Ford Foundation - Definition and Overview

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The Ford Foundation is a US charitable foundation created to fund programs that promote democracy, reduce poverty and promote international understanding (see mission statement (http://www.fordfound.org/about/mission.cfm)). It was founded in 1936 with grants from Henry Ford and his son Edsel Ford of the Ford Motor Company, and was headed by McGeorge Bundy from 1966 to 1979.

Some critics have charged that the Foundation is a front organisation for the Central Intelligence Agency, claiming to distribute funds for programs in countries where US interests are threatened by local groups struggling for human rights and democracy. By making donations and then putting conditions on how funds are spent, or by obtaining personal information on human rights activists, its critics allege that the Foundation and the CIA together often succeed in diverting intellectual and organising energy of human rights activists into useless or ineffective avenues, or in dividing different human rights activist groups from one another. As former Ford Foundation president Richard Bisell acknowledged, the purpose of the Foundation was not "so much to defeat the leftist intellectuals in dialectical combat as to lure them away from their positions".

The Ford Foundation is major donor to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a media watchdog group.

External link

• The Ford Foundation (http://www.fordfound.org/)

Further reading

• James Petras (2001), The Ford Foundation and the CIA (http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/ford010102.htm). Claims that the Ford Foundation is a front organisation for the CIA.
• Frances Stonor Saunders (2001), The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New Press, ISBN 1565846648.
• David Ransom, The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid, pub. 1975, pp. 93-116 "1970 Ford Foundation : Building an Elite for Indonesia" (http://www.cia-on-campus.org/internat/indo.html). Explans how Indonesia and Globalization were crafted, and its US relationship.