Darren Walker
In the early months of the pandemic, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker came up with an idea so radical that, he recalls, 'everyone asked me, 'You can really do that?!' Everyone.' His brainstorm: with interest rates near zero and stocks tanking, major philanthropies should issue 50-year bonds to raise money for COVID-19 relief. It would save them from having to sell assets at a moment when their value had dropped significantly. 'It was an arbitrage play, really,' he says.
Ford's 'social bond,' the first in U.S. nonprofit history, raised $1 billion to buck up hundreds of flailing nonprofit grantees during the unprecedented crisis. He lobbied 14 other major philanthropies to also issue bonds but only four followed his lead initially.
'Too many operate from a culture of no as opposed to asking, How do I get to yes?' Walker says. 'I believe philanthropy should be doing the bold, risk-taking work that the government or private sector isn't willing to or cannot do.' (After seeing how successful the social bonds were, some of the leaders who had initially refused issued them too.)
Walker, who will step down from Ford at the end of 2025 after 12 years in charge, has been a transformative figure. Under his direction, the $16 billion foundation, among the nation's wealthiest, turned its attention sharply to issues of social justice and inequality, with a focus on boosting educational opportunities and civil rights for people of color and those with disabilities—Walker established the first disability-rights program by a major foundation. In 2014, he chaired the committee to lead Detroit out of bankruptcy, corralling automakers, unions, and other stakeholders to strike an $816 million ' Grand Bargain '—Ford contributed $125 million—to pay off the city's debt without jeopardizing the pensions of local-government workers or selling off the city's art-museum collection.
This can-do instinct comes, he says, from his own rise from poverty in rural Texas to work first as a lawyer, then an international investor, and for the past quarter-century, in the nonprofit sector. In 2006, he became vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Seven years later, he took over Ford, becoming the first out gay Black man to run a multibillion-dollar philanthropy.
' 'Philanthropy should be doing the bold, risk-taking work.' '
The perpetually sunny Walker chuckles as he considers what Henry Ford, the legendary car maker also known for his racist views, would think of someone like him leading the philanthropy that the industrialist established in 1936, then shrugs. 'Things evolve.'
Walker is now often the philanthropy head others turn to for advice and perspective; he believes that's partly because he's one of the few who knows what it's like to be poor or marginalized. 'My experience and my background are unusual,' he says. 'I tend to see the world through a lens of abundance and not limitations.'
While he's often lauded for his groundbreaking yet collaborative approach— winning the Council on Foundations Award for Distinguished Service in 2024—Walker regards his own record as 'mixed' largely because, in focusing so heavily on poverty and diversity, he worries he failed to notice an important national shift. 'These last few years, we've seen inequality impacting working class white Americans who were not a demographic that was a priority for philanthropy because for most of the 20th century, they were doing better,' he says. 'Now we're seeing white households with indicators of poor well-being, downward mobility, and lower life expectancy. We need to pay attention to that.'
It's one of the reasons he decided to step down—so a new leader can look at the Ford Foundation's mission with new eyes. But Walker, whose longtime partner died of heart failure in 2019, also wants to look at his own life anew.
His parting advice to fellow heads of philanthropies? 'It's easy to convince yourself that you're a success when you're a foundation president because people tell you you're doing a good job all the time,' Walker says. 'Don't believe that. We need to assess ourselves with some humility.' —Steve Friess
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