by Richard Magat

Although the November 20 reunion was a wonderful event, it lacked some of the exoticism of earlier gatherings.

There was the reunion held at the historic National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, for example. LAFF members and their guests arrived to confront a picket line. Marching were Puerto Rican activists protesting cuts in social services by Mayor Giuliani.  The Mayor, as it turns out, was a sponsor of another event being held at the club, a fund-raiser for the Mayor of Jersey City. Although we outnumbered the Jersey City contingent, any thought of physical combat was dispelled by the heft of the Jersey Cityites. In any event, the club arranged to move us to another space in the building.

Although we were ready to have the next reunion at the National Arts Club in 2003 the club was no available. It seems that some of its officials were embroiled in legal matters involving misuse of funds. Further the club was feuding with its neighbors about the fate of trees in the park.

After a search for alternative sites, conducted mainly by Pat Corrigan, the cavernous Seventh Regiment Armory, at Lexington Avenue and 67th Street, was identified. It turns out that the Regiment rented its top floor to nonprofit organizations.  Another floor housed a shelter for the homeless.

Riding to inspect the premises, Pat and I shared an elevator with two women residents of the shelter. As the creaking elevator mounted, one of them said to the other, “When the hell are they going to fix this f—— elevator,” whereupon her friend admonished, “Mary, watch your language, there are two gentlemen in the elevator.”

The dining room and its menu proved quite satisfactory, and it had an academic aura since it was used by the Civil War Roundtable, headed by the distinguished Columbia historian Eric Foner.

From Robert Schrank

Robert McNamara recently passed away at 93. He had spent the last decades of his life trying to explain his behavior as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Most people remember him as a prime mover in the Vietnam war. That he was. I remember him as an important influence in Johnson’s war on poverty.

It was sometime in the sixties when I was a Commissioner in the Lindsay administration in charge of Youth Employment. I came to the job via Mobilization for Youth, MFY a pioneering effort to find ways to help troubled youth make useful lives for themselves. Early on at MFY I became obsessed with the reading difficulties of the 400-500 kids we would be working with at any one time. A large percentage were functionally illiterate, others read at the 3,4,5, grade levels. It was clear that they simply could not function in the job market unless we could find ways to improve their reading skills. (Even a janitors job required reading the instructions on the soap cans.)

So began a whole series of experiments in reading programs. On numerous occasions I was asked to participate in research projects designed to demonstrate new reading programs. One of those programs involved the military in Project 200,000. The Army would recruit kids rejected because of lack of reading ability and then subject them to intensive reading remedial program. As a member of the research review panel I asked one of our staff members to spend some time at the Lackland Air Force base in Texas where the remedial program was taking place and report on the progress of the program.

After spending a week at the base she returned with a glowing report of success. The first group of about 500 kids had their reading scores raised 2,3 grades in six month period. Keep in mind we had been reviewing remedial reading programs all over the country. The Army record was far in away the most successful. We were delighted and decided to ask for a meeting with the Secretary to persuade him to increase the program for all the armed services. We also understood the circumstances that contributed to the success, The Army has the kids full time. They feed, clothe and regulate their daily lives. That gives real structure to kids who grew up in a Ghetto where life is a series of of, “anything can happen.”

We went to Washington all puffed up with our great success story and laid it out before Robert McNamara and some of his associates. Well, I will tell you I have hoisted any number of lead balloons in my life but this one took the cake. The most disappointed person in the room was the Secretary as he laid out before us all the reasons the program could not be expanded or even continued. The various service commanders accused McNamar of trying to turn the Army, Navy and Air Force into a “moron army.”

We argued and pleaded but it was to no avail. McNamara had made his mind up and nothing we could say or do was going to change it. As we left I began to understand the rigidity of the man we had tried to just look at the data and see if there wasn’t some way we could continue the program. For Robert McNamara there was absolutely no room for ambiguity. No room for even a chance that there might be some other way to continue the program. There wasn’t.

