THE NEW YORK TIMES

June 21, 2009

By STEPHANIE STROM

Racked by steep declines in the value of their assets, the nation’s foundations are paring their staffs in large numbers.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was the latest to announce a voluntary severance plan, offered this month to 42 percent of its 250 employees. In May, the Ford Foundationoffered a similar plan to 140 of its 550 staff members.

“We need to be an organization whose grant making and administrative costs are those of an institution with $7 billion in assets, rather than one with the $10 billion in assets we had a year ago,” said David J. Morse, vice president for communications at Robert Wood Johnson, pointing out that this is the first time the foundation has had to downsize.

Bradford K. Smith, president of the Foundation Center, a research organization, said foundations were resorting to job cuts after having adopted other cost-saving measures, like hiring freezes and reductions in benefits and travel budgets.

“Foundations live and die on the strength of their assets,” Mr. Smith said. “With assets down, in some cases dramatically, the only way to restore balance between operating expenses and the amount of money going out the door in grants is by moving dollars out of management and into grants.”

The California Endowment cut 44 jobs in December through buyouts and layoffs, partly as a result of a decline in assets and partly because of a change in its strategy. The W. K. Kellogg Foundation has cut more than a dozen jobs by closing offices in Brazil, South Africa and Mississippi.

Mr. Smith said, “I think we’re just at the beginning of this process,” adding, however, that only about 4,000 of the nation’s more than 90,000 foundations had employees other than the founder or family members.

To maintain a stable level of grants, most large foundations use a rolling three-year average of their asset value to calculate how much they will give away each year. Thus, grants this year are expected to dip only slightly.

Next year, however, the Foundation Center and other analysts expect foundation giving to dive, and foundations are hoping that reducing staff now will help offset the impact of that decline.

Robert Wood Johnson, for example, has long worked on health care reform, and now that the issue is taking center stage, the foundation does not want its reduced wealth to affect its role in the debate.

It plans to make $450 million in grants this year and would like to make the same amount next year. “To the extent we can, we want to have the same impact we had when our assets were more robust,” Mr. Morse said.

The foundation’s severance offer went to employees who have a combination of age and years of service adding up to at least 70.

In May, the Ford Foundation offered its severance package to employees working in areas where it had the “most excess capacity,” said Marta L. Tellado, Ford’s vice president for communications.

Ford earlier sliced $22 million from its budget. When the foundation announced a restructuring in April, Luis A. Ubiñas, its president, said the move would not involve staff cuts, but then more money was needed. Officials decided to close offices in Vietnam and Russia, eliminating $5 million in expenses, but wanted to wring another $14 million out of the foundation’s costs.

“We went back and looked at everything again before we turned to staff adjustments,” Ms. Tellado said. “That was absolutely the last thing we could look at.”

Nonetheless, the severance plan has been controversial. Several employees complained that Mr. Ubiñas had rejected a proposal that management take a pay cut instead.

“Many of the people who got this package are support staff — women, single parents, African-Americans,” said one employee who was offered a severance package but was unsure about taking it and thus requested anonymity. “These people have limited recourse because it’s been made fairly clear that if this isn’t accepted, the next offer, if there is one, will be much worse.”

Others questioned why so few managers had been offered the package, saying that only 3 percent of those receiving it were in the upper tiers of foundation employees. “They’re the ones who make the big salaries at this place,” said another employee who was considering whether to take the severance package.

Ms. Tellado emphasized that the package was voluntary and said no decision had been made about what number of positions was necessary to achieve the additional $14 million in savings.

Another spokesman said 29 percent of the staff members receiving the severance offer were African-American. Seven percent of the offers went to managers, Ms. Tellado said, adding that the discrepancy between that number and the figure offered by the critics could have come from different definitions of who is a manager.

“We have an extraordinarily diverse work force, with a higher proportion of females and African-Americans in administrative positions,” she said. “After these buyouts, the foundation will be just as diverse as it was before.”

She and Mr. Morse of Robert Wood Johnson warned that more staff cuts were possible.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” Mr. Morse said.

From The New York Times

By WILLIAM GRIMES

By Gary Sick

JUNE 19, 2009

Khamenei: The Speech

Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Khamene`i, gave everyone a piece of his mind in his Friday speech.  Here are my reactions:

