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News About Former Ford Foundation Staff

 

Lisa Mensah has been nominated by President Barack Obama to be Undersecretary of Agriculture for Rural Development, where she will oversee the department’s multi-billion dollar loan, grant and technical assistance programs that support community economic development and financing.
 
Mensah has been executive director of the Aspen Institute Initiative on Financial Security, leading a team of financial security experts studying financial products and public policy solutions that “help build wealth from birth to retirement for America’s working families.”
 
Under her leadership, said Elliot Gerson, Aspen’s executive vice president, the Initiative “shed new light on the financial policies and products that will help more Americans save, invest and own” through “sensible policies that have bipartisan support, industry input and match consumer needs.”
 
Before moving to the Aspen Institute she worked at the Foundation for 13 years, until 2002, in a variety of positions that promoted the use of financial tools to improve the economic security of the working poor. As Deputy Director of Economic Development she led initiatives in microfinance and women’s economic development. She also was instrumental in the creation of Individual Development Accounts (IDA), an innovative savings account that uses matching incentives and personal financial training to finance homeownership, entrepreneurship and education. 
 
IDAs grew quickly from an experiment at a handful of sites to become a tool used by hundreds of community organizations in all 50 states.
 
Robert Curvin’s new book, a review of the tribulations of Newark, N.J., has been praised as a “probing, highly personal and painfully fair appraisal of Newark’s past six decades….”
In his review for The Newark Star-Ledger of Inside Newark, Jonathan E. Lazarus writes that “Curvin’s associations with key figures, extensive interviews and institutional memory mesh forcefully and lend amplitude to the narrative. Anyone who resides in or near the city, or once did, or feels like a stakeholder in the great urban outcome should dwell deeply on his journey.”
 
The book’s subtitle, “Decline, Rebellion and the Search for Transformation”, aptly describes its narrative flow and the author’s assessment of the city’s own journey in recent decades.
 
“Curvin manages,” writes Lazarus, “to exploit his perspectives as both an observer and a participant to gauge the feelings of hope and despair that have marked the Brick City’s upheavals from a manufacturing center of immigrants to an out-migration destination for southern blacks to decades of postwar decline to July 12, 1967, when all things imploded.”
That date was the start of five days of rioting that left 26 people dead, caused damages in the millions and left the city as a symbol of racial enmity. Curvin, a co-founder of the local Congress of Racial Equality, was called to police headquarters by anxious officials on the first night in the hope that his influence would calm the rioters.
 
He writes with “palpable enthusiasm”, the reviewer states, “Yet the persistent disconnect between officials and residents troubles him greatly, as does Newark politics practiced as a blood sport devoid of ‘vision’.” 
 
Curvin, a visiting scholar at Rutgers University’s Edward J. Blaustein School of Planning and Public Policy, was director of the Foundation’s Urban Poverty Program from 1988 to 1996 and its vice president for communications from 1996 to 2000.
 
His book is published by Rutgers University Press.
 
Three national non-profit organizations have reached into the ranks of the Foundation to hire new leaders. 
 
George W. McCarthy, an economist at the Foundation since 2000, has been named the fifth president of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think tank and research center in Cambridge, Mass., that promotes sound land use policy throughout the world.
 
“This is a pivotal and important time for cities around he world,” McCarthy said at the time of his appointment. “The Lincoln Institute plays a unique and extremely important role in identifying the central importance of land policies across a range of social and economic challenges. 
 
“The story of opportunity is told in how we organize ourselves spatially. Without an effective response, we will double the one billion people living in unplanned settlements around the world’s cities in the next thirty years. Land use decisions made today will dictate the life chances of generations to come.”
 
McCarthy went to work at the Foundation in 2000 as administer of a program that focused on using homeownership to build wealth for low-income families and their communities. In 2008 he became director of Metropolitan Opportunity, a Foundation initiative that sought to improve access to jobs and other opportunities to alleviate poverty and reduce its concentration within metropolitan areas.
 