Of all the unlikely places for McNamara influence to show up was in the Anti Poverty  Programs of the Johnson years. At the Ford Foundation I had numerous opportunities  to deal with anti poverty community organizations. I began to notice an increasing amount of talk about “Zero Based budgeting as well as PPBS “Planning Program Based Budgeting Systems.” Having come out of the corporate world this was lingo I was familiar with and it set me wondering where it came from? Sure enough I was repeatedly told it was the work of Robert McNamara and hastily added “he had been President of the Ford Motor Company.” In the non profit world there was a glorification of how business functioned. It was as if they could emulate business they would be just as successful. Of course I thought this was just more baloney about how the world of profit making functioned. The problems of the poor and disadvantaged are in no way comparable to a corporation. In fact corporations avoid those problems with their selective hiring of the best and the brightest.

I had one more brush with McNamra when he was on the Board of the Ford Foundation. My boss at the Foundation said that McNamara was uncomfortable with our spending millions helping community organizations like the California based Watts Labor Community Action Committee, WLCAC without knowing exactly what that accomplished? A few of us on staff spent an afternoon trying to figure out how to satisfy McNamara’s concern. By now we understood his obsession with hard data. So, we came up with an algebraic formula called, “the spin off effect of community investment.” Okay, so A equal investment. B equal how it is spent. C equals local business benefits. D equals how that money moves around the neighborhood equals the multiplier effect. Wow, McNamara loved it said, “that’s the kind of thinking we needed.”

In the documentary ”The Fog of War” McNamara certainly does well in explaining the futility of war but he insists that even when he knew that the Veitnam was was lost he could not say so publicly out of loyalty to the President. In many ways his rigidity and need to be absolute in his thinking is reminiscent of all those who have ever been caught in the vise of a moral dilemma. Right and wrong gets lost in the absolute of loyalty to my Commander in Chief. In his interviews with Charlie Rose he kept insisting that Charlie didn’t understand the atmosphere, the conditions under which he made his decisions. Everybody I ever listened to explaining away a moral responsibility calls up the circumstances that made me do it. Then of course there are those who just said “no I cannot in good conscience do that.” They are the Rosa Parks, the back of the bus lady. The Mandellas, Ghandi’s and Martin Luther King’s of our era and the legends of others  who just said “No.”  Thank God for them.

Thanks Kate N.H.W.Y.

From Chathan House.org.uk

Indonesia Forum

Tuesday 24 November 2009 12:30 to 14:30

Location

Chatham House, London

Participants

Speaker: Sidney Jones, Senior Adviser, Asia Programme, International Crisis Group
Chair: Kirsten Schulze, Associate Fellow, Chatham House

The speaker will discuss security in Indonesia since the south-east Asian terrorist leader Noordin Top was killed.

Sidney Jones is senior adviser to the Asia programme of the International Crisis Group, based in Crisis Group’s South East Asia office in Jakarta. Before joining Crisis Group in 2002, she worked for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and New York (1977-84); Amnesty International in London as the Indonesia-Philippines researcher (1985-88); and Human Rights Watch in New York as the Asia director (1989-2001).

This meeting will be held under the Chatham House Rule.

For more information please contact Rosheen Kabraji.

November 4, 2009 — Updated 1614 GMT (0014 HKT)

A blindfolded American hostage is surrounded by his captors in Tehran, Iran, on November 8, 1979.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• One hostage-taker says 1979 embassy takeover was protest by angry students
• Former hostage says the event “brought misery to the Iranian people”
• All sides tell CNN the legacy of the hostage crisis still affects U.S.-Iran relations
• Amanpour airs at 3 p.m. ET daily on CNN International and 2 p.m. ET Sunday on CNN USA

(CNN) — Thirty years ago Wednesday, Iranian student revolutionaries climbed over the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and seized dozens of Americans, whom they ultimately held hostage for 444 days.

The hostage crisis, coming in the aftermath of Iran’s Islamic revolution, ended diplomatic relations between Washington and Tehran — a rift that persists to this day.

Iran celebrates the embassy takeover as an official holiday, and tens of thousands showed up in Tehran on Wednesday to hear anti-American speeches.

The anniversary was also an opportunity to reignite the anti-government protests that were sparked in June, following a disputed presidential election, and thousands of anti-government protesters ignored warnings from Iranian authorities to stay home.

One of the leaders of the 1979 hostage-takers says the United States and Iran must not be hostages to history.

“I am not willing to be a hostage of that historical event,” Ebrahim Asgharzadeh said on CNN’s “Amanpour,” in an interview marking the anniversary.

“Neither Iran nor the United States should be hijacked by that historical event,” he said from Tehran, where he went on to become a reformist lawmaker and was himself jailed by the Islamic regime.