• First, and perhaps more important than the words themselves, was the fact that Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani did not attend. This is extraordinary. Khamene’i and Rafsanjani were fellow revolutionaries in 1978-79. They have been associates – sometimes close colleagues – for more than 50 years. Many believe that Rafsanjani was instrumental in getting Khamene’i his position as Leader. Rafsanjani today heads the Assembly of Experts, which is responsible for monitoring the performance of the Leader, among other things.  This was possibly the single most fateful speech by Khamene’i in his 20 years as Leader of the Islamic Republic. How could Rafsanjani not attend?  Did he simply boycott the event? Was he under house arrest? It probably didn’t help that several of Rafsanjani’s children were arrested in the previous 24 hours. We have never had such a graphic demonstration of political differences within Iran’s ruling elite.
• Another non-attendee, presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, whom I regard as an almost accidental leader, now faces some of the most fateful decisions in at least the past twenty years of the Iranian revolution. He decided to run for president as a relatively unknown and uninspiring candidate who could offer solutions to some of Iran’s more pressing problems, especially on the economic side. His greatest attribute was the fact that he was “anybody but Ahmadinejad.” But his appearances with his charismatic wife, often holding hands, and the invention of the “green wave” struck a chord in the Iranian body politic. Then the extraordinary revulsion at the regime’s electoral numbers left a leadership void. He stepped in, rather tentatively at first, and filled that role. Two days ago he told the crowd that he was “willing to make sacrifices.” He realizes that there is zero tolerance by Iran’s rulers for anyone suspected of leading an opposition movement. His top supporters and associates have already been jailed, and he could face the same fate – or worse.
• Khamene`i ‘s words were stark and simple. To paraphrase: the election is over, I fully support the person (Ahmadinejad) who won, it was fair, Iranians all trust their Islamic leaders, there will be no annulment, get over it and get off the streets or there will be harsh consequences, and besides it is all the work of outside agitators, especially the United States and Britain.
• Tonight the streets of Tehran rang out with cries of allahu akbar and “death to the dictator,” suggesting that opposition has not vanished. A major demonstration has been announced by Mousavi for Saturday. If it proceeds and is substantial in numbers, it will be the first open flaunting of opposition to the Leader, with the support of a number of key regime leaders, in more than twenty years.

Iran has always had the capacity to surprise. There are frantic decisions being made right now in the top leadership of the Revolutionary Guards, in the Leader’s office, in Mousavi’s team, and in kitchens and living rooms across the country as Iranians decide what they are going to do next. They don’t know how this will work out, and neither do we.

We do know that what they decide will be very important to the future of Iran, to Middle East politics, and to American policy. President Obama today went as far as he could prudently go by declaring:

I’ve said this throughout the week, I want to repeat it, that we stand with those who would look to peaceful resolution of conflict and we believe that the voices of people have to be heard, that that’s a universal value that the American people stand for and this administration stands for.  And I’m very concerned, based on some of the tenor and tone of the statements that have been made, that the government of Iran recognize that the world is watching.  And how they approach and deal with people who are — through peaceful means — trying to be heard will I think send a pretty clear signal to the international community about what Iran is and is not… . this is not an issue of the United States or the West versus Iran; this is an issue of the Iranian people.

But what he didn’t say was that it directly affects his policy of engagement. As long as the crisis persists, there is no chance that he can initiate meaningful negotiations with Iran.

He is also under immense and growing pressure – largely from people who deeply opposed the concept of engagement from the start – to take sides. And the pressure will grow, especially if there is a bloodletting by the regime in Iran. Obama’s statement today strikes me as typically precise and about as far as he can go without sliding into partisanship that will inevitably lead to escalating confrontation.

Despite the siren calls to give full vent to American outrage, short of widespread carnage he should recognize that such statements will not assist the beleaguered opposition in Iran. On the contrary, it will increase their vulnerability, raise false hopes of U.S. physical intervention, and will provide an excuse for the regime to carry out the kind of brutal repression that they are threatening, all in the name of fighting imperialism.

Shouts of outrage are fine by folks like me on the web, but the U.S. government should never forget that its primary task is to do no harm. It may be hard to hold your tongue, but then nobody ever said foreign policy was easy.

From Roll Call

May 18, 2009
By Lisa Mensah
Special to Roll Call

---

As we begin to take stock of the damage caused by the financial crisis, one thing is clear: The American workers’ sense of financial security has been dealt a devastating blow.For many workers, job loss has led to lost benefits, foreclosed properties and an inability to provide for their families. For many more, modest retirement nest eggs, accumulated over years of saving and investing, have disappeared almost overnight, leaving their prospects for a secure retirement dim. No matter where you look, it is hard to not see the drastic toll the past 18 months have taken on the financial security of the American family.

Yet the current economic downturn has also exposed an inconvenient truth about Americans’ financial security — one that has been lurking in the shadows for years.

Financial Insecurity: A Chronic Condition

The financial security of many Americans was living on borrowed time — and borrowed money. For decades, the United States has not been a nation of savers. Although the recent onset of financial insecurity might seem sudden, it is not surprising.

The root of the problem is an American system for saving and investing that poorly serves many American workers. Disproportionate tax incentives for those in higher income brackets benefit individuals who would save even without the government’s helping hand. Moreover, the existing savings system is a confusing patchwork of savings plans, far too complex for easy, universal use.

Research has documented a “wealth gap” that points to an extremely uneven distribution of assets in America today, with the majority of wealth being held in the top income quartile of the population. A closer look at the data also reveals an “investment gap” between lower- and higher- income savers, which adversely affects both the long-term financial security and financial opportunity of lower-income savers. Shockingly, it is estimated that one in four Americans do not even have a simple checking account, let alone a retirement or savings account.

More and more working families have been left behind, without the financial tools or know-how to save and build the wealth that will increase their financial security.

Savings for America and the American Worker

In my 13 years at the Ford Foundation, I was privileged to support strategies that were able to move forward people and places that were economically struggling. I came to see the power of strategies that helped individuals step up the economic ladder to a higher rung of prosperity and opportunity. I saw the power of helping people save money, with these savings doubled or tripled with matching money, so that they could afford a down payment on a first home, pay for college-level training, purchase vital business assets or secure their first retirement account. These assets offered a new layer of financial security to wage income. These assets were a true step up to a better paying job, to more earnings from a business or to a future way to finance long-term needs.

