Darren Walker's Ford Foundation legacy reached far beyond its walls

NEW YORK (AP) — When Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, exits the building on Jan. 1, 2026, he won’t be looking back on the institution he's led since 2013 and which has shaped his life for longer than that.

“I am taking my shoes with me and the next leader will bring their shoes, because those will be the right shoes for the next 12 years,” Walker said in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Sitting in his office on one of the upper floors of the Ford Foundation's building on the edge of the United Nations campus in New York, Walker said he was humbled, grateful and a little tired from fielding phone calls after his departure was announced on Monday.

“I’m going to walk out of this building and look forward. My mantra in life is to always live for the future,” Walker said, joking that he didn't want any emeritus title or rooms named after him at the foundation's headquarters.

Leaders of philanthropic foundations are rarely household names. While Walker may not be either, he has been profiled on “60 Minutes,” graced the cover of Town & Country magazine, and been one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People” for his work at the top of one of America's original foundations. His leadership has profoundly influenced other philanthropies, major donors and the work of nonprofits. It's a rare feat within philanthropy, especially for someone who is not themselves among the wealthiest people in the world like Bill Gates or MacKenzie Scott.

Walker said his campaign to influence philanthropy comes in part from his own biography of growing up in poverty and his experience fundraising for the nonprofit Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem.

“As we looked at reorienting the foundation to inequality, I wanted to grapple with the paradox that inequality contributes to the creation of foundations,” he said.

Rip Rapson, president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, said that in addition to his public advocacy for philanthropies and nonprofits to incorporate equity and justice into their work, Walker was tremendously persuasive in private settings.

“It was simply his using his considerable charm and skill and incredible intellect to get people to agree to a set of shared values and a set of shared ideas and set of shared strategies. And he did this time and time and time again,” Rapson said.

Walker also convinced the Ford Foundation's board to make some very big bets throughout his tenure, including to help resolve the city of Detroit's bankruptcy in 2014. The Michigan-based Kresge Foundation put in $100 million and the Ford Foundation gave $125 million, the two largest foundation commitments to support the deal, which prevented the sale of city-owned art but also cut into the pensions of city employees.

The so-called grand bargain was an unprecedented public-private partnership to bail out one of the country's great cities at a perilous moment. But it was also highly unusual and an early sign of Walker's capacity to pull off bold and timely interventions.

The commitment to Detroit also laid the groundwork for the Ford Foundation to reconcile with members of the Ford family, who last sat on the foundation board in 1976. At that time, Henry Ford II very publicly resigned, complaining of differences between himself and the foundation.

Walker described meeting with Bill Ford and Sheila Ford, who are descendants of Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Co. whose fortune seeded the endowment of the foundation. Eventually, Henry Ford III joined the foundation's board in 2019, a reconciliation that Walker is very proud of.

“The Fords made possible this foundation’s existence and to me, it was unacceptable for us to be indifferent to that truth,” Walker said.

Under his leadership, Ford has made major commitments to fund disability rights, to interrogate new technologies and their social impacts and to back feminist movements around the world. Walker helped launch a $100 million initiative funded by philanthropist and arts patron Agnes Gund to fight against mass incarceration. The foundation also has explicitly considered the impact of its investments in the context of its mission.

Walker advocated for the commitment of $1 billion from its endowment for impact investments. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and uprising for racial justice in 2020, he proposed issuing a $1 billion social bond. That essentially leveraged the foundation's endowment to take out debt that it then used over two years to help stabilize nonprofits who had lost funding during the pandemic.

The outpouring of kind words, superlatives, praise and appreciation for Walker was immediate when his resignation was announced. His admirers point to Walker's personal biography as a gay, Black man from the American South and his experience in the corporate world and working in nonprofits as an unusually valuable and effective mix.

Susan Taylor Batten, president and CEO of ABFE: A Philanthropic Partnership for Black Communities, called Walker a “student of philanthropy,” who understood the importance of building the infrastructure and institutions of the sector.

“There wasn’t anybody more authentic than Darren Walker. He was very clear about his identity. And, again, I believe representation matters, and so I remember when he got the position at Ford, we celebrated," she said. ABFE has long advocated for philanthropy to pay attention to the issues of the Black community and for the inclusion of African Americans and other people of color within the leadership of philanthropic organizations. To that point, Taylor Batten said the data shows some improvement.

“We still have a lot of work to do in this sector as well as others,” she said. “But, he clearly paved the path for others to come after him.”

Walker doesn’t know what he’ll do next after the foundation’s board chooses his replacement, but said he’ll be sprinting toward the finish line. He said he was confident that trustees will choose someone who shares the conviction that the best way to support a nonprofit is to give it general operating support.

In his office, Walker has hung multiple photos of Martin Luther King Jr. and on a shelf, has a framed quotation of King's that he often references. It urges philanthropists not to forget the economic injustice that makes the work of philanthropy necessary. It's a piece of truth that he's long sought to impart to others in the field, including through his 2023 book, "From Generosity to Justice."

“I wanted to use Dr. King’s words to frame the idea that the work of philanthropy is not just charity and generosity, but should also be dignity and justice and that for the philanthropist, that is a different experience.” Walker said. “Because it requires the philanthropist to interrogate our own complicity in the very problems we are now seeking to solve through philanthropy.”

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Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.