Board seats at the Ford Foundation are where grantmaking policy gets set, and one of them now belongs to a lawyer who has spent her career on pay, workplace justice and the safety of women and girls. The foundation announced on October 19 that it has elected Fatima Goss Graves to its board of trustees. She is the president and chief executive officer of the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, and president of the center’s Action Fund.
The seat carries specific work. Ford’s trustees serve six-year terms, and the foundation’s own description of the job is plain: trustees set broad policies relating to grantmaking, geographic focus, investments, governance and professional standards, and they oversee independent audits. In other words, Goss Graves will help decide where an $18 billion endowment points, for a foundation that has worked on inequality for 90 years from a headquarters in New York and 10 regional offices across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.
What the chair and the president said
Ursula Burns, the board’s chair, pointed to a record. “Fatima’s track record speaks for itself, her strategic vision, fearless advocacy, and proven ability to drive meaningful organizational and systemic change make her an invaluable addition to our Board of Trustees,” Burns said. Heather Gerken, Ford’s president, used similar language and named the constituency: Goss Graves’s advocacy, she said, has “broadened pathways for communities everywhere, particularly women and girls of color.”
Goss Graves answered in the terms she uses at the Law Center. “I have dedicated my career to ensuring that all people can live with safety, dignity, and full agency over their lives and that women and their families have what they need to flourish,” she said. “I am eager to bring that same commitment to Ford’s vital mission in the years ahead.”
A familiar funder on this beat
Ford money reaches the institutions The Social Register covers, which is why a trustee election is news here and not a personnel note. Earlier this fall the foundation’s $750,000 grant to the HBCU Radio Preservation Project was the subject of our story on the effort to save Black radio archives held at Black colleges. Who sits on the board shapes whether grants like that one keep coming.
Goss Graves arrives with a public profile unusual for a trustee. She has testified before state and federal lawmakers, and she appears as a legal commentator on CBS, MSNBC, BBC, CNN, PBS and NPR. She is a graduate of UCLA and Yale Law School. The foundation’s full announcement is on PR Newswire. Her term runs six years, long enough that the grant dockets she votes on will outlast the news cycle that announced her.
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