The LAFF Society

The Foundation’s painful decision to close the Hanoi and Moscow offices as part of its effort to adjust to the dramatic reduction in the value of its endowment has triggered expressions of sadness, regret and concern particularly from former field office staff members.  We post below  President Ubiñas’ announcement followed by a sample of the reactions we have received. You are encouraged to add your own thoughts, recognizing the painful choices currently confronting the Foundation.

From the Chronicle of Philanthropy

April 29, 2009

By Ian Wilhelm

After losing almost one-third of its assets during the last year, the Ford Foundation has announced it will close its offices in Russia and Vietnam.

“Given our obligation to our grantees worldwide, and the people they serve, we have been forced to make some very hard choices to bring about further savings,” Luis A. Ubiñas, the foundation’s president, wrote in an e-mail message he sent to Ford employees on Tuesday. “It is with great regret that I share the news that the foundation will be winding down its operations in Vietnam and Russia by the end of September.”

The move will eliminate 30 staff positions and save the organization at least $4-million in its fiscal 2010, which starts October 1, Alfred Ironside, the foundation’s director of communications, told The Chronicle.

He said Ford chose the two offices, both of which opened in 1996, because their closures would be “considered least disruptive to staff and operations.”

In his e-mail message, Mr. Ubiñas wrote that the foundation last year was able to reduce its operating expenses by $22-million thanks to cost-cutting efforts, but that amount was not enough to prevent drastic moves and layoffs.

Mr. Ubiñas, a former business consultant who joined Ford in 2008, said the staff members in the Hanoi office and Moscow office were informed of the decision in person by foundation officials Tuesday morning.

The foundation recently announced changes in its grant making,saying it would not alter the types of causes it supports but would try to spur collaboration and efficiency among its grantees. The decision to shut down the offices was unrelated to those changes.

As for its Russian and Vietnamese programs, the foundation is “enormously proud of the work” of the staff and grantees, said Mr. Ubiñas, and he praised them for helping to build stronger nonprofit groups and improved human rights and economic development in their respective regions.

He also said that Ford would continue to operate two signature programs in the regions: the International Fellowships Program, which provides scholarships for graduate study to people from developing countries, and a project to ease the health and environmental damage caused by Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.

Ford, the second wealthiest American foundation, will continue to have a global presence with 10 other overseas offices in Indonesia, South Africa, and elsewhere

Despite the closing of the foreign offices, Ford, which has its headquarters in New York, still needs to trim its budget, Mr. Ubiñas said.

“We are all affected, both personally and professionally, by the severity of this global recession,” he said. “At the foundation, our challenge is to make the decisions required of us to ensure that our grant budgets are as robust as possible in this time of need and that our costs are structured to meet our long-term needs.”

From Hispanics in Philanthropy

From a White House Press Release dated April 14, 2009

President Obama announced his intent to nominate Bonnie D. Jenkins, for Coordinator for Threat Reduction Programs (with the Rank of Ambassador), Department of State

Dr. Jenkins is the Program Officer for U.S. Foreign and Security policy at the Ford Foundation. Her grant making seeks to strengthen public engagement in US foreign and security policy debate and formulation in order to promote support for multilateralism, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and the rule of international law.  Prior to joining the Foundation, Jenkins served on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (”9-11 Commission”), as counsel. She was the lead Commission staff member on counterterrorism policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and on U.S. military plans to go after Al Qaeda prior to 9-11. She wrote part of the 9/11 report, which has since become a national bestseller. Jenkins also served as General Counsel to the U.S. Commission to assess the organization of the federal government to combat proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and as a consultant to the 2000 National Commission on Terrorism. She also worked at the RAND Corporation in their National Security Division.  She recently served as a Lieutenant Commander in the US Naval Reserves and completed a year of deployment at CENTCOM.  Jenkins has worked in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Policy Planning as a consultant of the Kosovo History Project. An expert on arms control and nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Jenkins also served for nine years as legal advisor to U.S. Ambassadors and delegations negotiating arms control and nonproliferation treaties during her time as a Legal Advisor in the Office of General Council at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. She began her years in government when appointed as a Presidential Management Fellow.  Jenkins is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the American Bar Association.  She received a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Virginia; an LL.M. in international and comparative law from the Georgetown University Law Center; an MPA from the State University of New York at Albany; a J.D. from Albany Law School; and a BA from Amherst College. She also attended The Hague Academy for International Law.

From the Chronicle of Philanthropy - April 9, 2009

Arcus Foundation (Kalamazoo Mich.): Appointed Carla Sutherland, a program officer for the education and sexuality program in East Africa at the Ford Foundation (New York) to be director of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights program.