He said the two sides need to be aware of the past without being imprisoned by it.

“If they do not pay attention to … history they will have an unstable future, an impermanent future,” he said.

Asgharzadeh said he and his fellow students had been offended that Jimmy Carter, then the U.S. president, had let the deposed Shah of Iran into the United States for medical treatment — and said the actions of his compatriots had parallels in the United States.

Video: Iran hostage anniversary

Video: Thousands rally in Tehran

Video: Tehran demonstrations

“We felt insulted — our revolution, our people — and so there was a rebellion,” he said through a translator.

“A measure was needed to be taken that was effective, that could impact the world public opinion.

“We were not radical students. We were revolutionary students, in the sense that we were defending our country, our people, our nation,” he said. “What the students did for the first two or three days, it was a student activity. It was meant to protest, something that American students did many times on the streets to protest the Vietnam War.”

But John Limbert, a former American hostage, is not convinced by the comparison.

“Whatever they thought they were doing, whether it was a 1970s-style student sit-in, the results of it were very … different,” he told Christiane Amanpour.

And it was not the American hostages who suffered most, he added.

“They brought misery to the Iranian people. What happened to us was difficult. It was frightening. It was — it was uncomfortable. But it lasted 14 months and was over,” he said.

“We certainly didn’t expect it to last that long. They have said they didn’t expect [it] to last that long. But what they did, in effect, was to create a climate of lawlessness and mob rule [of which] they and their compatriots are today the greatest victims,” said Limbert, the author of “Negotiating with Iran, Wrestling the Ghost of History.”

The hostage crisis escalated beyond what any of the participants expected as Iran’s new revolutionary government publicly backed the hostage-takers, Asgharzadeh and former Carter aide Gary Sick agree.

“That way it became actually an act of the Iranian government, rather than a group of students who were acting potentially outside the law,” said Sick, who was Carter’s point man on Iran.

“So basically, the situation got out of hand, in terms of being a student activity,” Asgharzadeh said. “It became a societal issue backed by the leadership.

“And every day that passed on, things got more complicated. The analysis got more complicated in the White House. They lost their cool. They didn’t know what to do. And they faced a challenge by the Iranian revolution and this revolutionary thought. And it reached a point where nobody felt prepared to deal with it,” the former student revolutionary said.

“And so after a while, both America and Iran were looking for a solution, because both their hands were tied at that stage, but the solution needed to be such that no country would be seen as the loser,” he said.

That impasse still dominates the wary relationship between Tehran and Washington, Amanpour’s guests said.

But it is time to call in the Ghostbusters, Limbert said, referring to the popular movie that came out not long after the Americans were finally released.

“You know, they put the ghosts in the can and put the can away. And somehow … you’ve got to do that,” he said.

“You don’t forget them. You don’t necessarily even ask for an apology. But you look them in the face, you know them for what they are, which is a very ugly and negative act, and then you put them in their proper compartment,” he advised.

But Sick, now a Columbia University professor, said the hostage crisis continues to have ramifications in Washington today.

“The hostage crisis was extended probably eight months beyond what it should have been. No matter how you look at it in terms of Iran’s interests or what have you, they simply couldn’t make up their mind,” he said of the regime in Tehran.

“And it has left the impression that, one, Iran can’t be trusted; two, that when they negotiate, they negotiate in bad faith; and, three, that they are paying only attention to their own internal circumstances and ignoring everybody else.

“That is a legacy that we live with and even people who don’t remember the hostage crisis at all still have that image of Iran that was created in those days that has not gone away,” he said.

Also of interest, on the website is some footage shot in the newsroom after the program of a three-way conversation between Limbert, Gary Sick and Amanpour that expands the discussion considerably. You can see it at:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/11/04/iran.hostage.anniversary/index.html

From the South Carolina News, November 5, 2009

CLINTON – Presbyterian College will host “Global Partnerships in the 21st Century: U.S. and China” – a symposium exploring the relation between the world’s superpowers – at a Nov. 6 event on the Clinton campus.

Held in conjunction with PC’s formal opening and daylong celebration of a Confucius Institute awarded last year by the Chinese government, the symposium is open to the public and will feature several prominent experts on Sino-U.S. relations, including a dignitary from the Chinese Embassy to the United States.
Dr. Shaozhong You, the current minister counselor of the Education Office at the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States, will speak at the symposium’s closing session at 4 p.m. in PC’s Belk Auditorium.

