Building on Tradition: New Ford Foundation Leader Luis Ubinas Outlines Goals

Ford Foundation’s new leader brings to the job management skills and a passion for social justice

Luis A. Ubiñas, president of the Ford Foundation, leans over a railing that overlooks the soaring 12-story atrium in the fund’s headquarters here. The office, built in 1967, was the first attempt by American architects to create an enclosed garden on such an enormous scale. Yet, he says, the building still manages to seem modern today.

In a sense, that view parallels Mr. Ubiñas’s perspective on the foundation itself.

While the Ford Foundation has been criticized by some nonprofit leaders for growing too staid, too cautious, and too unresponsive to change, particularly as a new generation of foundations has emerged, Mr. Ubiñas says his role will be less about spurring the fund’s evolution than building on its traditions.

“Ford is firmly in the 21st century,” he says. “There isn’t a single issue of current relevance that Ford isn’t spending substantial time and energy and money on.”

Mr. Ubiñas joins the Ford Foundation, the country’s second-wealthiest grant maker with nearly $13.8-billion in assets, after spending 18 years at the management-consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He worked in the company’s San Francisco office, where he advised Fortune 100 media, technology, and telecommunications companies.

Some people in the philanthropic world are hopeful that Mr. Ubiñas, 45, won’t shy away from making changes to Ford’s grant making.

“Change for them would be healthy,” says Peter Wilderotter, president of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, in Short Hills, N.J., and a former fund raiser for several Ford grantees. “They’ve provided great leadership in some areas after September 11, for example. But on the whole, in areas of civic engagement, I think they’ve been a little behind the curve.”

Listening to Grantees

Other big grant makers have undergone changes in the past few years. Last October, the Carnegie Corporation of New York simplified its giving, while the Rockefeller Foundation made a similar move the previous year.

Mr. Ubiñas, who began in January following the retirement of his predecessor, Susan V. Berresford, says he does not intend to steer Ford away from causes it has traditionally supported.

“I think the foundation is doing the right things,” he says.

Many of the issues that it has long focused on — economic inequality, segregation, voting rights, migration — are as relevant today as ever, he says.

Mr. Ubiñas says he will spend the next year meeting with trustees, staff members, grantees, and others in the nonprofit world. Any announcements about new programs or focuses of the foundation’s giving won’t come before 2009.

That kind of timeline has been typical for Ford Foundation leaders. Observers say it is valuable to spend much of the first year visiting grant recipients and familiarizing oneself with the foundation’s work, particularly for someone like Mr. Ubiñas, who has no prior grant-making experience.

“The folks who do that are far better off than the folks who say, ‘I’m large and in charge and am going to come up with a plan in a few minutes to transform this institution,’” says Joel J. Orosz, a professor of philanthropic studies at Grand Valley State University. “They have to learn to spell ‘philanthropy’ before they can transform it.”

Others urged Mr. Ubiñas to cast a wide net in his conversations, talking to those, for example, who fall on the conservative side of the political spectrum.

“He needs to reach out beyond the normal coterie of advisers,” says Leslie Lenkowsky, director of graduate studies at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. “That’s been long overdue at Ford.”

‘Perfect Combination’

Some philanthropy experts have wondered if Mr. Ubiñas’s selection is an indication that the foundation plans to apply more business principles to its management and grant making. A greater emphasis on accountability, as well as the emergence of new foundations that some observers say are more efficient, has put pressure on grant makers to adopt such for-profit approaches. But Mr. Ubiñas says the corporate world doesn’t have all the answers for charities.

“I don’t see that kind of dichotomy,” he says. “Basic good management principles have been brought to the foundation world and will continue to be brought to the foundation world.”

Charity and foundation leaders familiar with Mr. Ubiñas say he defies categorization as a number cruncher.

“The fact that he’s a management expert who is also a person with a strong passion about the issues of social justice, and has a voice that he can use on behalf those issues, is, to me, a perfect combination,” says Gara LaMarche, president of Atlantic Philanthropies, in New York, who met Mr. Ubiñas through a mutual friend.

Kathryn S. Fuller, who leads Ford’s board, says that Mr. Ubiñas’s business expertise wasn’t a “driving force” in his selection. But she says his ability to bring a fresh perspective to the foundation’s world — and that of philanthropy as a whole — will be an asset.

“I think he’ll be somebody who will infuse new energy into philanthropy and into this institution,” she says. His life story, says Ms. Fuller, “emblemizes the values of the foundation.”

Mr. Ubiñas grew up in the South Bronx, hopscotching from one apartment to another. His parents had emigrated from Puerto Rico before he was born. His mother worked as a seamstress. His father, he says, struggled with substance-abuse problems and had trouble holding down a job.

But an able guidance counselor helped steer Mr. Ubiñas toward some of Manhattan’s most prestigious schools. He graduated from the Allen-Stevenson and Collegiate Schools on scholarship before receiving bachelor’s and business degrees from Harvard University.

