News About Former Ford Foundation Staff

She’s been described as “going right into the lion’s den” and as “a woman with fresh thoughts” who definitely is “not one of the pack.” As an article in The New York Times recently observed, “Absolutely nothing about her screams obvious contributor to the Fox News Channel.”

Yet, notes the article, Sally Kohn has been “making a name for herself in the crowded arena of political punditry, having made her way into the business at Fox News…a favorite destination for conservative viewers.”

Kohn does not meet the usual expectations for a Fox News personality. She worked at the Foundation from 2002 to 2004 in Governance and Civil Society, ran a feminist organization, worked at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, was an organizer at the Center for Community Change for welfare reform, health care and immigration issues, and is the founder of the Movement Vision Lab, which was created to “amplify the voices of grassroots leaders and organizers.” She “prefers baggy clothes and doesn’t own a television,” wrote Elizabeth Jensen in the Times article. 

“I was one of those people on the left who was frustrated,” Kohn said in the article, “that the institutional progressive movement had, for lack of a better word, sewn its lips to the rear end of the White House….I was about movement politics, about ideas, about vision, about how to get regular people engaged in the process of making the world a better place.”

She got into television by accident, when a cable executive approached her at a conference. She was, said the executive, Geraldine Laybourne, “incredibly articulate about complex issues. She had a point of view and could put it forward in a way that made people listen to her.”

And read her. During the presidential campaign last year she wrote in a commentary on Foxnews.com that Rep. Paul Ryan’s vice presidential acceptance speech was characterized by three words: “dazzling”, “deceiving” and “distracting”. It was, she wrote, “an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.” 

The posting collected 2.1 million hits, making it one of the site’s top five original posts for the year.

David Smock, who worked in the Africa and Middle East offices from 1964 to 1980, has co-edited a new book published by the United States Institute of Peace Press titled Facilitating Dialogue: USIP’s Work in Conflict Zones.

He is senior vice president of the institute’s Centers of Innovation and director of its Religion and Peacemaking Center.

Radhika Balakrishnan was featured in an article in The Nation magazine in which the author, Laura Flanders, discussed human rights as a national political issue. “We could do with some good human rights lawyers in the budget debate in Washington,” she wrote.

She quoted Balakrishnan that, “Looking at the election we have just been through, if we had been looking at this from a human rights lens, every candidate would have to have spoken about poverty” because governments have obligations to the most vulnerable in the society.

Flanders paraphrased Balakrishnan that under international human rights accords, only some of which have been ratified by the United States, humans have rights and governments have duties, among them the duty to use the “maximum available resources” to realize the basic human rights of their people. “All of these discussions that are taking place as ‘you’re for the rich or you’re for the poor’ can be addressed in a very different way,” Balakrishnan said.

She worked in the Asia and Pacific Office of the Foundation from 1992 to 1995 and now is director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, at Rutgers University.

Charles Bailey’s recent talk at the Foundation Center on the use and effects of the chemical Agent Orange during the Vietnam War was the focus of an article in the center’s publication PhilanTopic by its president, Bradford K. Smith.  

Bailey is executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Agent Orange in Vietnam program, an initiative begun by the Foundation in 2010 and transferred to Aspen a year later. Other foundations have since helped fund the program, which is conducted in partnership with the U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin.

“The Ford Foundation,” Smith wrote, “quietly began working on the issue of dioxin remediation at a time when there was no official dialogue between the American and Vietnamese governments and none of the sixteen corporations that had produced Agent Orange would accept any liability for its devastating side effects.” 

Smith said Bailey’s talk was a “profoundly moving” presentation that “highlighted philanthropic freedom in action.”

Bailey had two tours at Ford, from 1972 to 1976 and again from 1982 to 2011, working in the Hanoi office as well as in New Delhi, Cairo, Khartoum, Dhaka, Nairobi and New York.