Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Historian O’Connor Comments on New Ford Foundation Strategy
In addition to her extensive publishing track record of books on poverty, Alice O’Connor’s Ford credentials make her comments on the new strategy announced by Ford Foundation president Darren Walker worth considering.
As NPQ Newswire readers remember, Walker has announced that the Ford Foundation’s top priority going forward will be reducing social and economic inequality, which he sees as “structurally embedded…in markets, political institutions, social attitudes, and cultural norms…not something…that can be addressed by traditional opportunity-opening grants,” as O’Connor puts it. She welcomes Walker’s appreciation of the structural dimensions of inequality, though she notes that “the analysis itself is hardly a revelation—echoing, as it does, what progressive activists and intellectuals have been saying and working-class people have been experiencing or decades....”