Just Matters

We’re spreading the word about Public Interest Tech, an exciting field that’s eager for fresh ideas and skills.

The right to protest has always been essential to movements for human rights and social justice. But around the world, there is a big gap between the promise of that right, and its reality.

Kevin Ryan joined the Ford Foundation’s Equitable Development team earlier this year, leading our grant making in Detroit. Here, the Detroit native talks about his family’s history in the city and region, the changes he’s seen in Detroit over the years, and the shape and scope of the foundation’s grant making there.

Universal free school lunch is a simple but radical idea. It removes stigma, improves children’s health and education, and helps low-income families make ends meet. Because it is one system, it also simplifies administrative processes, allowing schools, principals, and teachers to focus on teaching.

Earlier this summer, the Ford Foundation launched an interactive tool called Your American Dream Score, which aims to help each of us examine the factors that have helped us succeed or held us back, and to start conversations about the role of inequality and opportunity in our lives.

The “American Dream”—one of the country’s most foundational principles—has long made a simple promise: Hard work leads to success. But what happens when large swaths of American society don’t buy into it?

Darren Walker reflects on four of his commencement speeches, addressing how around the world, democracy and democratic values are under siege, and our responsibilities to protect democracy. 

Despite similar crime rates, the US incarceration rate is more than five times that of comparable countries. Out of every 100,000 Americans, 693 are in prison—a number that has multiplied in the past four decades.

In 2015, the Ford Foundation decided to "walk our talk" and start a professional development program for formerly incarcerated people. Our HR department explains what the process was like. 

Your American Dream Score aims to help us examine the many experiences, systems, and institutions that have helped—or hindered—our path to where we are today, and to jump-start honest discussions about the role of inequality and opportunity in our lives.

In their new book, Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and journalist and MIT visiting scholar Jeff Howe lay out new “rules” for surviving and advancing in this age of rapid technological change.

The global refugee crisis poses a range of challenges to host countries but also economic and cultural opportunities. Policy solutions that ensure refugees’ dignity and help build their skills, talents, and assets will ensure that migrants can live full lives and contribute to their new communities.