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News About Former Ford Foundation Staff

 

Rona Kluger has been involved with a grassroots effort to stop “wholesale destruction” of the landmarked historic South Street Seaport district in New York City, opposing a proposed project that includes a tower that “would obliterate the Brooklyn Bridge vista”.
 
Her group, Friends of South Street Seaport (FOSSS), is “a very small core group right now, formed by folks who started going to meetings of a coalition called Save the Seaport. The issue,” she says, “saving the historic and landmarked South Street Seaport from completely inappropriate development, sounds like your usual development versus preservation battle. In fact, the august New York Post recently editorialized in favor of the developer and called those opposed ‘crazies’. ”
 
The “bottom line”, she says, is whether “this historic area, and the vista of the Brooklyn Bridge (all public property) constitute an asset for New Yorkers, future as well as present. What is a treasure that we all pretty much agree is ‘hands off’ and what is permissible to have in play? The field of urban study and planning is ripe with new ideas and out-of-the-box thinking, and there is so much that could be done down here that could build on the old and irreplaceable. Instead, we are stuck in the same old paradigm of inappropriate development versus preservation.
 
“We are, in other words, a test case down here. Or, as we used to say at Ford, a ‘model for replication.’”
 
Rona worked at the Foundation from 1976 to 1979 in the National Affairs office and the Office of the Secretary and General Counsel before becoming a program associate at the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. After seven years there she became a private consultant and at one point worked for Ford’s Middle East and Africa program as well as Clark and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. She’s also done work for the New York State Council on the Arts, 
Atlantic Philanthropies and the Aga Khan Foundation.  
 
She has also worked for many years with Sheila Avrin McLean, including serving as vice president of McLean’s consulting company.
 
Brian Mori’s play Hellman v. McCarthy was selected as part of a new series of Off-Broadway productions appearing on New York City’s public television station Channel Thirteen and available online. The play was the second presented  in the series, “Theater Close Up, Thirteen”, and premiered in October.
 
The play, inspired by the literary feud between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, focuses on McCarthy’s appearance on the Dick Cavett television talk show in 1979. Dick Cavett played himself in the stage production at the Abingdon Theater and again in the Channel Thirteen presentation.
The producers of the television series described the play as a “roller coaster ride filled with comedy and pathos.” 
 
Mori worked for the Foundation for 24 years in the Rural Poverty and Resources and Community Resource Development units. He now is a consultant in the Metropolitan Opportunity and Education and Scholarship units. 
 
Omotade Akin Aina is leaving the Carnegie Corporation of New York for Nairobi, Kenya, to run the Partnership for Social and Governor’s Research in Africa (PASGR), which was created to “foster a new generation of policy-savvy researchers, activists and administrators who have the capacity to help translate research into public policy.”
 
Aina will be continuing work he’s been involved in over the last 16 years, including a decade with the Ford Foundation’s office in Nairobi before leaving in 2008 to work for Carnegie.  
 
“Africa has been the singular issue in my life,” said the native of Nigeria. “It’s where I grew up, just before independence in 1960. I was old enough to see the struggles.”
 
Aina has been working through the Developing and Retaining the Next Generation of Academics in African Universities initiative to strengthen post-graduate programs, foster disciplinary networks and fellowships, and advance academic leadership and policies across sub-Saharan Africa. 
 
The initiative, begun in 2008 by the Carnegie Corporation and funded as well by the Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller, Kresge, Mellon and Hewlett foundations, is designed to strengthen African universities to enable them to be full-fledged partners in development. It has emphasized improvements in libraries, labs, journals, broadband connectivity and female enrollment.
 
A major effort he will pursue with PASGR is to retain the gains made over the last several years, said Aina, challenged in particular by the combination of the loss of older generations of academics, a shortage of scholars with doctorates and an ongoing “brain drain”. More than 20,000 professors leave the continent annually for more 
attractive opportunities elsewhere.
 
He sees promise in the way people are responding to the work he has been involved with for nearly two decades, starting with his tenure at Ford. “For the first time in a long time,” he said, “Africans are saying they value their universities. And we are seeing people we have invested in stay on the continent.”  
 
N. Bird Runningwater, director of the Native American and Indigenous Program at the Sundance Institute, has been named one of 10 Native Americans “Who Are Making a Difference” by the online news site BuzzFeed. He was cited because he“endeavors to bring new Native voices to documentary and feature film.”
 
He worked in the Media, Arts and Culture Program at the Foundation from 1996 to 1998.

 

 

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