A graduate of the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management in Arizona, and Wuhan University in China, You is the former secretary general of the Chinese Education Association for International Exchange in the Ministry of Education.

The symposium will open, however, at 2:30 p.m. with a panel discussion featuring Dr. Mary Brown Bullock, president emerita of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga. An expert on Chinese history, Bullock serves as a member of the board of trustees of the Asia Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations; as chair of the China Medical Board of New York; and as a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. In 2007, Bullock joined the faculty of Emory University as visiting distinguished professor of China studies. She also has taught at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and served as the director of the university’s Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China.
She is the author of An American Transplant: The Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College and The Oil Prince’s Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy and China.

A second panel discussion will begin at 3:30 p.m. and will feature Dr. Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations based in New York City.

Much of the New York native’s educational and professional career has revolved around China and Asia. In 1964, Schell graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in far eastern history and has also studied Chinese language at Stanford University and as an exchange student at National Taiwan University. In 1968, he earned his Ph.D. in Chinese history from the University of California, Berkeley.

He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia and covered the war in Indochina for Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic. He also has written for The New Yorker, Time, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, the China Quarterly, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Schell has written 14 books, nine on China, and is at work on an interpretation of the last 100 years of Chinese history. He is the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorentestien Prize in Asian Journalism.

Schell also served as a program consultant for the “60 Minutes” report “Made In China,” which received both the Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Silver Baton award in broadcast journalism and an Emmy Award.

Other symposium panelists have been drawn from the faculty and administration of the consortium of Upstate schools –
Presbyterian College, Clemson University, Converse College, Furman University, and Wofford College – that will partner with the State Department of Education to develop a plan to teach Chinese in primary and secondary schools.

In addition, the Confucius Institute will partner with the Upstate’s Global Trade Consortium/Tianjin Free Trade Zone Administration, the Upstate Alliance, and PC’s exchange partner in China, Guizhou University, to provide outreach programming to the general public and business leaders who are interested in engaging China.

The Confucius Institute, which will be headquartered at PC with an annex at the Global Trade Consortium in Greenville, is led by Dr. David Liu, an assistant professor of political science who joined the PC faculty in 2008.

For More Information:
Hal Milam
Director of Media Relations
Presbyterian College
864-833-8282
hmilam@presby.edu

LAFF SOCIETY REUNION

Friday, November 20, 2009

2:00 to 6:00 pm

The Ford Foundation

Reconnecting with Our Past, Contributing to our Shared Future

AIMS

ÿ Strengthen the personal, professional and intellectual bonds among and between past and present Foundation staff members

ÿ Update our members on the Foundation’s new strategies and initiatives

ÿ Provide an opportunity for alumni to contribute their insights and talents for the benefit of the Foundation’s current endeavors

ÿ Inaugurate our new president

PROGRAM

2:00 pm Welcome  –  Auditorium

Peter Geithner, President, The LAFF Society

Luis Ubiñas, President, Ford Foundation  –  New Directions

3:00 pm Breakout Sessions – (Locations to be determined)

(1)   Natural Assets (Climate Change)

Moderator Ray Offenheiser, President, OXFAM America

FF Peter Riggs, Program Officer, Natural Resources & Sustainable  Development

Panelists Sharon Alpert, Program Director, Sustainable Environments, Surdna Foundation

Betsy Campbell, Vice President for Programs, Rockefeller Brothers Fund

Steven Sanderson, President & CEO, Wildlife Conservation Society

(2)  Sexuality and Reproductive Health

Moderator   Joan Dunlop, Board Member: Open Society Institute; InternationalWomen’s Health Coalition; Foundation for Community Health

FF   Margaret Hempel, Director, Sexuality & Reproductive Health & Rights

Panelists Adrienne Germain, President, International Women’s Health Coalition

Joan Kaufman, Distinguished Scientist & Senior Lecturer, Heller  Graduate  School, Brandeis University; Lecturer, Harvard Medical School

Marjorie Muecke, Assistant Dean, Global Health Affairs, University of Pennsylvania

