"What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality."

"Lack of money is a stubborn obstacle, but not as hopelessly unyielding as some of the others, and so would-be world-changers often set out to overcome it. Some try to raise money, but that can be depressing and futile. Others try to make money, but it’s hard to make enough. There is a third, more reliable way to overcome this obstacle, however, and that is to give away money that has already been made by somebody else, and has already been allocated to world-changing purposes. This is the way of the grant-makers of the Ford Foundation...

they possess a rare and heady blend of power and freedom: they are beholden to no one, neither consumers nor shareholders nor clients nor donors nor voters, and they have half a billion dollars each year to spend on whatever they like...

[The Foundation] had recently decided, in fact, that inequality was the problem of the times—more than climate change, for instance, or extremism. The foundation had been accused for years of spreading itself too thin. (The budget for 2015 was five hundred and eighteen million, but it was amazing how fast you could run through half a billion dollars with a world to fix.) So now it was going to do something dramatic: it was going to work on inequality and nothing else...

what would happen to things that could not properly be measured at all, such as oppression, or justice? What about initiatives whose success could take decades to become evident, such as social movements or the erosion of cultural norms?...

Ford thought of itself as the sort of foundation whose staff did not dictate what its grantees should do but sought out grantees with ideas and methods of their own: that was the social-justice way. But, ironically, this meant that it required far more staff than it would if it came up with its own ideas and hired people to execute them. Coming up with ideas to be executed was the sort of thing that could be done in a meeting at headquarters; but finding small, local N.G.O.s and community leaders and artists and researchers to fund in dozens of countries around the world required offices in those countries, with program staff and administrative staff and maintenance staff and gardeners and drivers, plus money for travel and hosting meetings and all the rest of it...

Humility was expensive."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/what-money-can-buy-profiles-larissa-macfarquhar

A big profile of the Ford Foundation and its history, and the history and place of foundations in America, and the current director of the Foundation and his philosophy and his very human thoughts on leadership and hierarchy.

The article doesn't necessarily synthesize everything it brings up, but it's launching so many thoughts for me about what money and intentions can do, about what we can really have knowledge about, about power and trust and appearances, about being corrupted and innocent and whether there are any real distinctions where when you reach a certain point of power and privilege.

I respect this work so much, but it also makes me that that we need new models for "doing good".