He spent the summer before his senior year of high school at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. The program was run by Leadership Education and Development, a Philadelphia charity that he advises today.

A ‘Second Career’

But Mr. Ubiñas says his dream was to work as a civil-rights lawyer, not in business. Hearing about the speeches of President Lyndon Johnson, watching the Watergate hearings, and learning about the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he says, all had a profound impact on his thinking.

Mr. Ubiñas speaks about the influence that charitable organizations have had on his life, helping to fight poverty, racism, and other issues that were churning in the country during his youth.

He describes the “material effect of places like the Ford Foundation” on New York and the rest of the world during the 1960s and 1970s. The fund’s grantees helped to spur urban development, widen access to education, and expand voting rights. “Those were all issues that were in my life at least, every day, that weren’t amorphous, intangible issues, and they were Ford Foundation issues,” he says.

After completing his education, Mr. Ubiñas says, he couldn’t afford to take a job at a nonprofit group. But he began volunteering with the intention of having a “second career” in the nonprofit world. Much of his work on behalf of charities has been helping organizations expand and start new programs.

Ric Ramsey, president of Leadership in Education and Development, says he first approached Mr. Ubiñas a few years ago, hoping for a large check. Instead, Mr. Ramsey says, Mr. Ubiñas gave him countless hours of advice on how to expand the charity. That advice has helped Mr. Ramsey create a program for aspiring engineers and expand the charity globally. (Eventually, Mr. Ramsey says, he also got a check.)

A Changing World

Mr. Ubiñas says it is too early to tell what new causes the foundation might support. But he emphasizes that confronting emerging challenges builds on the foundation’s past work.

In the world of media, for example, the Ford Foundation has long supported public broadcasting and radio. Discovering how to use cellphones and computers to elevate independent voices and educate and engage people isn’t all that different, according to Mr. Ubiñas.

“That isn’t new work for the foundation,” he says. “That’s very traditional work.”

Mr. Ubiñas paints a picture of a world very much in flux, with populations migrating to different parts of the world at a pace not seen since the Industrial Revolution and a new administration poised to enter the White House next year. But it is also a time, he says, in which intractable social problems have re-emerged.

Four decades after President Johnson’s War on Poverty, income gaps between rich and poor are widening in the United States and overseas. The disenfranchisement of black men, he says, may be greater than before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Fifty-four years after Brown v. Board of Education overturned segregation in public schools, low-income, minority children are still attending failing schools made up primarily of people just like them.

“There’s a level of resegregation in the schools that many people aren’t sure is better or worse than 40 years ago,” he says. “Some of these challenges we haven’t seen in many decades.”

Mr. Ubiñas says his work at Ford will be about helping to support innovative leaders and organizations to meet those challenges, just as the foundation helped to build the women’s-rights and human-rights movements decades ago.

“We should be so lucky to be able to continue that track record of success we’ve had in providing innovative, early funding to organizations in fields that sometimes don’t even exist,” he says.

‘A Full Plate’

Ms. Fuller, the Ford chairwoman, says that the foundation will see some turnover in the next few years as some employees retire. But she says that Mr. Ubiñas didn’t come to the job intending to bring in a new team.

Mr. Ubiñas says the foundation will continue to give general support when it is needed, particularly to newer charities. He emphasizes the importance of a diverse work force, but says the foundation has a strong track record of tapping people from varied racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

“I’m not the only person here who comes from a less than middle-class background,” he says. “Should we do more of that? I think everyone should do more of that.”

He also stresses the importance of working with other grant makers, particularly newly established foundations.

“We have a lot of coordinating to do,” he says. “There is a lot of new philanthropic funding coming in, and we need to think about how that affects where needs are going unmet.”

Ms. Fuller says she anticipates that Mr. Ubiñas may eventually grow into a prominent spokesman on philanthropy. Ms. Berresford, his predecessor, was to many a central voice on a range of issues in philanthropy, including some controversial ones, like keeping the amount foundations should be required by law to distribute each year capped at 5 percent.

“Over time, knowing Luis, he will play a larger public role,” Ms. Fuller says. “But these are early days, and he’s got a full plate right now.”

Mr. Ubiñas says he hopes to stay at the foundation for a “significant portion of my career.”

He recounts his experiences so far meeting with grantees in places like China and Mexico. He describes one female small-business owner he met in Mexico who, with a $100 loan, has increased by tenfold the number of loaves of bread she can sell — and can afford to send not only her sons but also her daughters to school. He talks about the government officials in China who have created new models for rural education.

Later on this day, he will head to the airport for a visit to South Africa, where the foundation’s grantees played a role in ending apartheid during the 1980s and early 1990s.

He says those conversations with grant recipients overseas have “brought home” for him the work of the Ford Foundation, its history, and its strong leadership to date.

“Whatever I do,” he says, “will build on that tradition.”