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News About Former Ford Foundation Staff

 

 
Patricia Wald, a distinguished jurist who was the first woman to serve on the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, was one of 16 people awarded the Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, in a ceremony at the White House last November 20.
 
In honoring Judge Wald, President Barack Obama described her as “one of the most respected appellate judges of her generation. After graduating as only one of 11 women in her Yale University Law School class, she became the first woman appointed to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and served as Chief Judge from 1986 to 1991.”
 
She later served, he noted, on the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague and currently is on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
 
The medals have been awarded since 1963 and honor individuals for “meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” 
 
Among those honored with Judge Wald were former President Bill Clinton; the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin; Benjamin C. Bradlee, editor of The Washington Post at the time of the Watergate investigation; the late Senator Daniel K. Inouye from Hawaii, and Gloria Steinem, the feminist writer.
 
Sara Rios has stepped down as president of the Ruth Mott Foundation because of illness. She learned last summer that she has ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative condition that attacks nerve cells and causes the body gradually to become immobile.
 
Rios became head of the Flint, Mich., foundation in April 2012. “I’ve been steadily declining since I’ve been here and I haven’t been able to get out in the community as much as I wanted to,” she said. “I’m very sad to have to leave. It’s a disappointment.”
 
The Mott foundation awards grants to Flint-area organizations and funds arts and cultural, beautification, and health promotion projects. 
 
“I think I helped to prioritize giving a greater voice to all communities but also to those who have been historically excluded,” she said. 
 
Rios served six years at Ford as director of the Human Rights, Equality and Justice unit before leaving to join Mott.
Notes and letters can be sent to her at 2702 Joelle Drive, Toledo, Ohio 43617.
 
Rosalia Sciortino has donated 60 Indonesian glass paintings to the new Southeast Asian Museum in Hanoi. They are among more than 300 works she and her late husband, O’ong Mariono, collected over the last 20 years while she worked in Southeast Asia.
 
“We talk a lot about economic integration,” she told the English-language daily newspaper Viet Nam News, “but we cannot forget that integration is also cultural and social, and this museum is about culture.”
 
She and her husband, who was Indonesian, were always looking for paintings to add to a collection that, she said, became “the symbol of our passion together for arts and culture. Many of these paintings are 50, 60 and 70 years old but not all are in good condition because they were painted with vegetable paints, and at that time there were no artificial colors. The paintings usually feature religious motifs, Indonesian epics of Ramayana and Mahabarata, life in villages, and different stories.”
 
Sciortino, who worked in the Foundation’s Jakarta and Manila offices from 1993 to 2000, is regional director in Bangkok of the Southeast and East Asia International Development Research Center.
 
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Michael Lipsky wrote of a farmers market founded in a Washington, D.C., suburb to meet the needs of low-income people. “It achieves this,” he wrote, “not just with its location in a poor neighborhood and its accessibility by bus, but by offering a friendly environment for people to apply for food stamps and women’s nutrition programs on site.”
 
What sets the market apart, though, is that it is one of the first in the country to supplement food stamps and nutrition-assistance grants. “For every dollar a low-income mother-to-be spends at the market” with her benefits, he wrote, “she can receive an equal amount in market coupons…doubling her purchasing power.”
 
The article, “How to bring farmers markets to the urban poor”, can be accessed at www.washingtonpost.com/opinions
 
Lipsky is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a public policy organization in New York City. A former professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked at Ford from 1991 to 2003 in the Peace and Social Justice program, where he was responsible for the Foundation’s work on government performance and accountability.
 
Rusty Morgen Stahl was married in New York City last November 17 and The New York Times highlighted his courtship.
 
Stahl, who worked at the Foundation from 2000 to 2002 in the Governance and Civil Liberty and Peace and Social Justice programs, married Sarah Brooks From, daughter of Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council and a domestic policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton.
 
They met on a blind date in February 2011 and on their second date, The Times reported, “Ms. From blurted to Mr. Stahl that she had a list of seven non-negotiable items for a prospective partner and that he met all of them,” including “smart enough to challenge me”, “committed to self-awareness and self-improvement”, someone who “wants kids” and someone who can increase her “fun quotient”.
 
“I couldn’t help myself,” she said. “It just kind of came out.”
 
Obviously it was all right with him.
 
Sushma Raman has been appointed a part-time Lecturer in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She also will continue to work as a consultant to foundations, non-government and non-profit organizations and international agencies. 
 
Raman worked at Ford from 2001 to 2006, where she managed a grantmaking portfolio in South Asia focused on social justice philanthropy and strengthening civil society. She helped start foundations devoted to gender justice and human rights and social justice, and was co-chair of Ford’s Philanthropy Learning Group.
 
While working in the New York headquarters she led a $100 million global initiative to strengthen philanthropy in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the second largest initiative in the foundation’s history at the time.
 
Jael Silliman, who was born into the Baghdadi Jewish community in Calcutta, has written a novel about that community that one reviewer says “evokes an India that has all but disappeared and draws on her personal knowledge of the Jews of India to create a unique and powerful novel about the human heart.”
 
Silliman, whose novel, The Man With Many Hats, is self-published and available from most book dealers, has written several articles and non-fiction books, including Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives From a Diaspora of Hope. 
 
A former program officer at Ford, she studied at Wellesley College and did graduate work at Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin. She has a doctorate from Columbia University. Her novel is the first work of fiction about the Baghdadi Jews in India.
 
Thomas F. Miller’s vision for a “more vibrant, diverse and sustainable” economy in Eastern Kentucky was described in an article in The Lexington Herald-Leader. Miller, who worked in community development at the Foundation and lives in retirement in Berea, has developed a proposal to create and nurture entrepreneurs and to invest in new businesses. 
 
“There are no silver bullets,” he said. “It’s probably a 50-year strategy, at best, and the first 10 years aren’t going to be pretty.” Much of his thinking developed out of his time in the 1970s as president of Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp., an anti-poverty agency.
 
The article notes that the proposed effort will “require culture change in a region where work has often meant working for someone else. And it would require extensive training in economics, entrepreneurship and business skills, from elementary school through college, both in the classroom and through extracurricular activities such as Junior Achievement.”

 

 

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