Decade: 1960s

How a foundation provided the final ingredient to an era-defining novel.

How a charismatic community activist from Watts challenged a foundation’s civil rights strategy.

The scientific, intensive agriculture that the Rockefeller Foundation pioneered on a large international scale (eventually in partnership with the Ford Foundation) was touted as a “Green Revolution” in a 1968 speech. The name stuck. How the Mexican Agriculture Program created a method for intensifying agriculture on a global level…

In 1968, the Ford Foundation began to fund minority enterprise and other social investments using a new tool, the Program-Related Investment (PRI). This photo essay shows the breadth of these investments and diversity of activities that PRIs funded in both inner city and rural environments…

A fundraising appeal from the United Negro College Fund in 1962 prompted the Rockefeller Foundation to design and launch a full-blown Equal Opportunity program, the first in its history. How a simple request come to have such a broad impact…

Environmental education was once a new, almost marginal idea. The rise of its acceptance traces partly to a series of grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to the National Audubon Society, totaling nearly one-million dollars. This funding helped Audubon reach out to youth and other new audiences in the 1960s and 1970s. In the process, Audubon itself transformed into a more modern, relevant organization…

Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of the most famous critiques of urban renewal in the postwar US. However, the book might never have been published if not for a vote of confidence from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1958…

The Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation kicked off plans to construct the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria in 1963. They viewed IITA as a vital new component of their joint efforts to increase the developing world’s food supply across the globe. But a political crisis and a subsequent civil war nearly upended the funders’ plans…

Business education as it exists today came out of a massive mid-century philanthropic effort to transform the field. Why would an American foundation take this on and what was the program’s impact? Ford Foundation leaders were looking for ways to encourage economic growth and stave off the negative aspects of economic cycles, but they saw that a real theory of business practice was absent…

In the years before Brown v. Board of Education, school desegregation loomed large in the South. The Fund for the Advancement of Education, a Ford Foundation creation, launched a massive research project in 1953. Its racially integrated research team believed that the numbers would speak for themselves on education equality. They were mistaken…