NEW YORK (AP) — When Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, exits the building on Jan. 1, 2026, he won’t be looking back on the institution he’s led since 2013 and which has shaped his life for longer than that.
“I am taking my shoes with me and the next leader will bring their shoes, because those will be the right shoes for the next 12 years,” Walker said in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Sitting in his office on one of the upper floors of the Ford Foundation’s building on the edge of the United Nations campus in New York, Walker said he was humbled, grateful and a little tired from fielding phone calls after his departure was announced on Monday.
“I’m going to walk out of this building and look forward. My mantra in life is to always live for the future,” Walker said, joking that he didn’t want any emeritus title or rooms named after him at the foundation’s headquarters.
Leaders of philanthropic foundations are rarely household names. While Walker may not be either, he has been profiled on “60 Minutes,” graced the cover of Town & Country magazine, and been one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People” for his work at the top of one of America’s original foundations. His leadership has profoundly influenced other philanthropies, major donors and the work of nonprofits. It’s a rare feat within philanthropy, especially for someone who is not themselves among the wealthiest people in the world like Bill Gates or MacKenzie Scott.
Walker said his campaign to influence philanthropy comes in part from his own biography of growing up in poverty and his experience fundraising for the nonprofit Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem.
“As we looked at reorienting the foundation to inequality, I wanted to grapple with the paradox that inequality contributes to the creation of foundations,” he said.
Rip Rapson, president and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, said that in addition to his public advocacy for philanthropies and nonprofits to incorporate equity and justice into their work, Walker was tremendously persuasive in private settings.
“It was simply his using his considerable charm and skill and incredible intellect to get people to agree to a set of shared values and a set of shared ideas and set of shared strategies. And he did this time and time and time again,” Rapson said.
Walker also convinced the Ford Foundation’s board to make some very big bets throughout his tenure, including to help resolve the city of Detroit’s bankruptcy in 2014. The Michigan-based Kresge Foundation put in $100 million and the Ford Foundation gave $125 million, the two largest foundation commitments to support the deal, which prevented the sale of city-owned art but also cut into the pensions of city employees.
The so-called grand bargain was an unprecedented public-private partnership to bail out one of the country’s great cities at a perilous moment. But it was also highly unusual and an early sign of Walker’s capacity to pull off bold and timely interventions.
