigation into OpenAI Inc., the company that makes ChatGPT. In a 20-page letter posing dozens of questions, the agency asked how the start-up trains its AI models and treats personal data. And yet, venture capital is pouring billions of dollars into the next generation of industry-defining technologies. As Silicon Valley continues to build at an enormous scale, civil society is expected to single-handedly protect the public interest while ensuring equitable and ethical outcomes for the next generation of technology with limited and constrained funding. This is untenable. Instead, we believe that impact investing and philanthropy must play a vital role—now, more than ever—in building an equitable tech future centered on the public interest. 

Wilneida Negrón
Co-Founder, Startups & Society Initiative/Strategic Advisor Responsible Innovation Labs 

Lyel Resner
Visiting Faculty, Head of Public Interest Technology Studio, Cornell Tech; Co-Founder, Startups & Society Initiative

A brief history of the impact space: where it’s been and where it must go

Impact investing emerged as a new asset class more than a decade ago. In a seminal research paper from J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), the authors anticipated that the market would reach $400 billion in assets under management by 2020. There was abundant and necessary debate about what constituted impact, but field builders were committed to mobilizing a fraction of the capital markets to advance the Sustainable Development Goals and produce positive social and environmental impacts. Early skeptics questioned if the market would succeed, but their concerns proved unfounded. Today, the impact investing market is estimated to be worth $1.164 trillion, according to GIIN, and the vast majority of impact investors receive the returns they wanted and see the social and environmental benefits their money was meant to unlock. Positive changes are happening in fields including climate change, healthcare and biotech, and housing and real estate. And, growing evidence suggests that impact can generate alpha for investors.  

While it is certainly true that philanthropy is increasing its allocations to mission and program-related investments, these tend to favor investments with clear metrics for measuring impact. Most philanthropies haven’t built the capacity to source and evaluate tech-related investments. Ford is a notable exception. In 2016, it invested $20 million in public interest tech through its Technology and Society program. Four years later, in 2020, the foundation approved a $50 million grant budget for the Public Interest Technology Catalyst Fund, which has helped mobilize more than $130 million in complementary grantmaking from partnering foundations. 

Impact investors, ESG investors, and forward thinking venture capitalists have an opportunity to build an alternative model by investing in a new generation of companies that are committed to public interest and/or stakeholder values, but this is yet to happen. The reasons are manifold.

Until recently, impact investing was assumed to be largely concessionary, and very few truly impact-driven companies achieved venture-scale returns. Most impact investments have also been within discrete impact areas like climate, health, and financial services that align with measurement frameworks like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Additionally, early stage technology investments were often beyond the scope and networks of impact investors. At the same time, traditional silicon valley actors operated with tremendous speed and scale and continue to be the first hope and call, even for impact-minded founders. Thankfully there are growing efforts to bend impact investing in the direction of building tech in the public interest.

At this very moment, the future of tech hangs in the balance. It can be equitable and inclusive or, conversely, exacerbate inequality. The launch of ChatGPT has civil society back on its heels, with debates about how to curb the myriad potential harmful effects of OpenAI’s flagship and haphazard rollout. What if the biggest tech companies 10 years from now had practiced responsible innovation from their inception? What if we could seed a new generation of companies that tie public interest into the core of their operations? What if the next generation of companies proactively and constructively engage with government and civil society to address the great problems of our time?

Envisioning—and building—a different future

In 2018, as a co-founder of Swayable, Lyel was dismayed to find that there were minimal tools and no community for people interested in building responsible tech companies. This held true even in venerated startup communities like Y Combinator. Knowing other founders who shared his frustration, Lyel teamed up with Dr. Wilneida Negron, a Ford tech fellow at the time, and launched the Startups & Society Initiative (SSI) in 2020 to fill a critical void in the tech sector. Three years later, SSI is a nonprofit think tank comprised of founders, investors, and researchers who continue to believe responsible tech is both a business and societal imperative. We are not the only ones: We’ve interviewed hundreds of influential founders and investors about building companies responsibly and published dozens of case studies. We also launched the Responsible Innovation Primer for Founders, which distills and consolidates more than 100 lessons from investors, operators, and founders. And, we lead the Responsible Innovation Founder Summit, which has attracted more than 700 global leaders each year since 2020.

We know that we are in a perilous moment but believe that if we act now, we can alter course. It is possible to create a different alternative than the present, frightening one that has many of us up at night, wondering if our data is being mined or manipulated, and how technology companies will impact the future of work, dignity, and democracy.

