Promoting the Next-Generation Workforce Strategies

In the Headlines

20 April 2012

Grantee Named on List of ‘100 Most Influential People’

Time Magazine has named Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The alliance, a grantee, works to organize and secure the rights of low-wage domestic workers across the United States, most of whom are women. Poo also leads Caring Across Generations, a Ford-supported collaborative that advocates for quality care and support for all Americans. Ford funds these critical organizations under our Quality Employment initiatives—Promoting the Next-Generation Workforce Strategies and Ensuring Good Jobs and Access to Services—as well as our Increasing Civic and Political Participation initiative. Writing for Time, Gloria Steinem praised Poo for “showing the humanity of a long devalued kind of work.”

Published as part of the Time Magazine series “The 100 Most Influential People in the World”

Ai-jen Poo: Labor Organizer

April 18, 2012 By Gloria Steinem

Once in a while, there comes along a gifted organizer — think of the radical empathy of Jane Addams or the populist tactics of Cesar Chavez — who knows how to create social change from the bottom up.

Ai-jen Poo, the 38-year-old daughter of pro-democracy immigrants from Chiang Kai-shek‘s Taiwan, has been growing into that role ever since she was a student outraged by the stories of domestic workers, often immigrants or women of color, who labored long hours for low pay as maids, nannies and other household workers.

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