Former Wall Street Executive Brings Finance Skills to Rockefeller
By nicole lewis
Contributor
January 24, 2002 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Seven years ago Darren Walker quit his Wall Street job after attending a fund-raising event
at a private school in Harlem where only two of the 22 board members were black. It was time, he reasoned, for him and other successful people who grew up in working-class families and benefited from the civil-rights movement to help other blacks.
“It’s very important that we as African-Americans realize we cannot pull the ladder up behind us,” he says. “We have an obligation to our communities. We cannot simply move to the suburbs and leave our brothers and sisters in inner cities behind.”
Mr. Walker decided to work for a year as a full-time volunteer at the Harlem school, the Children’s Storefront School, where he did a bit of everything, including writing grant proposals and substitute teaching. He fell in love with Harlem, and found a paid job as chief operating officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a nonprofit group that steers businesses and low-cost housing to Harlem, where he uses his finance skills to better poor people’s lives.
Mr. Walker, 42, is now preparing to bring his experience in helping revitalize downtrodden neighborhoods to a larger audience. On February 4, he will start a new job at the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York, where he will have wide-ranging influence over enhancing the lives of poor people across the country.
As director of the Working Communities division at the foundation, Mr. Walker will oversee a program that distributed $33-million in grants last year, more than four times the annual budget of his current employer. The Working Communities division awards grants to improve inner-city schools and enhance employment opportunities for poor people, as well as to encourage residents to become personally invested in changing their neighborhoods.
Mr. Walker, whose nonprofit group never received a grant from Rockefeller, says he was attracted to the job in part because the division finances organizations that focus on local problems as well as those that tackle larger issues related to the causes of poverty and how to end it. For example, in 2000, Working Communities grant recipients included the Omega Boys Club of San Francisco, which received $100,000 for its antiviolence radio show aimed at urban youngsters, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research organization in Washington that received $750,000 to monitor how federal policies and budget allocations affect the poor.
While the 89-year-old Rockefeller Foundation has long made fighting poverty one of its goals, in 1999 it redoubled that commitment by reorganizing its grant making to focus most of its awards on efforts to help poor and disenfranchised people worldwide (The Chronicle, December 16, 1999). Of the five new divisions, Working Communities is the only one that concentrates mainly on grant making in the United States. In 2001 the foundation, which has assets of $3.1-billion, distributed $156-million in grants.
In an interview, Mr. Walker talked about his previous work and future plans.
How will lessons learned at the Abyssinian Development Corporation inform your grant making?
Understanding that it’s important to work with a sense of urgency, that livelihoods and opportunities for people are impacted by decisions people within foundations make, and to be mindful of that. One example is where we worked with a block association that was desperate to restore a public park that had turned into a horrible, blighted piece of land. Our ability to work with that block was impacted by decisions made at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, one of our funders. We appealed to them with a group of local leaders to help staff a position to work on the block with residents, to develop leadership of residents, and to organize residents around quality-of-life issues, and they responded.
What appeals to you about working at a foundation?
What I am interested in now is working on broader societal issues. If your interest is working on broader societal issues and on policy development to support empowerment of poor people in low-income communities, the opportunity to do that in a well-known, respected foundation is ideal.
As someone who has been a grant recipient, how do you think foundation money can be most effective?
When it represents long-range commitments to responding to or solving a particular challenge. A long-term commitment to organizations is important because frequently, if you are in fact attempting to solve a systemic or seemingly intractable challenge, it’s highly unlikely that is it going to occur within a two-year grant cycle.
Your nonprofit work experience has been in Harlem. Will it be challenging to expand your scope nationally?
Much of what I’ve learned as a practitioner on the ground in Harlem really transcends geography. Harlem has more in common with the south side of Chicago or South Central or the fifth ward of Houston than one might think, and the institutional impediments that exist that have created poor inner-city communities are as prevalent in New York City as they are in Los Angeles or Houston or D.C.
What past experience prepared you most for this job?
As a young boy, I was a busboy in a nice restaurant, and it was very interesting to be on the periphery but not a participant in a feast that seemed to occur every evening. Everyone who works in a foundation should have that kind of experience, because it gives you a sense of how people who are on the margins live their lives every day working. Foundations are powerful institutions in American society and as such it’s important to understand who we serve and who we exist to empower. It’s important to do that with humility, with empathy, and with an understanding of what it must feel like to be in a society and to not participate in the wealth and opportunity of that society.
How might you expand the Working Communities program?
It’s premature to suggest what Working Communities will do in addition to what it currently does. It’s important to know that there are solutions to many of the problems that persist in our society and that make life difficult for poor people. What we need to do is to find those success stories and ensure that the stories get told. For example, there are successful inner-city schools across this country. If you were to ask the average American what is the state of inner-city schools, most would say very poor. Yet there are many success stories, so we need to look at those models of success, whether it be in education, housing, or the rights arena and exalt and support those success stories so we can use them to inform our policy makers and our leaders in this country.
Education: Earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin and his law degree from the University of Texas School of Law.
Previous employment: Currently serves as chief operating officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization that tackles improving the quality of life for low-income residents in Harlem. The organization’s programs include working with government agencies, foundations, and corporations to provide low-cost housing and working to attract businesses that will employ local residents. He has also held several finance jobs in the for-profit world, including associate for capital markets at the Union Bank of Switzerland, in New York.
Charitable interests: Mr. Walker spent a year as a full-time volunteer at the Children’s Storefront School in Harlem, a private school that offers education tuition-free for local children. He donates financially to the Hetrick Martin Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on the needs of gay and lesbian youth, in New York.
Hobbies: Mr. Walker is a longtime subscriber to the New York City Ballet.