Exploring these links between individual savings, matching incentives and simplified financial tools has been the mission of the Aspen Initiative on Financial Security for the past six years. And for good reason.

Saving is key for the long-term economic health of the American worker. On the individual level, it is the accumulation of savings and assets that fosters household financial stability, creates economic mobility and provides the ladders of opportunity for individuals to climb into and remain a part of the middle class. Research has shown that families with greater assets tend to own homes in better neighborhoods for longer periods of time, affording children better and more consistent educational opportunities and resources. Higher levels of assets have also been shown to promote self- confidence, self-sufficiency and civic engagement.

In macroeconomic terms, without saving, there is no domestic money for domestic businesses to borrow and invest, to increase capital, and at the end of the day to increase productivity — all of which, in turn, lead to more job opportunities, higher wages and higher standards of living.

Current market conditions run the risk of driving savers out of the equity markets for years. Assuring consumer confidence in investing again, structuring a universal, simple system of saving that is more inclusive, secure and fair, and creating the proper incentives to elicit better saving behavior has never been more important, both for individuals and the economic health of our country.

Moving Forward

It is now time to reinvent our savings system. We need a renewed focus on where the money goes and how the money grows. We at Aspen IFS believe that a new system of saving is needed that delivers on five guiding objectives: 1) Lifelong; 2) Universal; 3) Simple; 4) Incentivized; and 5) Widely Marketed. Fundamental reform will solve the root causes of our financial insecurity by providing us with easy, robust, safe financial savings plans that build financial security beginning at birth.

If we do not address the American work force’s financial insecurity, the future economic health of the United States itself is in jeopardy.

Lisa Mensah is executive director of the Aspen Institute Initiative on Financial Security.

From Foreign Policy.com By Raymond C. Offenheiser Page 1 of 1

Posted January 2009

The incoming U.S. president has made some impressive appointments, but he needs to start backing his words about fighting poverty and disease around the world with deeds. With the United States facing immense global challenges, President-elect Barack Obama has named foreign policy advisors that will bring deep experience, intellectual heft, and fresh thinking to the task of restoring America’s global reputation and leadership. This group will be in the spotlight this week when the confirmation process begins for Secretary of State-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. Ambassador-designate Susan Rice. Unfortunately, Obama’s foreign policy A-team is missing a couple of pivotal players. Despite his public commitments to elevate and strengthen U.S. global development efforts – those that alleviate poverty, fight disease, and create opportunity in developing nations while bolstering our security and prosperity at home – as a critical component of his foreign policy, he has yet to name even one senior official to be put in charge of bringing these critical changes to life. These “players to be named later” could make the difference between success and failure in the Obama administration’s ability to usher in a new era of U.S. foreign policy. What is at stake? For one, America’s ability to address this country’s biggest foreign policy challenges. As Defense Secretary Gates and other leaders have highlighted over and over again, sustainable success in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, and other sensitive places will depend on how well the new team integrates global development into its efforts. There are plenty of positive examples from America’s past work supporting global development – including the Green Revolution in agriculture and HIV/AIDS treatment programs in Africa – that show how successful we can be at increasing stability and restoring hope for those who need it most. Nobody understands this more acutely than Senator Clinton, who can use her confirmation hearing today to put development back on the front burner. Of all of Obama’s top aides, she is perhaps the most credible spokesperson on this topic, having built a legacy as a champion of global development. As first lady, she co-founded the Vital Voices Democracy Initiative, which later became a prominent non-profit organization helping advance women’s economic, political and social status around the globe, and she was a staunch defender of the important work of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). As senator, she championed the Education for All Act, a legislative proposal to vastly increase U.S. support for reaching the Millennium Development Goal of getting all children into school by 2015. During her 2008 presidential bid, she (and President-elect Obama) made specific commitments to increase resources for, and enhance the effectiveness of, U.S. global development efforts. There has never been a more important moment for these words to become actions, and Obama and Clinton must move swiftly to bring about fundamental change. First, the president-elect should quickly name one of the missing players on his foreign policy team - the administrator of USAID. To be successful, this person must have the ear of the president, experience working with Congress, and an understanding of what effective global development efforts look like on the ground in developing countries. Second, Obama must work with national security advisor James L. Jones to give the responsibility for coordinating development policy across the U.S. government to a deputy national security advisor or a senior director at the National Security Council. A critical early task for this person will be to lead an administration-wide effort to develop America’s first-ever National Strategy for Global Development, aligning it with the president-elect’s overall foreign policy vision by detailing how U.S. global development efforts, balanced with diplomacy and defense efforts, help achieve U.S. foreign policy goals. Once these key players are in place, Obama must forge a “Grand Bargain” with Congress to make sure that U.S. global development efforts are: 1) adequately funded; 2) well staffed and professionally managed; and 3) transparently evaluated according to specific goals and benchmarks. To codify this “Grand Bargain,” the new administration and Congress should work together to develop and pass a 21st century Foreign Assistance Act. The current version was originally written in 1961 to address Cold War concerns and was last updated more than 20 years ago. Although President-elect Obama bears the primary responsibility for realigning U.S. foreign policy to better balance development with diplomacy and defense, change will not be possible without leadership from those foreign policy officials who are already in his inner circle, particularly Senator Clinton. If she so chooses, she could be the most influential and well-informed advocate for this realignment. Today’s hearing will provide her with a powerful opportunity to start making the case for change – and open a new chapter in both U.S. foreign policy and her legacy of support for global development. Raymond C. Offenheiser is president of Oxfam America, an international relief and development agency, and a member of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network.

