Ford Foundation Announces $180 Million in New Funding for Racial Justice

The Ford Foundation announced Friday $180 million in new funding for U.S. racial-justice and civil-rights groups, raising its overall commitments to those causes to $330 million in 2020 and 2021.

The money came from Ford’s $1 billion bond offering, designed to allow the foundation to give more now without cutting into its endowment.

Other recent Ford commitments from its bond offering include $85 million for “Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous arts and culture organizations,” plus $10 million to assist recovery efforts in Puerto Rico.

Promoting Structural Change

The foundation said the racial-justice fund will be distributed to “groups creating structural and systemic change through strategic litigation, policy advocacy, and grassroots organizing.”

Darren Walker, Ford’s president, said in a statement that he hoped other grant makers would do more soon to support “racial-justice leaders and groups leading the charge of building a more just nation.”

The foundation cited the Mexican American Legal and Educational Fund, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund among the beneficiaries of the new effort.

The Ford announcement comes as more than $6 billion has been committed so far this year by companies and foundations to a wide array of projects to heal racial rifts.

Dig deeper: Foundations have been criticized for not doing enough to support racial-justice efforts and other social movements. We examined what they have done — and not done — in our September cover article.