From Morehead State University

Dr. A. D. Albright, the 10th president of Morehead State University, died Friday morning at his home in Wilmore.

The 96-year-old retired educator also served as president of Northern Kentucky University and as executive director of what is now the Council on Postsecondary Education, in addition to several senior-level administrative posts at the University of Kentucky.

“President Albright was a leader of strong integrity and high standards,” said MSU President Wayne D. Andrews. “His brief but effective leadership of this institution came at a critical time in our history. He was a towering figure in public higher education in Kentucky.”

Coming out of retirement at age 73, Albright served as MSU’s president from July 1, 1986, to June 30, 1987. The Virginia native was praised for his personal leadership at MSU in reversing an enrollment decline, strengthening and expanding academic programs and moving the institution into major gift fund raising.

Dr. Albright earned the Ph.D. degree from New York University, the M.S. degree from the University of Tennessee and the A.B. degree from Milligan College. A former Fulbright Lecturer to Belgium, he holds honorary degrees from MSU, Berea College, NKU, Eastern Kentucky University and Thomas More College.

 A former member of the Carnegie Foundation National Advisory Panel and chairman of the Commonwealth of Kentucky Committee of Presidents, he has been a consultant to the Algerian Ministry of Higher Education, the U.S. Department of Education and the Ford Foundation as well as to state agencies in South Carolina and Tennessee.

He has served on the boards of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the Southern Regional Education Board, the Kentucky Educational Television Authority and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

Dr. Albright has been married to the former Grace Carroll of Etowah, Tenn., since 1939.  His survivors also include two sons and four grandchildren. 

A memorial service will be scheduled later.

From the UCLA International Institute

For the last half-century the United States has undermined itself in Africa by failing to distinguish itself from Europe and the colonial legacy, says Haskell Sears Ward, one of the first to graduate from UCLA with an interdisciplinary master’s degree in African studies.

By Margaretta Soehendro
Staff Writer

The starting point for assessing U.S.-Africa relations in the post-colonial era is the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, when European powers carved up Africa “recklessly” and with little regard to historical and cultural affinities and ethnic boundaries, said Haskell Sears Ward, one of the first M.A. graduates from UCLA’s interdisciplinary African Studies program.

Ward has decades of experience in international affairs and today is a senior vice president of Seacom, a company that’s bringing high-speed Internet access to Southern and East Africa, Europe and South Asia. He talked about 50 years of U.S.-Africa relations at a lecture sponsored by the UCLA African Studies Center on April 2, 2009. The center was established 50 years ago in 1959, and Ward entered the new master’s program in 1965. Ward at the talk shared his experiences at UCLA learning from the late Professor C. Sylvester Whitaker, Jr., as well as former ASC Director Michael Lofchie and Professor Emeritus Richard Sklar.

Traveling with his wife, Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears of the Supreme Court of Georgia, the U.S. state, Ward remarked that she “has heard so much about UCLA that I wanted her to see where the center of my intellectual underpinning and understanding of Africa was derived.”

The establishment of UCLA’s African Studies program came two years after Ghana became the first African nation to achieve independence from colonial rule in 1957. The following year, President Eisenhower created the State Department’s Africa Bureau.

In discussing the relationship between the United States and Africa over 50 years, Ward said that after the wave of independence, the United States never assessed its interests bilaterally with African nations and instead allowed the legacy of the “Scramble for Africa” Berlin Conference to shape relations.

Even after the colonial period, that is, the United States did not change its approach of meeting African nations on terms set by the European powers. If Great Britain was antagonistic toward its former colony Ghana, for example, the United States would adopt the British posture, according to Ward.

“What was this great lost opportunity? It was our failure…to differentiate our policies and values from those of a still-resistant and unfriendly Europe toward Africa,” Ward said.

The greatest failure in U.S.-Africa relations, according to Ward, has been in the field of development assistance. Businesses, governments, and international and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) conditioned aid on an all-or-nothing acceptance of American and Western ways. They also imposed policies that would have never been instituted in the United States or Europe but were instated in Africa because they were to the donors’ advantage.

“Western advisers and planners, with a heavy dose of U.S. and U.S. foundation input, introduced centralized macro policies through devices such as five- and 10-year centralized macroeconomic development plans, which is important because we in the West had no centralized planning mechanisms of our own,” Ward said.

NGOs, though well-meaning, have also faltered because program priorities were decided far from Africa without local input, according to Ward, who had experience at the Ford Foundation before coming to UCLA and is familiar with the Rockefeller Foundation. Ward said coordinators decided the areas of support in the United States and took those decisions to Africa. If the locals wanted aid for something outside of those program priorities, they would face enormous obstacles, even in cases when a donor match could be identified.

