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NEWSLETTER
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President's Message, Winter 2014
I am looking at one of the world’s most spectacular views, Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, to where we now have retired. I first came to Rio, and to Copacabana, in 1961 as a young Fulbright scholar, the first step in a long academic and Ford Foundation career dedicated to rights and governance and equitable development. The city was clean and hospitable, the beach always alluring.
But the ensuing years have witnessed a struggle between inclusion and exclusion, and the score is not in yet. Rio has become a city marked by enormous gaps between rich and poor.
While the city’s economy booms, based on petroleum exploration, tourism and construction in anticipation of soccer’s World Cup games later this year and the Olympics in 2016, unemployed and out-of-school youths wander the streets committing petty crimes that have the population skittish. In the last several days shopping centers have been closed in the face of “flash mobs” that powered their way through corridors lined with fashionable stores, protesting prices the lack of affordable diversions for them elsewhere in the city’s summer heat. Criminal gangs and drug traffickers were driven from the hillside shanty towns (favelas), but the police presence has not been accompanied by social investment and the gangs are slowly coming back.
At this point you might well be asking, what does all this have to do with LAFF? I must admit the connection is indirect. Of course, there is the Foundation’s 50 years of grantmaking in Brazil, a mark of a proud heritage chipping away at the country’s most significant problems. And there now are thousands of extraordinary NGOs providing services while finding voice to make demands on the system.
I recognize a problem of governance when I see it, and wonder what could be brought to bear so that this extraordinary city can take its rightful place among the most exciting and livable cities in the world. The first thing that comes to mind is the Innovation in State and Local Governance program that Dave Arnold so ably initiated and managed in the 1980s. That and the healthy investment that Ford has made in community foundations and public-private partnerships in the United States. What in the Foundation’s experience can be applied effectively in the current circumstances?
Inspired in part by her knowledge of Ford’s efforts and her own work with NGOs at the UN, my wife, Leona, established the BrazilFoundation 15 years ago and, more recently, the Carioca Fund, named for the people of Rio. She has deployed some $30 million to more than 300 community-based projects throughout the country. The fund focuses on job training for Rio’s unemployed youth, a laudable idea that has failed so far to pique the consciousness of the city’s wealthy in ways that could turn it into Brazil’s first real community foundation.
Each of us holds in our own work experience keys to current problem solving. Life After the Ford Foundation is in large part about what we can bring to the table in our post-Ford lives. This newsletter and our website tell many such stories, and can tell more. Write for us. Share what you are thinking and doing in the locales where you now work. You’ve got a ready readership that can still put that experience to work.
I want to close on a note of sadness, and of joy. The sadness reflects the passing of two of our esteemed colleagues, Eugene (Rocky) Staples and Siobhan Oppenheimer-Nicolau, whose contributions to the Foundation and beyond are well-recorded in this edition. They were legendary figures in the Foundation and will be greatly missed.
The newsletter also celebrates the wonderful meeting LAFF’s New York chapter had at the Foundation’s headquarters and the remarkable welcome, in spirit and open dialogue, that Darren Walker provided. Thank you, Darren.
The sun is shining on the atrium now, and I believe that, as part of the Ford family, we can look forward to sharing in the Foundation’s certain accomplishments in the years to come.
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