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News About Former Ford Foundation Staff

 

Maya Harris has been appointed one of three senior policy advisers to Hillary Rodham Clinton as the former secretary of state, United States senator and First Lady begins her campaign to become president of the United States.
 
Harris has been a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress since 2008, when she left the Ford Foundation where she had been vice president for Democracy, Rights and Justice.
 
Before joining Ford she was the executive director of the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, following stints as dean of the Lincoln Law School of San Jose, Calif., a position she assumed when she was 29, and as a senior associate at PolicyLink. She also taught at the University of San Francisco School of Law and the New College of California School of Law in San Jose.
 
She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the Stanford University Law School. She was a clerk for United States District Court Judge James Ware and then worked in private practice in northern California, being named one of the Top 20 Up and Coming Lawyers Under 40 by The San Francisco Daily Journal. 
 
In her work as a lawyer and with ACLU, Ford and the Center for American Progress she championed police reform and the rights of women, particularly women of color, both of which were cited in news reports as key to her appointment to the Clinton campaign.
 
Her sister, Kamala Harris, is attorney general of California. 
 
Akwasi Aidoo, former executive director of TrustAfrica, a foundation he founded in 2006, has left that organization for a “multi-year role” as a senior fellow at Humanity United, a philanthropy created to “build peace, promote justice, end atrocities and advance human freedom”.
 
TrustAfrica was created to advance equitable development and democratic governance in Africa. It is supported primarily by donations by some 14 foundations around the world but, Aidoo said in an interview published in Alliance Magazine, “African sources of support are key.” 
 
One of his goals, he said, was to increase support from African governments and companies to help with “issues that only an African foundation can deal with.”
 
Among these issues, he cited “our work in illicit financial flows, our work on crimes of atrocity… our work in post-conflict Liberia, which is one of the most difficult places you can imagine working in, and in Zimbabwe, which is a terribly failed state.”
 
He said that such countries as Zimbabwe, Somalia, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are “big gaps in the donor landscape”. 
 
He continues that work at Humanity United, he told this newsletter, where he is helping to “continually refine its African program strategy and to build relationships with leading African philanthropists and institutions.”
 
Aidoo worked at Ford from 1993 to 2006, when he left to set up TrustAfrica. He had been head of its office for West Africa and director of its Special Initiative for Africa.
 
He was educated in Ghana and the United States, earning a doctorate in medical sociology from the University of Connecticut in 1985. He then taught at universities in Ghana, Tanzania and the United States before joining Ford. 
 
He is a member of several boards and chair of some, including the Fund for Global Human Rights, the Open Society Foundations Board for Africa and the Center for Civilians in Conflict. 
 
Radhika Balakrishnan and Leila Hessini have been named recipients of the OpEd Project’s Ford Public Voices Fellowship, an initiative designed to “dramatically increase the public impact of our nation’s top and most diverse thinkers and to change the demographics of voice across the world.”
 
The fellowships provide four day-long seminars, monthly phone calls with media professionals and on-going mentoring to help minorities, especially women, develop the inside information, high-level support and inside connections to “become influential on a large scale”. 
 
The project is a “collective of high-level working journalists who actively share our skills, resources and connections across color, class and gender lines….We envision a world where the best ideas, regardless of where they come from, will have a chance to be heard and to shape society and the world.”
 
The fellowships, funded beginning last year by Ford’s Women’s Human Rights Initiative, is part of a broader, multi-year, multi-institution partnership. They were given this year to 21 men and women who were selected “based on exceptional knowledge and expertise, as well as on the impact they have had in the U.S. and globally.” Their work is in social justice, women’s rights, economic and racial justice, HIV/AIDS, gay rights and sexual reproductive health, among other areas.
 
Balakrishnan is faculty director at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership and a professor in women and gender studies at Rutgers University. She worked for the Foundation from 1992 to 1995 in the Asia Programs, and is the author of many books and articles on economic policy and human rights, and on gender issues.
 
Hessini is chair of the Global Fund for Women and has worked for more 20 years in global advocacy, grant-making and organizing activities on behalf of women’s human rights, including time spent in the Foundation’s Cairo office. She directs the community engagement work of Ipas, an organization that works with health-care systems and providers to increase their skills and capacity to deliver safe abortion services.
 