As a result, Africans viewed the United States with disappointment and suspicion. As a non-colonial power, the United States was in great position to help shape a new relationship between Africa and the West. Africa looked to the United States to be an independent negotiator and found it lacking, Ward said.

“The prevailing sentiment which I have heard for most of the past 50 years is that a strong, charismatic African leader is antithetical to U.S. and African interests and must, therefore, be eliminated. Harsh words, but a prevailing thought and attitude in Africa,” he said.

Ward said there were two bright spots in U.S.-African relations over the half century: the Peace Corps and educational institutions. Ward went to Ethiopia as one of the early Peace Corps volunteers. Volunteers posted to Africa have increased U.S. knowledge of the continent, helped the United States’ reputation there, and gone on to policy-related and NGO work, he said.

Ward considers the 60s the golden age of African studies and said that, since then, universities have emerged as excellent centers of studies on the continent. International efforts have also made remarkable gains in the health sector.

For the future, Ward said the United States still must realize what its interests in Africa are.

“I believe now at this very moment in time that Africa is at the dawn of a great, new era.”

Africa is one of the most profitable places for businesses, and private companies are rushing to do business on the continent, according to Ward. While security and Al Qaeda will remain top concerns for U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, Ward said Obama’s challenge in Africa is to respond to problems while also creating structures that encourage Africa to take care of itself.

“If we can embrace these dual realities and respond creatively in a spirit of collaboration and mutual respect, the next 50 years of U.S.-Africa relations can build a new, prosperous future on the missed opportunities of the past,” Ward said.

WCPC Seminar April 13, The Current Economic Crises, inequity, and the inadequate concept of poverty

 Friday April 13

West Coast Poverty Center (WCPC) Seminar

by ALICE O’CONNOR

Professor of History

University of California, Santa Barbara

Friday, April 13th

Parrington Hall, Forum (Room 309)

3:00 - 4:30 p.m.

ABSTRACT:

The current economic crisis has brought renewed attention to longstanding problems of economic need and insecurity in the United States, even as it underscores the inadequacy of conventional concepts of poverty as frameworks for understanding and dealing with the deepening inequities characteristic of late 20th- and early 21st-century capitalism. So argues historian Alice O’Connor in the lecture she will deliver at the West Coast Poverty Center on April 13th.  Recognizing that we are approaching what could be a defining reform moment on par with the New Deal and Great Society, her talk will explore what contemporary scholars and activists can learn from their Progressive-era counterparts, in the hopes of framing the kind of public conversation that the political sphere has proved unable, or unwilling, to sustain:  One that begins with a deeper set of questions about what a just economy looks like; one that takes issues of economic inequality and reform, rather than poverty and social uplift, as its central focus; one that challenges and transcends rather than tries to remain within the confines of existing political possibility; and one that draws from the past not in an effort to replicate it but to inform a far more broad-gauged discussion of what a more just economic future would look like and the kinds of policies and politics needed to achieve it.

BIOGRAPHY:  Alice O’Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches and writes about poverty and wealth, social and urban policy, and inequality in the U.S.  She is the author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (2001); and, most recently, Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned
Rightside Up (2007). She is also a co-editor (with Chris Tilly and
Lawrence Bobo) of Urban Inequality: Evidence from Four Cities, and co-editor (with Gwendolyn Mink) of Poverty and Social Welfare in the United States: An Encyclopedia, among other publications. Before joining the UCSB faculty, she was a program officer at the Ford Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.  Her current research focuses on the changing politics and cultural meaning of wealth in the post World War II United States, and the origins of the second Gilded Age.

West Coast Poverty Center (WCPC)
wcpc@u.washington.edu
206-616-2858 / 221-3781
wcpc.washington.edu
University of Washington Social Work Building #101 & 102
Seattle WA 98105

From CARIBBEAN BUSINESS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2008

 BY GUIOMAR GARCÍA, ED.D. & JANICE PETROVICH, ED.D.

 “God” is the answer that businessman Jaime Martí provides to the question: “What motivates you to be a philanthropist?”

 Martí is chairman of Reliable Financial Services, a subsidiary of Wells Fargo & Co. He credits his Christian values as the source of the impulse to “distribute goods, resources and talent to benefit all of society.”

 Martí established his own foundation, Fundación Jaime Martí Inc., and also created Fundación Reliable as a joint venture between the administration and the staff of the corporation. The donations from these foundations help people overcome their disadvantages so they can “do for themselves.” Martí seeks to provide others with the opportunities from which he benefi ted, though he is quick to clarify that his intent is for beneficiaries to take on the responsibility of developing themselves. “The greatest harm one can do to human beings is to do for them what they can do for themselves,” Martí says.

