Updated at 3:30, July 25:
The Ford Foundation reached into its own ranks to tap Darren Walker—a longtime foundation professional with extensive nonprofit and corporate experience—as its next president.
Mr. Walker, a gay black man who grew up in a small town in Texas, worked for nearly a decade as a lawyer and bond salesman on Wall Street before giving up corporate life in 1995 to volunteer for a year at a school in Harlem.
He went on to become chief operating officer at Abyssinian Development Corporation, a community-development group in Harlem. Mr. Walker then worked for many years at the Rockefeller Foundation, before moving to Ford in 2010 as vice president for education, creativity, and free expression.
“The opportunity to lead the Ford Foundation is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for someone of my background, with the interest in social justice and the passion for social-change work that I have,” Mr. Walker said in an interview on Thursday.
Mr. Walker’s selection—he will officially take over in September—was widely praised by philanthropy peers, who described him as a well-connected and energetic manager with an unusual ability to build consensus among different groups of people.
“I’ve never seen anyone with a better capacity to move across sectors than Darren,” said Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, who promoted Mr. Walker to one of two vice-president positions during her controversial shake-up at Rockefeller eight years ago. “He’s really incredible at it.”
Mr. Walker didn’t hint that he was eyeing the transformative change that Ms. Rodin undertook at Rockefeller. Instead, he heaped praise on his predecessor, Luis Ubiñas, who shocked the philanthropy sector in March by announcing that he would step down as Ford’s president after just five years on the job.
“Let me say that I am celebrating Luis’s tenure,” Mr. Walker said. “The foundation is on a very strong footing operationally, and our endowment has weathered the worst recession since the Great Depression. I am inheriting a foundation that is in excellent shape.”
Mr. Walker said he would spend the first few months on the job meeting with staff members, grantees, and others before making any major strategic decisions. While he declined to identify any areas of the foundation’s work that he would seek to expand, he did say that he was troubled by the “growing inequality in the United States and around the world” and he would bring greater foundation focus to the problem.
“We are alarmed by this trend,” he said. “It has implications for social justice and for opportunity.”
Ford’s staff, which once stood at 550 employees, was cut significantly as its endowment fell by 30 percent during the recession. The endowment, worth nearly $11-billion at the last official count in September 2012, has now topped its pre-recession high, according to Mr. Walker, but Ford’s reduced staffing level persists, at just 390 employees.
Mr. Walker said any decisions on whether to add to the staff would be made based on programmatic needs.
“We won’t take a formulaic approach to staffing,” he said. “Form should follow function. It would be imprudent to discuss a number without having an understanding of what our grant-making strategy requires going forward.”
As a youth, and throughout his career, Mr. Walker said, he benefited from programs that were supported or championed by the Ford Foundation. He participated in Head Start programs as a five-year old in Goose Creek, Tex., 30 miles outside Houston. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982, with help from the federal Pell Grant program. Abyssinian received grants from Ford while Mr. Walker helped lead that community-development corporation.
Ford tapped Mr. Walker for the top job after conducting a five-month search that included an “extraordinarily high number of strong candidates,” Irene Hirano Inouye, chair of Ford’s Board of Trustees, said in a statement.
Mr. Walker is “an excellent leader for a global organization with grassroots sensibilities, and we’re very proud that he emerged from within Ford’s own pool of talent,” she said.
Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, praised Ford for looking internally as it searched for a new leader. The center conducted a study last year of how chief executives at the 100 largest foundations got to their positions, and found that 60 had not worked at a foundation in their previous post. Only a fifth of the CEOs—21 out of 100—had been promoted internally by the foundation.
“Running a foundation well is actually really hard work,” Mr. Buchanan said. “Measurement is much more difficult in philanthropy than in other sectors, because you’re working on some of the toughest problems. So knowing something about how a foundation is run can be a real advantage.”
Geri Mannion, who directs the U.S. democracy grants program for the Carnegie Corporation of New York, called Mr. Walker a “terrific choice” who is unlikely to conduct the radical overhaul that an outsider might undertake.
“I wish more foundations would look for leadership within the sector—people who understand the nuances of philanthropy and don’t feel like they have to start from scratch,” she said.
Mr. Walker serves on several boards, including those of the Arcus Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, and the New York City Ballet. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His partner, David Beitzel, is an art dealer in Manhattan.
Ralph Smith, senior vice president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, said the respect that Mr. Walker already has earned within the foundation world will position him well to become an important philanthropic leader.
“He can cut right to the core of an issue,” Mr. Smith said. “He can add that new insight. I’ve seen him with just a few words tilt an entire conversation in a more positive and productive direction.”
Previous version of this story posted on July 24, at 9 p.m.
The Ford Foundation on Wednesday announced that its new leader is Darren Walker, a vice president at the fund who previously worked at the Rockefeller Foundation and served as a top official at a major Harlem community-development group.
Mr. Walker succeeds Luis A. Ubiñas, whose sudden announcement in March that he was resigning stunned philanthropy insiders. Mr. Ubiñas, a former McKinsey & Company executive who took over the foundation in 2007, did not say what he would do next.
Before joining the nonprofit world, Mr. Walker worked as an international lawyer and then in the capital-markets division of Union Bank of Switzerland.
At the beginning of the decade, he made a major career switch, volunteering at a school that serves poor children in Harlem and then becoming chief operating officer of Abyssinian Development Corporation.
Mr. Walker was vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation before he joined Ford in 2010. He oversees grant making focused on education, creativity, and free expression.
The promotion of an internal candidate is more in keeping with Ford’s recent history than the hiring of Mr. Ubiñas, who took over after Susan Berresford retired. Ms. Berresford led Ford for a dozen years and had worked there since 1970.
Dig deeper: See what experts hoped Ford would consider as it chose its new chief executive.