There’s a particular email that everyone who works in the good-causes world knows by heart. It arrives from a foundation, it is warm, it is grateful, and it is full of the word “journey.” Somewhere in paragraph four it explains that your program area no longer exists.
I read the Ford Foundation’s big announcement last week the way a grantee would read it. On October 22 the new CEO unveiled the foundation’s first “major strategic reset” in more than a decade.
Nineteen program areas become seven. There is also a separate racial justice fund, because er…well. I don’t know. Because racial justice is separate from everything else? (Imagine the “nuh-uh” buzzer from Family Feud sounding, there).
Grants get bigger, longer, and more of them will be for general operating support. That’s the flexible money that lets a nonprofit pay the rent instead of writing a report about the rent. About $700 million in grants will come next year. Over the next 14 months, Ford will “wind down support” for existing grantees who do not fit the new vision. That last phrase is doing a lot of quiet work, of course.
Some existing areas will also be “absorbed” into the new categories. Absorbed, like a nutrient. I have written versions of this sentence myself, and I am not proud of them. The problem with being “absorbed” is that it asks the grantee to do the decoding. Am I still funded? Under what heading? By whom? The foundation knows the answer. The grantee? Not so much.
Starting in January, Ford’s staff move into three temporary units. They all have names that sound like the Politburo came up with them. Strategy Design. Transitional Grantmaking. And my favorite: the unit for the “Responsible Sunsetting” of areas of work. I would prefer it if they called it “Euthanasia.” But if I know my foundations, I’m sure that is what they’ll be calling it behind its back.
“Sunsetting” beats the old habit of going quiet and hoping the grantee takes the hint. Nobody asks whether the people watching the sunset feel good about it, but still. A Ford executive told press it’s too early to say which of 2,300 grantees will lose funding. He promised the exits would happen “with respect and grace and care and support.” Four nouns, no verb, no list, no date. It’s a quote that reads like a mood board.
In the gaps, grantees assume the worst. They phone their board and start shopping their programs to other foundations. They start having conversations about “contingency planning” with their operations people. God forbid you have a job at one of these organizations.
The truth is, the need for reform of major foundations is real. Ford named the moment. The CEO said the pivot comes amid an “emboldened strain of 21st-century authoritarianism.” She pointed to $80 million this year for nonprofits safeguarding election results. There is a doubled immigration budget. There is more work for marginalized communities. “Those are places where not everyone is staying. We are staying,” the CEO said.
Still, Connie Laurin-Bowie, who runs the Disability Rights Fund, gave an interesting quote. She told press that she has heard the “mainstreaming” promise before. “In other contexts, I’ve been really critical of saying, ‘We’re going to mainstream disability.’” Why? “Because what I’ve seen is it is a way to make it invisible,” she said.
She is describing what being “absorbed” sounds like from the other side of the email. A category that disappears into another category does not always survive the journey. I am skeptical of disability justice work continuing with the same vigor at Ford. That’s not only bad communications, it’s bad for fairness and justice in America.
Ford’s announcement is better than most, and the unrestricted money is real. But the test of a foundation’s communications is simple. Can the grantee who got the bad news forward it to their board without adding a translation? On that test, “absorbed” fails. “Responsible sunsetting” fails. “With respect and grace and care and support” fails. None of these euphemistic phrases answer the question the funded reader actually has. That is: Am I still funded?
Ford’s communications people: You can do a lot better. If you feel you can’t, quit. Don’t associate your reputations with this kind of nonsense. Now there’s a direct piece of written communication! It’s so refreshing, isn’t it?
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Matt Davis is a strategic communications consultant.