Raymond C. Offenheiser’s blog

Submitted by Ray Offenheiser

From the Boston Globe

by James F. Smith

President George W. Bush scored major advances in his administration’s worldwide campaign against AIDS. In fact, some critics say he was so successful that other dire needs in poor countries were squeezed out by the relentess American focus on AIDS.

Balancing the still-critical AIDS crisis against the many other Third World problems is just one of the dilemmas confronting President Obama as he redefines the American role in Third World health and development.

The Obama administration believes it can leverage Bush’s successes into an assault against a much broader array of diseases that afflict poor countries.

Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew, who is leading a State Department review of development strategy, says the same health delivery systems that the United States has built to treat more than 3 million HIV/AIDS patients should also be used to treat mothers and children with common, but deadly, ailments.

“It’s not glamorous to treat diarrheal diseases in small children, but we know it saves a lot of lives,” he said. “If you’ve got somebody who’s coming into a facility that treats mothers with antiretroviral drugs, you’ve already got the capacity to treat their children. . . . If the capacity is there, it ought to be relatively easy to expand the scope of services provided.”

Bush concentrated US global health spending on AIDS and two other diseases, tuberculosis and malaria. He set up agencies to drive those programs, and poured in funding - $18.8 billion over five years - concentrated in 15 countries where AIDS was especially devastating, mainly in Africa.

Bush’s critics complain that he tied more US development aid to national security policy than ever before. In their view, he pushed too much foreign aid money toward Iraq and Afghanistan for short-term geopolitical goals, at the expense of poverty relief and development in other countries that will pay off in better security down the road.

As a candidate, Obama pledged to double US foreign aid and to elevate development to the same level as diplomacy and defense. That raised hopes in the development community of major changes in direction, including a reduced role for the Pentagon.

President Obama last month announced a global health initiative that will increase funding next year by $460 million, to $8.6 billion. He pledged a total of $63 billion over six years, vowing to keep up the AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria campaigns, “while increasing and enhancing our efforts to combat diseases that claim the lives of 26,000 children each day.”

Those amounts would still fall well short of the Institute of Medicine’s recommendation last month of an increase to $15 billion a year for global health aid alone.

The budget is just one source of the frustration among those agitating for Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to take ambitious steps.

“There’s a lot of confusion in Washington at this point,” said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Boston-based Oxfam America. “We see Secretary Clinton making speeches, and very compelling speeches, about the importance of effective development, of building civilian capacity and supporting rural development in many regions of the world, and the importance of poverty alleviation. The problem is we just haven’t seen that translated into specific commitments.”

It’s amid this high-stakes debate that Dr. Paul Farmer, the Third World health pioneer from Harvard Medical School and cofounder of Boston-based Partners in Health, is being considered for a top administration position. No one is talking publicly, but the speculation is that Farmer may be tapped either to lead the US Agency for International Development or to take a White House role directing all American global aid.

Just about everyone agrees on the need to revitalize USAID, which was created in 1961 as part of President John F. Kennedy’s first-year surge in global development programs.

Laurie Garrett, a global health specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, says USAID has gone from an organization that had more than 4,000 agronomists, hydrologists, and other experts on staff in 1980 to just over half that size. It now relies heavily on contractors to deliver services abroad.

As USAID services were privatized and outsourced, more development programs were shifted to other departments, notably the Pentagon. The security component of foreign aid has risen steadily since Sept. 11, 2001, with the Pentagon now channeling about 22 percent of all US foreign aid - up from 3.54 percent in 1998, Garrett noted in a study published by the council in January.

In 2006, USAID was effectively folded into the State Department. As Offenheiser put it, the Bush administration knocked down the wall between diplomacy and development.

Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, says the US foreign aid program is awash in over 150 policy directives and goals. “When you prioritize everything, nothing is a priority,” Kerry said in a speech last month at the Brookings Institution.

“Right now, while 60 percent of our foreign aid goes to 10 countries for political/military, counternarcotics, and HIV/AIDS, the other 40 percent is spread thin in 140-plus countries,” Kerry said. “We need a more balanced approach, and a comprehensive development strategy to determine which agency is in charge, what we hope to achieve, and how best to accomplish our goals.”

An audit done for Republican Senator Richard Lugar found that in some countries where the president’s AIDS relief program is very active, doctors and nurses are being drawn into HIV/AIDS care “at the expense of primary and maternal health, [leading to] the unintended consequence of weakening a country’s overall health infrastructure.”

Nonprofit groups say the Bush administration’s priorities left other needs unattended.

“Africa is covered with HIV/AIDS money, but they’re facing a global food crisis and we don’t have a strategy for it,” Offenheiser said. Kenya is facing a major governance crisis, but most US development assistance there goes to AIDS, he noted. In Rwanda, where less than 3 percent of the population is HIV-positive, two-thirds of US assistance there is for AIDS, Garrett noted in her study.

Lew said the administration recognizes that the scattered US foreign assistance programs need better coordination and longer-term planning. Lew argues that the ambassador in each country should take on more authority directing all US aid programs.

