By Lesley Stahl, CBS News, August 1, 2021
Imagine if your job were to give away upwards of $500 million a year trying to make the world a better place. That is the enviable, or perhaps unenviable, task of Darren Walker, president of one of this country's largest and most prominent philanthropies, the Ford Foundation.
A gay Black man who grew up poor in a single-parent home in rural Texas, Darren Walker is probably not who Henry Ford would have chosen to give away the proceeds of the family fortune. Walker believes that in this time of stark and growing inequality -- of staggering wealth for a few, but stagnation for far too many -- philanthropy needs a major rethink. And, as we first reported this spring, he's using his checkbook and his charm to make the case that generosity is no longer enough.
As Ford Foundation president, Darren Walker oversees a $14 billion endowment and a landmark headquarters building in Manhattan where more than 1,500 grants are made each year to non-profit organizations in the U.S. and around the world. Its grants helped create giants like public broadcasting and Sesame Street, Human Rights Watch, and Head Start, a program Walker says made a huge difference in his own life as a poor kid in East Texas. He was in its very first class.
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