Before working at Ford, McCarthy was an economics professor and research associate at several institutions, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bard College, King’s College of Cambridge University, the University of Naples and the Centre for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg, Russia.
 
Marta L. Tellado, the Foundation’s vice president for global communications, has been chosen as the new chief executive of Consumer Reports.
 
“We do need to move increasingly into the digital space,” said a spokesperson for the company, “and Marta has the skills to help us do that.”
 
Tellado said she will focus the company’s work on “rebuilding a movement for consumers and reintroducing the power of consumers to generations that aren’t familiar with it.”
 
Consumer Reports, a nonprofit organization that does not accept advertising for its print edition, earned $259 million in 2013, up from $249 million three years earlier. It has eight million subscribers to its primary magazine, website and other publications.
 
Tellado, who began her career working for Ralph Nader, will take over at the company in the fall.
 
Surina Khan, director of the Democracy, Rights and Justice Program at the Foundation, returns to the Women’s Foundation of California, which works to increase the economic security of low-income women and families. She becomes its chief executive officer in September. 
 
Kahn has worked for 20 years in philanthropy, women’s rights and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. She had spent six years at the Women’s Foundation before joining Ford in 2011 as a program officer specifically to begin its first LGBT Rights Initiative. Then, as Director of Gender Rights and Equality, she oversaw the work of the Foundation globally in women’s rights, LGBT rights and HIV/AIDS. Most recently she was Interim Director of Democratic Participation and Governance, overseeing efforts to promote electoral reform, strengthen civic participation and promote accountable government.
 
The Women’s Foundation has offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles and assets of $10 million. Since its founding 35 years ago it has been a pioneer in the use of strategic investments, women’s leadership development and public policy programs that deal with such issues as domestic violence, reproductive rights and the impact of budget cuts on safety net programs. 
 
Dr. Natalia Kanem, who as the founding president of ELMA Philanthropies spearheaded its efforts in providing services that promote health and education for African children, has been named representative of the United Nations Population Fund in Tanzania. 
 
Dr. Kanem started with the Ford Foundation in 1992 as a program officer in Nigeria and later became its representative there. She moved to the New York headquarters office in 1996 as director of the Office of Management Services and in 2001 was named Deputy Vice President for the Peace and Social Justice Program, overseeing global grantmaking in human rights and international cooperation.
 
She is a pediatrician trained in epidemiology and preventive medicine with expertise in women’s reproductive health and the social consequences of HIV/AIDS and infertility. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, earned her medical degree at Columbia University and has a master’s degree in public health from the University of Washington.
 
Prior to joining Ford she co-directed the Harlem Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention and held a joint appointment in pediatrics and epidemiology at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and School of Public Health.
 
Tom Malinowski was only three months into his new job as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor when he was pulled into the maelstrom that is Middle East politics.
 
Malinowski was on the first day of a three-day visit to the troubled island nation of Bahrain on July 6 when he was ordered out of the country. He had interfered in the country’s domestic affairs, said a government spokesman, by favoring some groups over others, displaying actions that “run counter to conventional diplomatic norms.”
 
His “action” was to meet on that first day with representatives of a Shiite group, Al-Wefaq, in a country where the Shiite majority has been engaged in near-daily protests seeking greater political rights from the minority Sunni monarchy. “He had a vision to end the political crisis in Bahrain,” said a spokesman for the Shiite group, “especially since the region is witnessing political unrest in Iraq and Syria.”
 
The State Department said it was “deeply concerned” by the decision of the government. It said Malinowski’s visit “had been coordinated in advance and warmly welcomed and encouraged by the government of Bahrain….” Then, it said, “in violation of international diplomatic protocol, the government insisted…to have a Foreign Ministry representative present at all” of Malinowski’s meetings with individuals and groups “representing a broad spectrum of Bahraini society.”
 
Bahrain, where the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet is based,  said its relations with the United States remain strong and that it was reacting only to the “divisive” nature of  Malinowski’s visit with the opposition Shiite group.
 
Malinowski was a research assistant at the Foundation from 1992 to 1993.

 

 

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