“We’re taking the view that even with the current structure, and assuming you didn’t change any of the laws, there’s an enormous coordination of programs that ought to be happening at country level, where we really ought to see our ambassadors as true chiefs of mission, not just in title, but as CEOs who have the ability to look across all the programs and manage more effectively,” Lew said.

However, Maurice Middleberg, a policy analyst at the influential Global Health Council in Washington, argues for an arm’s-length relationship between the State Department and global development.

He notes that diplomacy is often crisis-driven and based on geopolitical interests. Those aren’t always the same as the need for social and economic development in a country or region.

“There needs to be a loud and clear voice for development,” Middleberg said. “I’m not sure the ambassador is the right person.”

But most agree that action is needed to make effective use of US money.

Garrett wrote in her report: “US programs continue to operate through legislated stovepipes, putting resources and cash into efforts, regardless of - and often in opposition to - the primary needs on the ground in recipient countries. . . . All too often, foreign assistance increases dependency, and aims at the wrong targets.”

From Campaign for America’s Future

By Alan Jenkins
June 15, 2009 - 10:14pm ET

I learned last week that my friend and law school classmate Luke Cole had died in a car accident while vacationing with his wife in Uganda. Luke was an incredible guy with an infectious positive energy about him and the belief that he could change the world for the better. In a number of big and small ways, he did.

Luke became an environmental justice lawyer before most of us in the public interest legal field even knew what environmental justice was. He didn’t invent the concept, but he realized early on that communities of color—from American Indian reservations in the West to hog farming communities in the South to inner-city neighborhoods in the Northeast—were struggling with common problems of multiple environmental hazards and inadequate environmental protection. He realized, too, what government and private research would eventually confirm: that the racial character of these communities was the greatest predictor of the level of environmental degradation they would suffer. Greater than class. Greater than region of the country.

At a time when only neighborhood organizers and community groups were decrying this problem, Luke realized that lawyers could have a respectful, supportive role to play in addressing this deadly situation across the country.

Over the course of his 20-year career, Luke represented African-American and Latino residents of Camden, NJ, fighting the concentration of abandoned factories, a chemical plant, waste-treatment plants, automotive shops and a petroleum coke transfer station in their community. He represented the mostly-Latino residents of Kettleman City, CA in their campaign to stop Chemical Waste Management Inc. from building a toxic-waste incinerator. He defended the Timbisha Shoshone tribe in its effort to halt open-pit gold mining with cyanide on ancestral land in Death Valley. And he assisted the residents of Kivalina, an Inuit village in northwest Alaska, in a claim that a company’s zinc and lead mine had polluted the village water supply.

He had a huge impact, not only through his cases, but through his tireless and eloquent argument that equal access to a clean environment is a fundamental human right.
At the same time, Luke was funny. He was silly. He was the only guy in our law school class who used words like “stoked” and “gnarly” with no irony. He was a political cartoonist and he could be a bit cartoonish himself.

I last saw Luke in January at an inauguration party. He was beaming, joking, marveling along with the rest of us that our law schoolmate, Barack Obama, was now president. But he was quick to point out that we’d all have to stay vigilant. As always, his optimism was tempered by realism and a distrust of the powerful, whoever they may be.

From Alliance magazine   http://www.alliancemagazine.org

When Bill Carmichael joined the Ford Foundation in 1968, Ford was an active supporter of several aspects of human rights work and civil society development in the US, but outside the US things were different. It was Carmichael who pioneered these areas of work in developing countries. How did it all begin, Caroline Hartnell asked him. In the mid-1950s, when development primarily meant economic development, Ford was working closely with governments, helping them to build their capacity. When and why did the change to supporting human rights work and fostering civil society occur?

In the 1950s and early 1960s, says Bill Carmichael, only a handful of American foundations were substantially engaged in development assistance in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Rockefeller Foundation was certainly a pioneer, with major initiatives in agriculture (which played a key role in producing the ‘Green Revolution’), health and higher education. The Carnegie Corporation funded research on development issues (including Walter Rostow’s influential book on The Stages of Economic Growth[1]), and a handful of other smaller foundations, including Rockefeller Brothers Fund, were making grants in a few developing countries. When Carmichael joined the Ford staff in 1968, development assistance, he explains, was conceptualized primarily in economic terms, and ‘the name of the game was to facilitate both public and private sector investment as levers for accelerating economic growth’.

For development assistance providers, he says, ‘an important corollary of this heavy focus on getting public sector investment right was working with national governments of a wide variety of political stripes’. In Ford’s early work in Asia, this meant major engagements in building professional capacities and promoting policy-oriented research in planning ministries in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and several other countries, often with Ford-hired ‘project specialists’ occupying ministry posts. Ford staff did not get involved in assessing the political characteristics of their ‘host governments’, although in some instances, including Burma and Pakistan, the Foundation’s activities were terminated because of insufficient progress in meeting their goals.

Working in military-ruled Brazil

In 1968, when Bill Carmichael became Ford’s Representative in military-ruled Brazil, the Foundation was similarly engaged with the research arm of the planning ministry, as it was in Chile, Colombia, Venezuela and other Latin American countries. It was also supporting graduate training and research programmes in economics and business and public administration in several Brazilian universities. Ford was also engaged in a ‘law and development’ initiative that was heavily focused on facilitating domestic and foreign private investment as key engines for economic growth, rather than on the ‘rule of law’ and the role of the courts in promoting human rights and citizens’ roles in political decision-making.

