The work of transforming our institution begins now.

Today, we announced our new strategy and seven interconnected funding areas we will develop to meet the demands of this historic moment. As we embark on the Ford Foundation’s next chapter, many have asked how we will navigate this evolution responsibly.

We believe that if we are going to meet the challenges before us, we must fund our work at scale. This means investing more deeply across all of our interconnected priorities through fewer, larger grants to ensure our partners have the resilience and agility to succeed. 

Four foundational principles will guide our approach:

• We will draw on all our assets, including our endowment, facilities, convening power, and voice, wherever Ford is positioned to make the greatest impact.
• We will sustain and strengthen the ways of working that have long made us who we are, and will continue our steadfast commitments to human potential and achievement as a means to inspire and elevate.
• We will be adaptive and agile—learning continuously, welcoming dissent, and evolving as conditions change.
• We will pair our broad global reach with deep local relationships. Our network of offices across the Global South connects us directly to the communities shaping global change, where the future of multilateralism is being shaped.

In every area, we will remain grounded in our core values while actively seeking common ground, constructive debate, and new avenues for collaboration.

To develop our new areas of work, we will reorganize grantmaking teams for a transitional year so that our new models of innovation and grantmaking can be fully operational by January 2028. 

Heather Gerken and I previously shared that we are structuring our internal operations to support this transition in January 2027. As we move forward, I want to share more about our direction.

We are embracing three imperatives for this interim organizational change. 

• First, we must move as quickly as possible to implement our newly defined areas of work, freeing up a subset of our grantmaking team from day-to-day grantmaking so they can focus on refining our strategies. 
• Second, we must ensure continuity of service and support for ongoing grantmaking while ensuring that we exit responsibly from those areas where our grantmaking is winding down.
• Third, we must be sure that members of our grantmaking teams know they have an essential role to play throughout 2027. We want our grantmakers to work together, collaboratively, and with urgency to help shape our next chapter. 

For these reasons, starting in January, current program teams will be reassigned into three temporary units, each designed to focus on a core priority of this transition period starting this January. 

The first unit, Strategy Design, will focus on sharpening the vision for thoughtful, forward-thinking strategies for the seven new areas that maximize our impact today, and in the future. 

The second unit, Transitional Grantmaking, will focus on continued grantmaking, ensuring we maintain momentum and support the ongoing work that must be done effectively at this urgent moment. 

The third unit, Sunsetting and Relationship Management, will ensure we are responsible, intentional, and thoughtful about how we wind down grants and manage relationships with impacted grantees and the sectors they serve. This transitional approach will draw on best practices and provide focused time for strategic planning without spreading teams too thin or overlooking important parts of the process.

Standing up a transitional structure adds complexity to organizational management, but it ultimately will help us step to the moment with required urgency, and to do so with care and focus.

The work ahead will require deep collaboration with the fields we serve, current and future. We are eager to embrace this year of transition to build an institution that is stronger, more responsive, and uniquely prepared to meet this moment.