(3)   Human Rights

Moderator   Lynn Huntley, President, Southern Education Foundation

FF   Sara Rios, Director, Human Rights

Panelists Larry Cox, Executive Director, Amnesty International USA

Natalia Kanem, President, ELMA Philanthropies

Diana Morris, Director, Open Society Institute - Baltimore

(4)   Education and Scholarship

Moderator Janice Molnar, Deputy Commissioner, Division of Child Care Services, NYS Office of Children & Family Services

FF Alison Bernstein, Vice President, Education, Creativity & Free Expression

Panelists Joseph Aguerrebere, President & CEO, National Board for Professional  Teaching Standards

Sanda Balaban, Network Leader, NYC Board of Education, Empowerment Schools

Greg Farrell, President & CEO, Expeditionary Learning School, Outward Bound

(5)   A New Logo and Tagline for Ford: How We Got There and What it Means

Moderator Aaron Levine, Chief Information Officer, Carnegie Hall

FF Marta Tellado, Vice President, Communications

4:30 pm Reception  (11th Floor Service Dining Room)

Reminiscences  – Alan Divack, Moderator (Dick Magat/Michael Lipsky/+)

Inauguration of Shepard Forman as LAFF President

6:00 pm Informal dinners arranged by those interested

Lisa Jordan

Lisa Jordan left the Ford Foundation to take up the post of Executive Director of the Netherlands-based Bernard van Leer Foundation at the beginning of July. What does she bring to her new role from the Ford experience? Will there be changes of direction? What has surprised her about the Bernard van Leer Foundation? Does she anticipate any difficulties as an American coming to run a European foundation? These are some of the questions Caroline Hartnell asked Lisa Jordan and Board Chair Trude Maas-de Brouwer.

Trude Maas-de Brouwer

Lisa, your previous job focused largely on global civil society. What do you bring from this experience to the Bernard van Leer Foundation, with its focus on early childhood development?

Lisa Jordan Well, of course kids are citizens too, we shouldn’t forget that. Today’s children will be tomorrow’s global civil society. Bernard van Leer Foundation is trying to make sure that these children are able to realize their full, and global, potential. From the perspective of the Bernard van Leer Foundation,I think what was interesting about the experience I had at the Ford Foundation was not only the topic of global civil society, but the whole Ford unit on governance and civil society. It was a huge department that worked all over the world. We were investing $120 million a year in social programmes, some of which were service delivery, some of which were policy and advocacy issues, and all of those kinds of activities are ones that the Bernard van Leer Foundation also undertakes. And of course Ford is a big foundation and so is the Bernard van Leer Foundation, so I understand the parameters of the beast.

Ford’s toolkit for creating social change was quite broad, and one of the things that I’d like to do in this position is to expand the Bernard van Leer Foundation’s toolkit in a similar way. I want to look at the sort of strategies that the foundation uses, not only to encompass grants and publications, which is how we share our knowledge, but also to look at advocacy, media relations and perhaps even mission-related investment.

It’s sometimes said that the Bernard van Leer Foundation punches below its weight – it does fantastic programme work, second to none, and has a wonderful grantmaking practice, but it doesn’t communicate what it has learned widely enough. Is that something you’re thinking about changing?

Trude Maas-de Brouwer When we were looking for a new executive director, we realized that the foundation is in a kind of transition. We have been working in the field of early childhood development for 60 years now; when we started, ECD was virtually unknown as a field, but things have changed since then. We also realized that since we don’t have the factories any more [the Van Leer Group Foundation sold Royal Packaging Industries Van Leer NV in the late 1990s] we need new and different criteria for eligibility of countries. We started this process of change and we expect Lisa to continue it with much energy.

With our 60 years’ experience, we are sitting on a pot of gold, and one of the duties Lisa has accepted is to make sure that we really get all the potential out of the knowledge we have built up, for rich countries as well as for poor ones. She’s very much aware of how the world is changing, for example media-wise and technology-wise, so we expect her to help expand our toolkit, building upon our strengths.

LJ Right now you might make that comment about a lot of foundations, especially small or medium-sized ones, whose work is not really well understood in the public domain. I feel that the whole sector has a responsibility at the moment, in much the way that I’ve accepted the responsibility that Trude has just outlined, to be more transparent about what we do. This is partly because we are all operating with smaller resources all of a sudden, because of the global financial crisis, but I think it’s also true that when we’re more transparent we can attract more partnerships and bring other kinds of players in to further the mission of the institutions within which we work. I think operating in a broader public domain will allow us to develop partnerships in a much stronger way than we’ve done in the past.