Shortly after he took up his post in Brazil, the military government of the time took what he calls ‘a sharp turn to the right’, most dramatically on 1 April 1969, when it forcibly ‘retired’ scores of Brazil’s most distinguished scholars from their posts in federal universities. Some had to flee the country, he recalls. The next day a delegation of three professors from the Federal University of São Paulo, including Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had been removed from his university post, came to Ford’s office to enquire whether the Foundation could help them set up an independent research organization to explore policy issues and examine options for the eventual restoration of democratic rule in Brazil.

Carmichael responded encouragingly and requested the approval of the Foundation’s New York office for a grant. ‘Much to my dismay,’ he remembers, ‘the request was initially turned down on the grounds that it could evoke a hostile response from Brazilian authorities and perhaps even result in the Foundation being requested to leave the country.’ But Carmichael persisted, and at the next officers’ meeting the grant was approved. In due course the new ‘think-tank’, the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Policy (CEBRAP), was established. CEBRAP, he notes, continues its work some 40 years later and is widely regarded as having made important contributions to Brazil’s redemocratization, while Cardoso went on to serve for two terms (1995-2003) as president of Brazil.

Why was the grant approved the second time around? First, Carmichael thinks that he was able to argue convincingly that he had done enough checking with people in or near government to be reasonably confident that the grant would not fatally compromise Ford’s ability to continue its work in Brazil. Second, he believes that there was ‘growing sentiment in the Foundation’s senior leadership in New York that we ought to be concerned about the nature of the governments in countries in which we were heavily engaged’. But the Brazilian Government was clearly not entirely happy. Some months later, he recalls, he was asked to meet with a rather embarrassed senior staff member of the US Consulate in Rio de Janeiro, ‘who reported that Brazilian Government officials, while expressing their appreciation for the Foundation’s work in economics and agriculture, had expressed concern over our support for research in sociology (which they appeared to conflate with “socialism”) and similar fields.’

A gradual change of emphasis

In the early 1970s, under Carmichael’s leadership from the Foundation’s New York Office, Ford’s Latin American programme wound down its direct support for work in government agencies. As democratically elected governments were succeeded by harshly authoritarian regimes in many parts of the region, it funded an increasing array of ‘think-tanks’ and other civil society organizations. In most countries the shift was gradual: ‘We tested the waters, but we became increasingly sure that, even under severely rights-abusing regimes, we could support activities that could perhaps hasten the return of democratic government, or in any event produce important dividends upon the return of democratic rule.’

In Chile, in the wake of the military coup of 11 September 1973, Carmichael notes, the change in approach was more abrupt. Funding was quickly made available for the creation of several new think-tanks for policy-oriented researchers who found it impossible to continue their work in government-funded universities. As evidence of the value and practical consequences of those ‘investments’, Carmichael observes that when the Pinochet regime was replaced with the election of Patrico Aylwin as Chile’s president in 1990, three ministers and several other senior officials of Aylwin’s government were drawn from the staff of those Ford-funded organizations.

In Latin America, as the dark days of military rule extended into the late 1970s and 1980s, Ford also made a number of perhaps bolder grants for more activist, human rights-related activities by civil society organizations – some but not all of which enjoyed the protective sponsorship of church or international agencies. It is worth remembering, Carmichael notes, that when the first such grants were approved, very few American foundations were engaged in supporting human rights activism in overseas settings. ‘Ford is by no means alone now,’ says Carmichael, ‘but it was certainly an important pioneer in that field, particularly in Latin America. Initially, we assisted such work in a very low-key way. Some Foundation staff in other developing regions, where close partnerships with government agencies still characterized much of our work, questioned the wisdom, or viability, of support for human rights undertakings.’ In 1976 or 1977, however, after an internal staff review, the board’s approval was obtained for a special appropriation for international human rights work. Initial support was then provided for the organization that evolved into Human Rights Watch, and the stage was set for the eventual development of a major initiative in that field.

From Latin America to Africa

In 1976, McGeorge Bundy, the Foundation’s president, asked Carmichael to assume responsibility for Ford’s programmes in Africa and the Middle East. ‘With very little prior experience in those two unusually challenging regions, I accepted the assignment with some misgivings,’ he notes. ‘But I was particularly intrigued at the prospect of testing how transferable the Latin American experience of assisting the development of civil society human rights initiatives would be in (then) minority-ruled South Africa, where I would assume direct grantmaking responsibilities from New York (rather than assigning them to field office staff).’

Soon after taking up the new post, therefore, and in the immediate aftermath of the Soweto riots that began in mid-June 1976, he travelled to South Africa. There he met a wide range of leaders of relevant university-based and civil society organizations and asked for their advice on how Ford could most effectively contribute to the alleviation of rights abuses in the near term and to building a strong base for a well-governed and just post-apartheid South Africa. ‘On the basis of the advice that I received in that first and several subsequent visits to South Africa, I concluded that the field of law was a particularly promising arena for Foundation investments, and that two institutions in that field merited immediate attention.’ The first of these was the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) of the University of Witwatersrand, which was engaged in research and litigation, with particular emphasis on issues relating to labour rights and freedom of expression. The second was a then nascent civil society organization, the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), which had a broader array of rights-related concerns and plans for ‘high impact’ litigation.