Now is the time to scale up efforts exponentially. The long-term tech strategy must do more than support civil society organizations in responding to how technological innovation impacts society, the workplace, and the labor markets. It is essential to take a proactive response by marshaling private capital into the public interest so that we build an alternative ecosystem—one that is populated by a new generation of companies committed to public interest tech and/or stakeholder values. This is not utopian. It’s possible, and we believe there are specific actions investors, limited partners, early stage funders, and philanthropy can take right now: 

Guidance for good actors: How impact investors can accelerate public interest tech

1. Embrace speed and urgency: Technology is building the future right now, and we need to ensure that prosocial and impact-minded investors have a prominent seat at the table. Impact investors need not compromise their due diligence but they cannot delay: It’s important to keep pace with other investors in the ecosystem who move quickly. Strive to be founder-oriented—respect founders’ time, keep your word, and move through your diligence processes as quickly and respectfully as possible to close or pass on deals.  

2. Support ecosystem-building: Like many venture capitalists, a growing number of impact investors recognize the value of working together to top off funding rounds. By collaborating, we can help impact-founders hit their target raises and build their businesses more quickly. Investor collaboration also improves the ecosystem by creating more companies with a “cap table”—or shareholder ownership—that is values-aligned and interested in steering the company toward responsible practices and operations. There are notable pioneers in this work, including the membership association Impact Capital Managers and the Impact Investing Alliance, but the space is still fragmented, and collaboration isn’t happening early—or often enough. 

3. Broaden impact scope: Some investors are strictly focused on the Sustainable Development Goals, but others are in a position to consider investments that go beyond this purview—to prevent harm or promote responsible tech. Such investments are critically important and can steer and shape companies so they become good corporate citizens. For example, ChatGPT, Airbnb, and Zoom are not social impact companies per se, but they are building technologies that affect fields like education, affordable housing, and healthcare, respectively. If such entities were more attune to social issues and if their early investors prioritized such a focus, the landscape would be markedly different.

4. Catalyze capital: The next generation of founders is hungry for an alternative to traditional venture capital, which exerts pressure to grow at all costs. A recent survey from Sifted, for example, found that 96% of Gen Z founders said they want to prioritize values-aligned capital, and in a 500 Global survey, 91% of founders said responsible company building practices would make an investor more attractive. And yet, early stage impact investing in technology is underdeveloped, and there are limited funds where founders can go for values-aligned capital. Public interest tech impact funds that pool catalytic capital from philanthropy and impact investors can meet this demand.

5. Increase the number of impact operators in impact funds: There is a new generation of “impact operators,” who have built and scaled purpose-driven companies as founders and executives. Such individuals understand what it means to work at the intersection of impact and purpose at the execution level and can significantly help source deals, conduct due diligence, and provide value to portfolio companies. Traditional venture capital is indexed heavily on bringing operators into funds, and impact capital would benefit from this as well.

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At the Ford Foundation, we are committed to being responsible and responsive grantmakers. As funders, we recognize how uneven the power dynamic is, and how few opportunities there are for us to receive the kind of feedback that can help us improve our relationships to the organizations we support. We know that if we want honest and candid feedback, we need to offer channels for input with an emphasis on anonymity. That’s where the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) comes in.

Since 2008, our CEP colleagues have conducted six surveys of our grantee organizations to assess how we are seen by the partners we support. The findings provide us a sense of how we have improved or declined in key areas over time, as well as how we compare to the over 300 funders who rely on the Grantee Perception Survey. Between 2008 and 2017, we received four surveys that gave us consistent feedback: We had much to improve. But in 2017, we made concerted efforts to take this feedback and apply it.

Among our efforts, we streamlined our grantmaking systems and made significant commitments to multiyear general operating support through our BUILD initiative. These multiple and combined efforts helped lead to significant improvements in our 2020 survey.

In 2022, we conducted another survey and hoped that we were still on the right track. The results were heartening, as we held strong and even saw some additional improvements. This sort of sustained improvement is fairly unusual in the philanthropic field, CEP notes, particularly for a large funder like Ford. While we celebrate the good news, we also hear that there is still room for improvement—and we take this very seriously. We’re pleased to share the top findings of the survey and our plans to address this invaluable feedback.

What we learned

We are on an upward trajectory, with grantees’ perceptions at their highest-ever point on a number of key issues.

The foundation received its highest-ever rating for impact on grantees’ fields and organizations. Ratings also improved for the foundation’s understanding of the social, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts in which organizations work, as well the foundation’s understanding of the needs of the people and communities that they serve. Comments from respondents highlighted our crucial leadership on issues related to their fields and our influence on other funders. They described our funding as “transformational to their organizations and to their ability to make a lasting difference in their fields.”

We were also happy to learn that ratings are at an all-time high for the helpfulness of our selection process. Respondents reported more positive experiences for all aspects of the reporting process, and that they experienced low levels of pressure to modify their priorities in order to receive funding. These significant improvements on our selection process suggest we are on the right track, and we continue to work toward streamlining our processes.

