Topic: Economic Inequality
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A “Constructive and Important Failure”: A Foundation Funds Job Training in the 1970s and 1980s
Prompted by Reagan-era budget cuts, a new program serving low-income single parents receiving public aid failed to meet its constituents’ needs.
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Timeline: A Century of American Philanthropy’s Engagement with Race and Racism
Delving into a century of philanthropic engagement with race, from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights era.
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Funding a Social Movement: The Ford Foundation and Civil Rights, 1965-1970
A story recounting many accusations, from rigged elections to the meddling of big private money in grassroots organizing.
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Ted Watkins and the Rockefeller Foundation: An Unlikely Partnership
How a charismatic community activist from Watts challenged a foundation’s civil rights strategy through a jobs training program.
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“Investment Philanthropy” Investing for Social Good, a Century Ago
An early twentieth-century foundation tried using its endowment to support for-profit projects that also would achieve a social goal.
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Photo Essay: Supporting Minority Enterprise in the late 1960s
In 1968, the Ford Foundation began to make social investments using a new tool borrowed from the for-profit world, the Program-Related Investment.
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Can Data Drive Social Change? Tackling School Segregation with Numbers
In the years before Brown v. Board, a philanthropic fund hoped research and data would turn the tide on attitudes toward segregation.
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Supporting Economic Justice? The Ford Foundation’s 1968 Experiment in Program Related Investments
How the largest US foundation began supporting market-based projects in the late 1960s.