Ford’s early steps toward a strategy overhaul
The foundation will divide into groups to prepare for a program reboot, the first under its president, Heather Gerken.
By Alex Daniels
Senior Editor, Foundations
September 10, 2026 | Read Time: 4 minutes
The Ford Foundation will soon start a process to roll out a new grant making strategy, the foundation’s president, Heather Gerken, told the Chronicle in an exclusive interview.
Gerken and her staff have already developed a broad outline of those strategies. She plans to present them to the foundation’s trustees this fall. If they are approved, starting in January the foundation will divide its staff into three units to bridge current operations with the new grant making priorities. One group will focus on further refining the new grant making strategy, one will maintain current grants, and the third will work on devising tie-off funding for grantees that won’t be part of the grant maker’s future.
The new strategy should be in operation by January 2028, Gerken said.
“We don’t want to have a pause,” said Gerken, who began leading Ford in November. “The world doesn’t stop turning because the Ford Foundation is going through a strategy refresh. And so we want to do right by our grantees and keep moving grants forward.
Gerken and Nicholas Turner, who joined Ford as executive vice president for programs in May after a long tenure leading the Vera Institute of Justice, declined to provide specifics about the nature of the programmatic reset. Gerken described the changes as “evolutionary, not revolutionary.”
A staff-led process
The program design and the idea of splitting the staff into three departments came from Ford staff rather than outside consultants. The rationale for doing so, Turner said, was so staff could diligently attend to the new strategy, existing grantees, and breaking off relationships with grantees in a professional way rather than being dragged in various directions that can distract.
“I’ve seen it in a lot of complex organizations that go through changes,” he said. “You have hybrids, pilots, transition management offices, but what we’ve done is really focused on the three most important things we have to do in transition.”
Leaders who were key in designing the plan, including Turner and Sarita Gupta, vice president of U.S. programs, previously led organizations that received grants from Ford.
Committed to general operating support
With more than $17.5 billion in assets, as of the end of 2024, the foundation is one of the country’s largest grant makers. It makes more than $1 billion in charitable disbursements each year throughout the United States and globally to a range of causes including art, disability rights, gender and racial justice, and climate.
While Gerken did not divulge any of the changes that are likely to result from this process, she said the foundation would remain committed to the principles of its BUILD strategy. That approach, championed under former president Darren Walker, gave foundations multiyear general operating support and put a premium on noncash support the foundation could provide, such as consulting work or introductions to other grant makers.
Walker’s BUILD program was shut down shortly before Gerken took over, when Ford leaders decided that much of its strategy had been successfully baked in to grant making throughout the organization. It was a centerpiece of Walker’s overhaul of Ford’s strategy — the foundation’s most recent reboot — which in 2015 put equity at the center of all Ford’s grant making.
Plotting change while supporting urgent needs
As Gerken, the former dean of the Yale Law School, makes her mark on Ford, she has emphasized the need to protect the rule of law as democratic institutions come under attack.
Big foundations like Ford need to take a “tip of the spear” approach, leading other grant makers by making big bets and moving quickly, she said.
The foundation’s new three-pronged approach will take a year to fully develop Ford’s future strategy. But Gerken stressed that its design will enable it to do so without disengaging from urgent needs.
“It’s really easy to take a long time to do a strategy refresh. It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day and not move quickly,” she said. “This is not a time that we have the luxury of stopping our grant making while we do our refresh. It is essential that we keep putting resources into the system because people need it desperately at this critical moment.”