Finally, we were able to build on our past strong ratings in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Given our commitments in this area, we welcomed hearing that Ford by and large communicates and demonstrates our work in DEI.

Key Ratings Summary

We can improve on our engagement and communication.

Even as we celebrate these strong results, there are places where we see need for improvement, particularly areas where we’ve made little progress over the years, where we lag compared to our peers. The first is our relationships, responsiveness, approachability, and engagement with grantee organizations. While we were able to maintain our gains from 2020 on a number of these measures, some of these results were still lower than we believe they should be. One of the most common suggestions for improvement was more frequent and substantive interactions between Ford staff and those we fund.

And while we improved significantly on the clarity with which we communicate our goals and strategies with grantee organizations, ratings for the consistency of our communications remained largely unchanged. These are still lower than other very large, private funders.

While the findings we share here are about the foundation overall, we also recognize that grantee organizations often have different experiences depending on program and geography. Our goal is to minimize that variability wherever possible so that all organizations we fund consistently have positive experiences.

Finally, while there were no meaningful patterns of differences associated with grantee disability identity or gender, respondents who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community provided significantly lower ratings across many survey measures. In the United States, respondents who identify as a person of color provided lower ratings on these issues than grantees who do not identify as a person of color. These are places where we want to see change.

Next steps

While we are encouraged by these most recent survey results, and pleased that we’ve seen positive trends since 2020, we’re also ready to roll up our sleeves and work to improve even further.

The survey reminded us that the organizations we fund view Ford as a leader in the philanthropic space and on the global stage, especially in our public commitments to social justice issues and incorporation of DEI initiatives. We will continue these efforts and demonstrate that a vibrant, diverse workforce is a richer one.

We are also looking to make the following commitments:

• Prioritize more substantive conversations between program officers and organizations, and help program staff become more responsive to the organizations they fund
• Include grantee organizations even more explicitly in strategy development wherever possible
• Continue to employ the use of multiyear, general support in our grantmaking and use additional, non-monetary institutional support to grantees where appropriate
• Convene the leaders and organizations we support and connect our grantee organizations to other funders where strategic
• Ensure consistent coverage of indirect costs for eligible project grants by applying our policy of a 25% minimum rate
• Seek ways to create a more consistent and positive experience for grantee organizations, regardless of program or regional area and without disparities based on LGBTQ+ status or race and ethnicity

These survey results are just the beginning of an important discussion. Please reach out to Ford staff if you have additional suggestions or any questions. We appreciate the remarkable organizations in our community and look forward to improving our relationships with them even further.

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After three years of quarantines and isolation in China, the government has lifted its zero-COVID policy, signaling a willingness to open and resume connections with people from other countries. While movement across China’s borders becomes more routine, uncertainty remains around the future of China’s interactions with foreign governments and foreign civil society.

This moment reminds us of the challenges that foreign philanthropies, including the Ford Foundation, faced in the late 1970s when they began building connections with China after the death of Mao Zedong. The barriers seem even more formidable today: Instead of creating ties under an official Chinese policy of “Reform and Opening Up,” the current task is to rekindle relationships in an atmosphere that does not welcome reform.

We are facing a moment of extreme pessimism regarding the future of foreign legal assistance to China and the future of the country’s legal reforms. It is easy to feel discouraged, but positive insights from our research on the Ford Foundation’s nearly four-decade law program in China resonate today.

In fact, data from our expansive study on Ford’s multi-decade China program found that the law program was instrumental in providing Chinese actors with multiple opportunities. More specifically, the program produced three major outputs. It exposed stakeholders to new ideas, alternative norms, and practices; helped them engage in joint formulation of project designs; and provided access to sustained Ford project support critical to smooth and impactful implementation.

Since the end of the law program in 2015, we found that the Chinese government has initiated a number of restrictions on foreign funding for nongovernmental organizations, most notably through the Foreign NGO Law, which took effect in 2017. Encouragingly, the desire for foreign contacts persists. Legal academia and civil society activists continue to reach out to organize and participate in online meetings and other events.
The insights listed below may offer a path to pursue future collaboration.

Background

In 1979, the Ford Foundation awarded its first ever grant to support activities in China; $200,000 was provided to the Law Institute of the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences (CASS). This initial funding catalyzed a four-decade legal assistance program.

To design this new program, the Ford Foundation engaged a diverse range of collaborators across the country. Ford made grants to state institutions, law schools, and grassroots civil society organizations working on issues related to gender, discrimination, environment and other policy areas. Over the course of the program, the foundation nurtured generations of academics and NGO leaders.