Brandee McHale has been appointed president of the Citi Foundation and Director of Corporate Citizenship for Citi. She will oversee the foundation’s work to “promote economic progress and improve the lives of people in low-income communities around the world.” In making the announcement, the Citi foundation said that last year it “enabled 1.1 million people in 85 countries to work toward specific economic empowerment goals.”
 
She also will be responsible for it’s “innovative Pathways to Progress initiative, which over three years aims to help 100,000 low-income young people gain the skills that lead to long-term employment.”
 
McHale first joined Citi in 1991, working for nearly two decades in a variety of business management and philanthropy-related roles. She left in 2004 to work at Ford to develop a portfolio of investments that supported the efforts of low-income households to achieve financial success, and established a business case for financial inclusion.
 
Mark Sidel discussed the evolution of community foundations as the guest speaker at the Asia-Pacific Centre for Social Investment and Philanthropy meeting at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia in March.
 
Sidel, the Doyle-Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, noted that community foundations were “one of the first models to enable philanthropy to reach beyond the very wealthy, to enable more middle-class people to participate in community philanthropy,” according to a report of his speech in a publication of ozphilanthropy, which reports on philanthropy in Australia.
 
While community foundations have grown significantly in the last 30 years, he said, “fueled by the development of donor-advised funds,” that very growth has hampered the foundations because much of their giving is limited by where and how the donors require their gifts be spent.
 
Sidel worked for the Ford Foundation in its Bangkok, Beijing, Hanoi and New Delhi offices from 1988 to 2000.
 
As a movement develops at private schools throughout the country encouraging white students and faculty to examine their own race and the effect their attitudes have had in their schools, the films of Andre Robert Lee are a significant part of the dialogue on what is increasingly being referred to as “white privilege”.
 
Lee, a former program assistant at the Foundation, is the producer of a documentary, “I’m Not Racist…Am I?”, that is being shown at schools in many areas of the country. The film follows 12 students in private and public schools in New York City for a full year as they attend workshops that explore racism and white privilege and begin to question their own attitudes.
 
“School administrators tell me: ‘We realize we have a lot more work to do on these issues,’” Lee says in an article in The New York Times about the movement. 
 
A previous film of his, “The Prep School Negro”, which examined his experience as one of the few African-American students enrolled in the 1980s at Germantown Friends, an elite Quaker school in Philadelphia, has been shown at hundreds of schools and, according to the article, “helped spur conversations about race and class that would not have been possible even 15 years ago.” 
 
The full article, “At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside”, by Kyle Spencer, appeared in the February 20 issue of The Times.
 
Barbara Klugman has co-authored an article in the journal of Reproductive Health Matters exploring the use of “strategic litigation” as a “powerful tool to advance rights as well as hold governments accountable and ensure compliance with human rights obligations.”
 
Klugman, who is an associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, worked with Women’s Link Worldwide (WLW), a human rights non-profit in Colombia that seeks to ensure gender equality throughout the world, to develop a test to determine when “an environment is conducive to social change through strategic litigation”. 
 
Four conditions are necessary, she writes: “an existing rights framework, an independent and knowledgeable judiciary, civil society organizations with the capacity to frame social problems as rights violations and to litigate, and a network able to support and leverage the opportunities presented by litigation.”
 
She describes, with her co-author, Monica Roa of WLW, how the strategy was used in two cases in Colombia to illustrate its effectiveness when “confronting a powerful public official who opposes reproductive rights.” The article is available online at www.rhm-elsevier.com
 
Klugman worked at the Foundation from 2003 to 2009 as senior program officer for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights.
 
Jael Silliman has written an article about the last remaining Jews in Calcutta that has appeared on the online site of Time. She describes the decline of what once was a thriving community of Bagdadi Jews in that city, now known as Kolkata, who had played a key role in the city’s “mercantile development, engaged in governance and civic affairs, built impressive synagogues, established schools, and constructed magnificent buildings. Though never more than 4,000…the community was influential and thoroughly integrated in the fabric of” the city.
 
She traces the decline, beginning with the “tumultuous years” of the 1940s, until there now are just 20 left, “many old and infirm”. She, with members of her family, is one of those 20, and is active in preserving what still is there. She is documenting the impact of the Jewish community through a Nehru Fulbright grant, and has started a digital archive.
 
Silliman spent six years at the Foundation as a program officer for Women’s Rights and Gender Justice and in the Reproductive and Sexual Rights program. She is the author of several books and articles and is an associate professor of women’s studies at the University of Iowa.

 

 

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