Do you think that one of the effects of the global financial crisis could be more questioning of the role of foundations – both their tax status and their role in society – and a need to make clearer what they do?

TM Yes, I think so. To coincide with the 60th anniversary of the foundation, a book will be published about Oscar van Leer, and when it was being produced we realized that the Van Leer family was really the first philanthropic family in the Netherlands. Compared with other countries like the US or the UK, this was rather late maybe, but in a way Oscar van Leer was the grandfather of the philanthropic movement here. Over the years, the Van Leer Group Foundation has tried to stimulate that movement, and we hope that publishing the book about Oscar’s life will give a new impetus to the public debate in the Netherlands about the role and place of foundations.

LJ When we’re actively seeking out partnerships with other sectors of society, it’s important that they understand what the foundation sector is all about. Our outreach to create stronger partnerships at this moment in time, which is outreach that everybody should be undertaking, in some way rests on a very good understanding of what the foundation sector is about. Hopefully the book and the publicity around the 60th anniversary will help us achieve that.

Lisa, do you see the Bernard van Leer Foundation making a change of direction under your leadership or is it basically a matter of carrying on the good work?

LJ The important thing to understand is that we will continue to work with young children – that will remain a critical focus of the work that we do. What we’re doing right now is asking ourselves, and others who have child-oriented missions, what the most critical and under-addressed problems facing young children worldwide are. From our tradition we have two main countries of focus and that’s the country where we are and Israel, because of Bernard van Leer and Oscar wanting Israel as a special-interest country, and as it happens the issues we have in our mandate are especially present in Israel.

Internally we’re starting to look at our mission and our vision, and to go right back to the fundamental question of what those problems are. We know that there are problems in the fields of health and education; we know that discrimination has become a much bigger problem, because of a multiculturalism that people don’t really know how to deal with; and we know that young children are experiencing a significant level of violence, so those are the main areas where we have started to create some goals for the next five years. Our goal of addressing problems that young children are facing worldwide, in both the North and the South, and that focus on young children’s lives, hasn’t changed.

What will change is that there will be a strong problem orientation and knowledge-sharing strategies that move beyond the strategies of service delivery. In fact I think knowledge sharing will become a lot more important to each one of the goals we establish, regardless of what country we’re in, because when you have a global mandate, sharing that knowledge worldwide becomes one of your responsibilities.

What about mission-related investment? Is that a direction you will be moving in?

LJ Mission-related investment is one type of strategy that foundations use in order to be able to create the change that they wish to see in the world. At this juncture it would be premature to say that we’re going towards mission-related investment, but it’s one of the strategies that’s on the table and that we will start to consider once we have our problems and goals clear, along with advocacy, lobbying, service delivery and knowledge sharing through our publications.

What do you see as the main challenges facing you over the next few years or so?

LJ The biggest question is to identify the main challenges facing young children, such as the ones that I just named – inability to learn, lack of educational access, poor physical health, violence and discrimination – and then to figure out how to address those challenges with partners. That’s another part of the strategy, to increase partnership with other foundations, with the private sector, and maybe even directly with governments. This has not been a strategy that we have used over the last 25 years, but those are the kinds of things that we need to ramp up in order to be able to address thee critical issues young children are facing.

TM I also think also we need to keep the focus and make the leverage bigger – and do so with less money!

That sounds quite an all-encompassing challenge.

TM Yes, but sometimes it’s that sort of pressure that makes you creative.

Lisa, you’ve come from the Ford Foundation. Has anything about the Bernard van Leer Foundation surprised you?

LJ I was pleasantly surprised by the systematic way in which programme officers make decisions here, which in some ways is very thorough and quite analytical. I was also completely surprised by how many publications are produced and how well – the turnaround process is incredible. Learning something in the field, writing it up and getting it out into the public domain – Ford doesn’t do that. All of the knowledge is more or less held internally in the foundation, and periodically something comes out into the public domain. This operation uses all the resources it has to bear in the publications process and I thought that was really interesting.

The other thing is that in the US and in the UK, the concept of the foundation is very well understood. What I’m finding out here is that the concept is not as well understood outside other foundations, and needs to be well articulated in the public domain, so that cultural context is an interesting challenge.