 Lourdes Miranda says she doesn’t know where her charitable impulse comes from, but she recalls always feeling a need to serve others. “I have been blessed with opportunities and I have the responsibility of passing on some of my blessings to help the larger society,” she says.

 Miranda notes she had many influences in her life that helped shape her philanthropic strategies, including the schools she attended, religious teachings and particular individuals. However, she remembers her philanthropic drive has been there since she was a little girl. After retiring from a successful career during which she established her own company in the Washington, D.C. area, Miranda returned to Puerto Rico and, in 1993, created the foundation that bears her name. The Miranda Foundation supports nonprofit organizations that help strengthen civil society in Puerto Rico.

 A prominent Puerto Rican businessman, founder of a leading integrated construction services company in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, he also has dedicated much of his private wealth to philanthropy, but prefers to remain anonymous. “What motivates me is a desire to help others… Business is tough and toughens people; you spend a lot of time fighting to get things done. If by nature you are generous, you look for a way to help, always respecting others, getting personally involved, understanding their situation.” He, too, expressed the same desire to “give back” and identified “spiritual” reasons and “Christian values” as a source of his desire to help others.  He and his wife, for many years, have supported the education of promising young students with limited financial resources, providing them full scholarships to pursue studies in music institutions. Today, the couple often has the opportunity to attend concerts where they listen with joy to those they once supported.

People of all cultures demonstrate the desire to give and also to alleviate human suffering. This was evident in the huge global outpouring of help for victims of the tsunami in 2004.  Roberto Clemente, who many consider Puerto Rico’s best baseball player of all time, died in a plane crash in 1972 on his way to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. More recently, contributions by Puerto Ricans to the victims of the four back-to-back hurricanes in Haiti generated so many donations of clothing, medicines and household goods that numerous shipping containers were filled with these donated goods and sent to the neighboring country. The organizations that coordinate relief efforts confi rm Puerto Ricans are unfailingly generous.

 Some who make donations may do so for reasons other than altruism, including social recognition, the interest in developing new networks and connections with powerful people or the desire to obtain tax benefits. However, people probably give for a combination of reasons, some selflessly and others perhaps more self-serving.

 In Puerto Rico, as in the mainland U.S., the majority of donations go to religious institutions. This is perhaps not surprising given the strong directives by many religious traditions for their faithful to consistently support their church. Recent survey data on nonprofit organizations in Puerto Rico indicate 30% of donors reported contributing to churches, according to Estudios Técnicos, a local economic consultancy firm.

 After churches, the largest recipients of contributions appear to be large, well-established charities that are chapters of national and international organizations. People who give to these charities often do so because they trust these institutions will use their donations wisely and effectively.

 All the major religions of the world encourage philanthropy, the love of humankind. It isn’t surprising then to find many people who make charitable contributions also worship regularly. However, religious motivation is only one of the many reasons for giving.

 Like Miranda and Martí, many philanthropists indicate they have been fortunate and feel a responsibility to share their good fortune. Lilly Zeller, longtime philanthropist and host of the weekly radio program “Hablando de Philanthropy” (Talking about Philanthropy) also believes in enriching the lives of others as well as her own. “It is away of advocating for specific quality-of-life issues. I’m passionate about the Third Sector, while others may be more passionate about politics. It’s a way of giving back to communities.” Zeller also talks about being “grateful for the many blessings” in her life, and explains: “philanthropy allows me to promote advocacy around specific challenging areas such as education, health and social services…It is a social investment that yields a better world.” •

 Organizations that respondents identified as receiving their donations during the past 12 months (includes the 10-most frequently identified)

 Churches 30.6%

Red Cross 13.3%

SER de Puerto Rico 13.3%

Those that work with children 9.2%

American Cancer Society, P.R. Chapter 5.1%

Salvation Army 4.1%

Muscular Dystrophy Association 3.1%

World Vision 3.1%

Puerto Rican Lung Association 2.0%

Children International 2.0%

Crea 2.0%

Fondos Unidos 2.0%

 Source: Estudios Técnicos, “Estudios de las Necesidades Sociales en

Puerto Rico, 2007” (Study on Puerto Rico’s Social Needs, 2007)

Why do people give? In his book “Strategic Giving,” Peter Frumkin describes two ways to understand the reasons why people give; one has to do with a private need to express our values, get outside our own personal needs and contribute to what we care about most. Another reason to donate is the public function of philanthropy, in which a person uses private funds as a way to have an impact on our society by effecting change, innovation, redistribution or pluralism.

Editor’s note: This article is part of a monthly series, researched and prepared by the Flamboyán Foundation and brought to you by CARIBBEAN BUSINESS in an effort to increase understanding and involvement in philanthropy. We welcome your comments and suggestions for future topics at info@fl amboyanfoundation. org and editor@caribbeanbusinesspr.com.