For more than a decade, progressive foundation leaders looking to launch ambitious programs have given each other the same advice: Run it by Darren Walker.
Walker, who broke the mold of big philanthropy leaders by virtue of his identity as a gay Black man and ambitious grant making, announced Monday that he will retire by the end of 2025 from the $16 billion Ford Foundation. For 12 years, he made headlines for orchestrating big ticket grants — from hundreds of millions of dollars to help the City of Detroit exit bankruptcy to $400 million for organizations focused on disability to the $610 million spent last year through the foundation’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice effort. Walker helped engineer Art for Justice, an effort to use the sale of art to solve criminal justice issues with equity in mind, and led a group of foundations in tapping the bond market to move billions of dollars to social causes during the pandemic.
His legacy, according to his philanthropic peers, will be rooted not just in these programs but also in how he used his perch at Ford to gather all types of leaders — union representatives, elected officials, wealthy donors, academic researchers, and grassroots leaders — to work toward eliminating inequality. Walker’s fellow foundation leaders credit him with changing the Ford Foundation from a staid institution to a very public center of gravity for the broader social justice movement.
Walker also has presided over efforts to loosen the control foundations exert over grantees by offering more multi-year grants that allow nonprofits to focus more on their work instead of fundraising. Under his watch, Ford boosted the amount of general operating support it provides. Early in Walker’s tenure, just more than one-third of the foundation’s grants were for general support. As recently as 2022, more than three-quarters of Ford’s grants had no strings attached.
Walker’s collaborative leadership style changed the entire field of philanthropy and encouraged other foundation leaders to take risks, said his fellow foundation leaders.
“I’m not being even remotely hyperbolic. He has transformed philanthropy,” said Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation.
Social Bonds of Many Kinds
Walker was a new type of leader in the upper echelons of philanthropy. A gay man raised by a single Black mother in Louisiana and East Texas, he became a corporate lawyer and banker early in his career. When he made the move to the charitable world, he served as chief operating officer of the grassroots Abyssinian Development Corporation and served as a vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation. It was a trajectory far different from that of many foundation presidents.
While his personal biography gave him the ability to navigate different situations, Walker’s success as a leader, Alexander said, comes from his subject matter expertise and overriding focus on helping people make the world a better place.
She said he told her: “Most of what we say is no,” because even pressing needs will always outstrip philanthropy’s vast resources. “But even when you are saying no to a potential grant, there is always something you can say yes to. And it is your job to figure out how to be helpful to people.”
Walker, she said, persuaded her to join several other foundations in issuing social bonds to respond to the pandemic. Interest rates were rock bottom, and Walker argued that it made sense to get immediate cash from a bond offering rather than deplete undervalued endowment assets that had been roughed up by the market.
The idea made sense to John Palfrey, who was relatively new at his job as president of the MacArthur Foundation. He had used debt as a secondary-school leader to finance campus building projects. But Walker had something much bigger in mind, Palfrey remembers.
Ford ended up making a $1 billion offering in 2020. MacArthur, Mellon, and several other foundations used many of the same lawyers and bankers to complete their deals, which altogether totaled about $3 billion in ready-to-use philanthropic capital.
By corralling the foundation leaders, Palfrey said, Walker “de-risked” the novel approach, giving them safety in numbers.
“That was, frankly, a bold decision for each of us to borrow money,” he said. “Being able to do it with Darren Walker made it more possible.”
Walker showed a willingness to develop large-scale partnerships that can get messy and complex but are intended to get behind big issues that philanthropy often felt uncomfortable addressing. It’s a role, Palfrey said, he has tried to emulate at MacArthur. MacArthur’s current Press Forward initiative, in which the Chicago grant maker is attempting to spur philanthropic giving nationwide to local newsrooms and test theories for reinvigorating the news industry, is taken directly out of Walker’s playbook, Palfrey said. The approach reflects Walker’s attempts to take visible public stances and take big swings at vexing issues.
“Darren held up the possibility of playing a different kind of role as a foundation leader,” Palfrey said.
Focus on Inequality
During his time at Ford, Walker has attracted criticism for pushing a progressive agenda. Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance has said that well-moneyed philanthropies like Ford are “cancers on society.”
Walker has also irked fellow progressives. Even as Ford finances efforts to reshape capitalism, some have complained that his position on a major corporate board — PepsiCo — undermines the foundation’s efforts to shake up market-driven approaches to the economy and dilutes his standing as a social-justice advocate. Others had harsh things to say about his position on a committee that recommended the construction of new jails to help facilitate the demolition of the Rikers Island facility. A critic of mass incarceration, they said, should not endorse prison construction.
In a 2019 response to some of the criticism, entitled “In Defense of Nuance,” Walker called for a patient approach to solving problems in a world that is complex rather than black and white.
“We need to re-establish incentives that encourage our leaders to seek more nuanced solutions and reject unproductive extremes,” he wrote.
As a leader, Walker showed that he was willing to recognize his shortcomings and try to improve, according to Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, founder of RespectAbility, a disability advocacy group. Shortly after Walker assumed his job, Mizrahi directly confronted him about the fact that his vaunted new approach to addressing inequality didn’t have any reference to people with disabilities.
Walker listened, Mizrahi said.
The foundation’s website and videos were not accessible to blind and deaf people, she recalled, and Ford’s huge New York headquarters was not an inviting place for people with mobility issues. Not only did Ford vastly improve its physical building and web presence, Mizrahi said, but it has fully incorporated disability into its effort to achieve equality. In the five years ending in 2023, Ford put $400 million toward disability groups and social-justice groups working on disability issues and in 2021 created a disability program with a $10 million annual budget.
“Darren Walker completely transformed how philanthropy looks at disability,” she said. “People really saw it as a side issue, not as part of how we can lift up everyone as part of our shared humanity. “
Similarly, Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation, credits Walker with moving equality front and center. He thinks Walker’s work getting elected officials, judges, foundation leaders, and city residents to back Detroit’s bankruptcy plan is a key part his legacy. And he credits Walker with re-establishing the Ford family’s involvement in the foundation that bears their name.
But he thinks Walker’s commitment to equality is the hallmark of his time at Ford.
“He tried to create an argument for issues of equality that basically transcended everything we did,” Rapson said. “In some ways, equality was something that philanthropy tended to pigeonhole.”
Walker was able to keep together groups of institutions and people focused on the same goal, Rapson said, because he was an amazing communicator who could crystallize complex ideas and because his goal was always to advance his work rather than himself.
“There is probably no more prominent person in philanthropy than Darren. And yet you always walked away from the conversation thinking about what he was trying to accomplish — to advance the work, not to fortify his ego or to put him in some kind of public limelight,” Rapson said.
Michael Bolden was present at the periphery of many of the negotiations during the Detroit “Grand Bargain” when he was on staff at the Knight Foundation.
Seeing Walker push for philanthropy to take a much bigger role in terms of fronting cash and bringing a disparate set of players to work on a thorny issue was inspiring, he recalled. Under Walker’s leadership there is a “center of gravity around the Ford Foundation that extends far beyond their ability to just give money,” said Bolden, who is now the chief executive of the American Press Institute.
Walker’s work at Ford, Bolden said, “drove home for me the power of effective philanthropy.”
The Ford Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