In the late 1970s, therefore, in collaboration with the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford made the first of a long string of grants to each of those institutions. ‘With the benefit of hindsight, I am fully persuaded that the impact of that support, both in the last 15 years of the apartheid era and in the post-apartheid period (ushered in by the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994 and the adoption of a new and exceedingly rights-supportive constitution in 1996), has vastly exceeded my very high expectations.’

During the waning years of the apartheid period the staff of both institutions engaged in litigation, based on carefully conducted research, ‘which effectively demonstrated that, even under very difficult circumstances, law can be an effective instrument for securing (rather than restricting) rights’. In more recent years, both institutions have also made ‘critically important contributions’ to assuring the rule of law and protecting and expanding human rights in the ‘new’ South Africa – not least by training many of those who would later assume key posts in the judicial system. Arthur Chaskelson, founder and first director of the Legal Resources Centre, was appointed by President Mandela in June 1994 to serve as the first president of South Africa’s new Constitutional Court (the apex of South Africa’s judicial structure). Many other former staff members of LRC, CALS and other Ford grantees in the law and rights field have served as judges of the Constitutional Court and in other senior positions since the advent of majority rule.

During the last 15 years of apartheid rule, Ford also supported a considerable number of community-based and national civil society organizations that provided much needed services for particularly disadvantaged South Africans. These also served, in several instances, as training grounds for black South Africans who subsequently assumed important posts in government at national, provincial or municipal levels. ‘In so doing they have helped address one of the aims of a new, or newly labelled, field of activity that featured prominently in a new Foundation-wide programme structure that was introduced in 1981.’

Enter the term ‘governance’

In 1981, Carmichael was appointed vice president with responsibilities for overseeing Ford’s Developing Country Programs globally. Working in partnership with Susan Berresford, the newly appointed vice president in charge of Ford’s United States Programs, he developed a new Foundation-wide programme structure with four major units. One of those units was intended to embrace Ford’s work in support of human rights and a related set of activities, undertaken primarily by civil society organizations both in the US and in some overseas settings, that were aimed at making governments more responsive to the needs and wishes of their citizens.

‘The term “governance” was not then in general use in describing these initiatives,’ he recalls. ‘I think it came to my mind from the writings of early 19th century moral philosophers, and it struck me as a particularly apt term for activities very different from the “state-building” initiatives that Ford had long supported under the rubric “development planning and management”.’ Accordingly, the new programme unit was labelled ‘human rights and governance’.

In 1981 that new label, Carmichael argues, was a good fit with a growing array of Ford activities – particularly in Latin America and South Africa, where the Foundation was assisting a number of ‘think-tanks’ and more activist organizations working to curb the abuses of authoritarian regimes. But in parts of Asia, where Ford was still working closely with government ministries in the Marcos-led Philippines and Suharto-led Indonesia well into the 1980s, ‘I suspect that it may have struck a rather discordant note. In some instances,’ he notes, ‘old habits and old perceptions of the Foundation’s role were not easily changed.’

Carmichael recalls a visit to the Philippines in February 1986 soon after the ‘People Power Revolution’ had toppled the Marcos regime and Corazon Aquino had become president. Upon arriving in Manila, he found that prominent religious leaders and the leaders of some of the Philippines’ most accomplished and widely respected civil society organizations were initially unwilling to meet with someone from Ford ‘because they regarded Ford as having been much too closely involved with the Marcos government. It was only after learning of some of the Foundation’s work in Chile, and elsewhere in Latin America, that they were willing to consider the possibility of Foundation support for the work of their organizations on human rights and governance.’

Work at the community level

It has become almost a truism to say that strengthening civil society organizations is an important way of fostering democracy and better governance, and it is a view that Carmichael subscribes to. But he points out that, with very few exceptions, the organizations that Ford was supporting in Latin America and South Africa were not community-based or community-governed .

‘There’s another type of civil society organization,’ he quickly adds, ‘that should be carefully examined when we seek to promote better governance, combat pervasive corruption, or nurture effective peace-building and conflict resolution efforts – those that are firmly rooted at the community level.’ When he was at Ford, he notes, the Foundation did very little with community-based organizations in its developing country programmes. But having worked since leaving Ford some 19 years ago with Ashoka and other highly creative organizations assisting development at the community level, he is ‘increasingly persuaded that much of the most innovative work in the field of governance is being undertaken by organizations that are firmly rooted in the communities they seek to serve’.

While Transparency International focuses primarily on high-level corruption, several Ashoka Fellows have developed creative initiatives to cope with a broad array of governance issues at the community level. He cites as examples a Fellow in Java fighting corruption by mobilizing citizens to refuse to pay bribes for the documents required to get their children into schools and another in Nigeria developing simpler and less costly ways of resolving disputes that would otherwise clog the dockets of municipal courts. ‘I’m increasingly convinced that tackling issues like corruption and ethnic conflict at the community level is a critically important strategy for changing attitudes towards and expectations from governments among the population at large.’

Several of these initiatives have already achieved a significant national impact, he says, but others have not yet achieved the wide recognition and replication that they deserve. In his view, there is an important, not yet adequately addressed, need for fresh attempts to assist the ‘scaling up’ and geographic spread of particularly promising community-level governance initiatives.

What about scaling up?