The law program was initially centered around academic legal exchanges, which sent young academics from China’s leading law schools to the U.S. for training. By 1983, these exchange programs evolved, becoming the Committee on Legal Educational Exchanges with China (CLEEC). When CLEEC was phased out in 1995 and replaced with in-country programs, Ford had spent more than $4 million and sent over 200 Chinese scholars to U.S. law schools. CLEEC laid a foundation for future law-focused programs in China, and also served as a litmus test to determine the potential for legal reform as China opened to the world.

Most of the foundation’s partners were based in Beijing, but it also worked with actors across the country to ensure different needs in diverse geographies—both urban and rural—were being met. Additionally, Ford’s law program in China extended beyond the country’s borders. Chinese legal scholars and practitioners participated in summer schools on American and comparative law; these were offered in Chinese law schools and short-term foreign exchanges also brought students to train in the U.S., other parts of North America, Europe, and Asia.

Strategic focus

The law program’s core grant activities were organized into three categories: capacity building, advocacy, and legal reform.

After decades of Mao’s rule, China had limited legal talent; law schools were closed during several periods, including the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution. In the post-Mao era, the government recognized that law schools urgently needed qualified professors to teach China’s future judges, prosecutors, and lawyers. The foundation likewise saw this need and provided critical resources to nurture a new cohort of legal minds who eventually became leaders in China’s legal academy.

For the second, the foundation supported public interest law institutions. The foundation sponsored university-based legal clinics and public interest law centers and supported internships and fellowships to link legal education with public interest advocacy. These efforts shaped China’s public interest law landscape.

To promote legal reform, the foundation supported legal experts to study legislative and policy challenges related to legal system functioning, including criminal procedure, legal aid, administrative law (encompassing judicial review, public hearing, and open government information), and the operation of the courts.

While the Chinese government recognized the need to rebuild the legal system—and acknowledged that foreign actors could facilitate this goal —it also insisted on limiting foreign engagement. Foreign projects were not allowed to advocate for political reform, but other guidelines were vague, and there was a general murkiness regarding what projects could and could not do.

Today, while the scope for foreign engagement in the field of law is narrower than at any time since 1978, it has not been eradicated. The Ford Foundation’s China law program’s nimbleness in navigating shifting political spaces demonstrates the need to be creative in identifying activities that are feasible today while always keeping an eye on what might be possible tomorrow.

Taking the long view

After making its first grant within China in 1979, it was nearly another decade before the foundation was able to establish its representative office in Beijing in 1988. For the following three decades of the law program’s existence, the Ford’s Beijing-based officers were keenly watching when, if at all, various projects were possible.

The multi-decade law program is a study in alert patience. The foundation, like other foreign funders, needed to be adept at reading the political winds that shaped the zone of permitted work. This required being both astute and flexible as the situation on the ground changed and, at times, to simply wait.

When opportunities arose, the foundation’s in-country presence positioned it to pivot from a more passive stance to seizing opportunities for meaningful engagement. The foundation’s capacity to be perceptive, unhurried, and reflective was key to its multi-decade arc of law-focused initiatives.

This decades-long program was only possible because the Chinese government wanted this collaboration. Throughout its duration, the Chinese government was the principal driver of legal reform, having recognized a need to develop the country’s legal system. The foundation was a supporting player in a vast ensemble that was suggesting various roadmaps for the ultimate decision-makers to follow.

Reconciling values

The Ford Foundation is guided by its mission to reduce poverty and injustice, strengthen democratic values, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. The primary reason Ford has been able to work in China is because the foundation shares the government’s poverty reduction goal.

The foundation did not come into China with a political agenda; it never advocated for change to the constitutional order, nor did it present a preferred structure of government. It did, however, arrive with deep-seated convictions about the inherent dignity of all people and that the legal system should support the rights of all.

The Chinese leadership and the foundation were far from sharing a unified, cohesive vision of the normative goals of China’s legal reform project. To do this work, the foundation had to avoid conversations around the Constitution and government structure. At the same time, the foundation never disguised its values and was always clear about its commitment to democracy, openness, pluralism, and rule of law. Many individual Chinese citizens with whom the foundation interacted over the years shared these values with Ford.

Striking aspects of the numerous conversations held with former Chinese grantees during our study were the overwhelming desire to improve the lives of their compatriots. These groups expressed tremendous gratitude for the foundation’s support and valued the relationships cultivated with colleagues inside and outside China. Many of these relationships endure today and can help both to seek out new ways to improve the lives of Chinese citizens.

Today, we anticipate that China’s initial path out of pandemic-period isolation will result in re-opening but not reform. We are, however, optimistic that the lessons from the foundation’s law program can help guide others seeking to resume or begin building relationships in the legal field.

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