Do you anticipate, or have you found, any difficulties as an American coming to run a European foundation?

LJ Well, part of our mission is to build knowledge in the field so I don’t think people really mind so much about where that knowledge comes from. I’ve been in contact with German and Italian foundations, for example, all of whom are eager to work with us on child-related issues, and many have been asking for knowledge acquired from our programme. We were in Berlin two weeks ago to work and share our expertise on what’s happening with Roma children in continental Europe – initiatives taken through the EFC. So I think that the mission of the foundation is strong enough to overcome any latent issues that people might have about the national stripe of the person who’s running it.

TM I also think having an American is helpful in a way because of the different knowledge you build up and culture you bring in. On the other hand, when we looked at Lisa as one of our candidates, we found that she did her thesis in the Netherlands and is married to a Dutch husband. So in a way she’s a kind of cultural bridge, which is interesting in itself, with the foundation itself being a very diverse place to work.

Being Dutch and working in a Dutch environment, we know that we are a small country so we don’t have the natural feeling of being important in the world, but being small doesn’t mean that you can’t have leverage and have an effect on things. I think it can be a strength to be a very determined small country and a very dedicated foundation, maybe because other people and organizations are not frightened by your size. I’m very confident that Lisa will be smart in using all the advantages that are hidden behind that.

Given the priorities and challenges for children you have identified, including discrimination and violence, do you think you will have an even greater emphasis on human rights than previously?

LJ A lot of the work the foundation has undertaken in the past six years has been based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which provides us with a wonderful baseline to work from. For example, if you look at the HIV/AIDS work that the foundation undertook, or at the right to play, which is another theme that comes straight out of the convention, you’ll see that children’s rights is part and parcel of what we do.

But it is not the only argument that matters today. There are many places where human rights are not well developed, and the frame of human rights is not a powerful messaging frame. So I think that human rights will continue to be an integral part of the way in which this institution looks at young children, recognizes young children’s voices, empowers young children to speak on their own behalf and encourages adults and caretakers to listen to young children, but I would not want to suggest that it will be the only kind of approach that we will take. It will be one of many important approaches.

Lisa Jordan is Executive Director of the Bernard van Leer Foundation and Trude Maas-de Brouwer is Chair of the Board.

For more information
www.bernardvanleer.org

Becky Lentz / McGill University

28 Sep 2009

Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has appointed Dr. Sarah Cook as the new Director of UNRISD. Dr. Cook will take up her post on 1 November 2009 replacing Thandika Mkandawire who left UNRISD on 30 April 2009.

Dr. Cook, who joins UNRISD from the Institute of Development Studies, is a development economist and China specialist whose recent work has included research on social protection in Asia, social welfare in rural China, the informalization of employment and the gender impacts of economic reform. She is the first British national to take the helm at UNRISD.

I am very much looking forward to the challenges involved in managing UNRISD multinational research teams, attracting and collaborating with leading researchers, while maintaining quality and influence in our work. I intend to join my new colleagues in identifying cutting-edge research topics and carrying on the UNRISD tradition of delivering innovative, influential and timely research, said Dr. Cook.

While academic excellence is clearly a priority in maintaining UNRISD as the leading institution in its field, doing this in a way which builds on the strengths of multi-disciplinarity; engages with a diverse community of scholars, policy makers, practitioners and other stakeholders - including local communities; and delivers and communicates practical policy-relevant results; is also of critical importance for achieving impact.

Dr. Cook has a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University. She speaks English and Chinese fluently, and has a working knowledge of French and Spanish.

Notes to editors

• The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) was created in 1963 and is an autonomous UN agency engaging in multidisciplinary research on the social dimensions of contemporary development issues. Through its research, UNRISD stimulates dialogue and contributes to policy debates on key issues of social development within and outside the UN system.

• Sarah Cook studied at Oxford University, the London School of Economics and Harvard University. She is a widely published development economist and social policy expert, specializing in social reform in China. During her career to date, she has experience carrying out international academic research and has taught in the multidisciplinary field of development studies. She has also undertaken policy and advisory work for international governmental and non-governmental development agencies. Dr. Cook spent over years living in China, and has also worked in India, East Africa, Cambodia and Mongolia.

From Womensenews.org

By Jael Silliman

WeNews commentator

Sunday, November 1, 2009