He acknowledges, however, that the problem with too many highly creative community-based programmes is that their impact is confined to the communities or the immediate areas in which they are located. But he also maintains that there are carefully devised and well-tested strategies for avoiding that trap. He cites as an example a community-managed mosque-based school initiative for girls that was launched with the counsel and modest assistance of Future Generations (a West Virginia-based civil society organization on the board of which Carmichael currently serves) in a few communities in Ghazni province in Afghanistan and very quickly spread to some 600 villages in Ghazni and neighbouring provinces. ‘There are well-tested spread strategies that work,’ he argues, ‘for assuring that the impact of well-conceived community-based initiatives is not confined to the immediate areas in which they are initially based.’ He cites a study currently under way under the aegis of Future Generations that is examining five conflict prevention/resolution initiatives – in Afghanistan, Burundi, Guyana, Nepal and Somaliland – and attempting to distil the strategies they have employed to attain a major impact at a national scale.

The hard nuts

Are there places where Carmichael thinks Ford’s governance and human rights initiatives may have run up against a wall? He quickly identifies two possibilities. ‘During my last two years at Ford, I was involved with the (then) Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Gorbachev era of glasnost and perestroika. During that period, I chaired a study group that made a series of visits to the Soviet Union and to three countries (Poland, Chechoslovakia and Hungary) in Eastern Europe to assess whether the Foundation could play a useful role in assisting a growing array of civil society organizations that were working to promote democratic governance, greater adherence to human rights norms, environmental protection, and related causes. The group concluded that Ford could indeed make a significant contribution by helping fund the activities of local groups working on those issues.’ In his view, that assessment has been vindicated by subsequent developments in the three Eastern European countries. But at this point, on the basis of two recent visits to Russia, he acknowledges that ‘it is, at best, an open question whether outside assistance for civil society organizations working on rights and governance issues in Putin- and Medvedev-led Russia can play a positive role’.

Another country where such work must still be very difficult, he notes, is China, where a recent job posting in The Economist indicated, to his surprise, that Ford is recruiting a new staff member with responsibilities for programme development in the ‘human rights’ field. On the basis of two brief exposures to China in recent years, Carmichael acknowledges that the possibilities for such work are now decidedly better than they were in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, when he retired from Ford. ‘I will be watching with great interest for reports on the activities that the new Ford program officer develops.’

1 W W Rostow (1960) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bill Carmichael is an independent consultant working with several American foundations, civil society organizations and international organizations, including the New Delhi-based Global Development Network. Email wdcarm@gmail.com

Bill Carmichael’s career at the Ford Foundation
1968-71 Representative in Brazil

1971-76 Head of Latin American Program

1976-81 Head of Middle East and Africa Program

1981-89 Vice President for Developing Country Programs

From The American Spectator
6.15.09 @ 6:01AM

FORD THE RECORD
Re: Neal B. Freeman’s Jeez Luis — Part Deux:
We laughed off Neal B. Freeman’s light-hearted first commentary on the Ford Foundation as good intramural fun. He broke no new ground in asserting that the foundation is progressive in its mission and grantmaking; we always have been and we will proudly remain so. His second commentary, however, requires serious correction.
Mr. Freeman correctly states that we have lost about a third of our endowment over the past 18 months. This economic reality has forced us — like so many other organizations — to make very hard decisions.
But he gets it wrong when he claims that our approach runs counter to our values. We first made every effort to avoid impacting staff, shaving $22 million from our expenses in 2008. When our portfolio lost another $2 billion this year, we had no choice but to look for further savings in order to preserve our support to grantees.
That meant making reductions we could sustain over time. With great regret, we closed two of our regional offices. These closures affected senior management, program staff, and support staff equally. We also froze salaries for all staff around the world, adjusted benefits considerably, and laid off staff in every one of our regional offices.
In New York, we tried to obviate the need for lay-offs by offering generous voluntary packages to a broad cross-section of staff, including a number of managers and supervisors. The packages were offered according to one criterion alone: Whether the position fell within an area where the foundation could envision more efficient ways of working. Though the process has been painful, it has been thoughtful, fair, and tuned to the long-term health of the foundation.
What we have refused to do is compromise our ability to make grants and support grantees, all of whom face even tougher circumstances than we do. The measures we have taken have preserved our grantmaking capacity and budgets, and every dollar saved has gone directly to our grantees.
Finally, regarding our trustees, Mr. Freeman might think about expanding the circles in which he associates. Among them are indeed Fortune 500 executives, university presidents, and leaders of national nonprofit institutions. The diversity of experience and excellence they bring to our board is a reflection of our best traditions of leadership and, like their predecessors, they recognize there are few other institutions that so thoroughly attempt to live up to the values they espouse.
– Alfred D. Ironside
Director of Communications, Ford Foundation/New York
Neal B. Freeman replies:
It’s good to hear from Mr. Ironside, but I’m not sure that he engages any of my central points. First, while he may have felt my commentary was “light-hearted,” Ford’s low-paid employees are feeling real, life-changing pain as management squeezes them out in mid-recession. Secondly, my information is that only low-paid staffers are being asked to take the hits in the New York office. I will be glad to correct any misimpression I may have created: can Mr. Ironside tell us what if any cuts have been imposed on, say, the ten highest-paid employees? And third, my comments about Ford’s Directors were not to suggest that they are not good people, of course, but simply to note that they do not compare in public eminence with their predecessors. That’s a fact.