TELL US YOUR STORIES
Share Your Recollections About the Ford Foundation HERE
MEMBER FORUMS
Affinity Groups (2) |
Events (5) |
Volunteers (2) |
Classifieds () |
Recollections (1) |
 |
NEWSLETTER
|
President's Message, Winter 2015
This Newsletter’s report on the New York chapter’s meeting, Tell Us Your Stories, animates me for several reasons, among them because it realizes a primary LAFF mission: to maintain bonds among former colleagues through shared experiences.
Second, it serves to enliven our chapters, as evidenced in the recent Manila meeting and others that Suzanne Siskel, our Vice President, is encouraging.
Third, in these “best of times, worst of times”, this epoch of belief and incredulity, recounting the solid memories of our efforts to build a better world gives me hope that promise will ultimately best despair. Positive reflection on the past re-energizes, provides example and inspires recommitment.
Which brings me to the Ford Foundation History Project, Darren Walker’s welcome initiative to delve into the Ford archives, which past President Luis Ubiñas had deposited at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. Darren’s charge to Patricia Rosenfield, who leads the project with her colleague, Rachel Wimpee, is to elucidate the relevance of past Foundation programs for its future strategies.
To date, Patricia and Rachel have completed reports on arts and culture, civil rights, civil society, fellowships, South Africa and urban grant making. They are now reviewing the Foundation’s written record of its work in International Affairs and Human Rights, and, as Patricia framed her request to interview me, “there is nothing like person-to-person interaction to help us understand this history”.
Memory, as I have experienced in a writing workshop I am attending on personal history, is part fact and part interpretation (maybe even, as one participant insists, part fiction). Diverse angles of vision deepen, extend and provide a check on memory in ways that enrich our knowledge and understanding of both the object we are remembering and ourselves. Sharing our experiences prods memory, fills out the written record and enlarges the facts and interpretations we recorded in the memoranda and reports that comprise the archive. LAFF’s members’ story telling can aid in learning the lessons of the past and putting them in the service of the future.
Jim Smith, Vice President and Director of Research and Education at the Rockefeller Archives, and I once talked about co-hosting a series of conversations with LAFF members about Ford Foundation history. I wonder if the Ford Foundation History Project could be a venue for prodding our individual and collective memories in ways that might contribute constructively to the Foundation’s current efforts?
We are living once again through difficult times, witness to events that cause fear, revulsion and even disbelief. We temper these with memory–of other difficult times that came and went, of better times, and of our and others’ efforts to remediate and do good. It is what enticed us to careers in philanthropy and to the heady and wonderful years we spent at the Ford Foundation. Let’s continue to fill in those memories, meeting together, and writing!
Shep Forman
|