NEW YORK — When Darren WalkerWhen Ford Foundation Chairman leaves the building on January 1, 2026, he will no longer look back on the institution he has led since 2013 and that has long shaped his life.
“I’ll bring my shoes and the next leader will bring his shoes, because those will be the right shoes for the next 12 years,” Walker said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press.
Sitting in his office on the top floors of the Ford Foundation building on the edge of the United Nations campus in New York, Walker said he was humbled, grateful and a little tired from answering phone calls after his departure was announced on Monday.
“I’m going to walk out of this building and look forward. My mantra in life is to always live for the future,” Walker said, joking that he didn’t want an emeritus title or rooms named after him at the foundation’s headquarters.
Leaders of philanthropic foundations are rarely household names. While Walker may not be, he has been profiled on “60 Minutes,” which graced the cover of Town & Country magazine, and is one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People” for his service at the helm of one of America’s original foundations. His leadership has profoundly influenced other philanthropies, major donors and the work of nonprofits. It’s a rare achievement in philanthropy, especially for someone who isn’t among the world’s wealthiest people, like Bill Gates or MacKenzie Scott.
Walker said his campaign to influence philanthropy stems in part from his own life, growing up in poverty and his experiences fundraising for the nonprofit Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem.
“When we looked at refocusing the foundation on inequality, I wanted to address the paradox that inequality contributes to the creation of foundations,” he said.
Rip Rapson, president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, said that in addition to his public advocacy for charities and nonprofits to integrate equality and justice into their work, Walker has also been extremely persuasive in private.
“It was just his considerable charm and skill and incredible intellect that he used to get people to agree to a set of shared values and a set of shared ideas and a set of shared strategies. And he did this over and over and over again,” Rapson said.
Walker also convinced the Ford Foundation’s board of directors to make some very big bets during his tenure, including helping to solve the city’s problems Detroit’s bankruptcy in 2014Michigan’s Kresge Foundation invested $100 million and the Ford Foundation gave $125 million, the foundations’ two largest commitments to support the deal, which prevented the sale of city-owned art but also cut city employee pensions.
The so-called grand bargain was an unprecedented public-private partnership to save one of the nation’s largest cities at a perilous moment. But it was also highly unusual and an early sign of Walker’s ability to make bold and timely interventions.
The Detroit involvement also laid the groundwork for the Ford Foundation’s reconciliation with members of the Ford family, who last served on the foundation’s board in 1976, when Henry Ford II publicly resigned, complaining of differences between himself and the foundation.
Walker described meeting Bill Ford and Sheila Ford, who are descendants of Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Co. whose fortune established the foundation. Henry Ford III eventually joined the foundation’s board in 2019, a reconciliation Walker is particularly proud of.
“The Fords made the existence of this foundation possible and to me it was unacceptable that we would be indifferent to that truth,” Walker said.
Under his leadership, Ford has made major commitments to fund disability rights, explore new technologies and their social impact, and support feminist movements around the world. Walker helped launch a $100 million initiative, funded by philanthropist and arts patron Agnes Gund, to fight mass incarceration. The foundation has also explicitly considered the impact of its investments in the context of its mission.
Walker advocated for the $1 billion commitment of his endowment to impact investing. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 uprising for racial justice, he proposed a $1 Billion Social Bond. That essentially used the foundation’s donations to pay down debt, which was then used over two years to help stabilize nonprofits that had lost funding during the pandemic.
The outpouring of kind words, superlatives, praise and appreciation for Walker was immediate when his resignation was announced. His admirers point to Walker’s personal biography as a gay, black man from the American South and his experience in business and nonprofit work as an unusually valuable and effective mix.
Susan Taylor Batten, president and CEO of ABFE: A Philanthropic Partnership for Black Communities, called Walker a “student of philanthropy” who understood the importance of building the sector’s infrastructure and institutions.
“There was no one more authentic than Darren Walker. He was very clear about his identity. And again, I believe that representation matters, and so I remember when he got the job at Ford, we celebrated,” she said. ABFE has long advocated for philanthropy to address issues in the Black community and for the inclusion of African Americans and other people of color in the leadership of philanthropic organizations. Taylor Batten said: Data shows some improvement.
“We still have a lot of work to do in this sector and in other sectors,” she said. “But he has clearly paved the way for others who come after him.”
Walker doesn’t know what he’ll do after the foundation’s board selects his replacement, but he said he’ll sprint to the finish line. He said he’s confident the trustees will choose someone who shares the belief that the best way to support a nonprofit is to provide it with basic operational support.
In his office, Walker hangs several photos of Martin Luther King Jr., and on a shelf sits a framed quote from King that he often refers to. It urges philanthropists to remember the economic injustices that make the work of philanthropy necessary. It’s a nugget of truth he’s long tried to convey to others in the field, including in his 2023 book, “From Generosity to Justice.”
“I wanted to use Dr. King’s words to frame the idea that the work of philanthropy is not just charity and generosity, but also dignity and justice, and that this is a different experience for the philanthropist,” Walker said. “Because it requires the philanthropist to interrogate our own complicity in the problems that we are now trying to solve through philanthropy.”
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