Ford Says Every Asset. What About the $18 Billion?

On page 13 of its new strategy, the Ford Foundation makes a promise that could change what philanthropy does with its money. Its president, Heather Gerken, writes that Ford will deploy "every asset in our arsenal" where it can do the most good. The first asset on her list is the endowment.

Then the endowment disappears. The report runs 34 pages on democracy, inequality, workers and the concentration of economic power. It says almost nothing about the $18 billion that pays for all of it.

We read Ford's tax filings and audited statements going back to 2000 to see what that asset is doing. Over the last decade, Ford stopped showing the public what it owns, and it moved billions into the corner of finance that does the most to produce the inequality this report describes. Both of those things can't stay true at once: a foundation can't diagnose the problem this clearly and keep financing it.

Ford says it wants to change that. We want that too, and we think a lot of people do. If Ford follows through, it could show every endowment in the country what that looks like, and Ford is better placed to do it than almost anyone.

Ford already wrote the diagnosis

Read the report closely and it reads like an indictment of where large pools of capital have gone. Ford writes that extreme inequality grows out of a democracy that isn't working. It names the concentration of economic power. It says large corporations chase narrow self-interest at the permanent expense of workers, families, communities and the natural world. It says American workers have steadily lost rights, protections and voice, and it commits Ford to rewriting the distorted rules of a capitalism that has fallen out of balance (pages 17 and 18).

It goes further. When it lists the preconditions of democracy, access to truthful, accurate information is on the list (page 10). It describes a vicious cycle in which weaker accountability lets power concentrate and trust erode (page 16).

We agree with every word, and we bet most people do too. You can feel it in everyday life: in paychecks that don't stretch, in rents that keep climbing, in norms and institutions that fray a little more each year. Our economic system needs to change, and few institutions are better placed to change it than a trusted foundation with $18 billion and the freedom to put it wherever it chooses. That makes the next question the important one: what is Ford's own money doing to those preconditions?

Transparency dimmed as the money moved

Ford's annual tax return used to tell you what it owned. In 2013 it named 566 individual stocks and listed more than 400 private funds line by line. Starting with the 2018 return, the portfolio collapsed into a handful of category totals. By 2021 it was five rows covering more than $14 billion.

One of the seven funding areas in Ford's new strategy is defending information as a public good (page 19). The foundation that wants to fund transparency for everyone else has spent the last eight years making its own portfolio harder to see.

That is when the money accelerated. At the end of 2017, Ford held $2.9 billion in private equity and venture capital. By the end of 2025 it held $6.0 billion, more than a third of everything it invests, across roughly 278 private equity funds. Between 2019 and 2021 alone the private equity book doubled. Ford names none of the managers. We know the totals only because Ford's audited financial statements still report the size of each asset class every year. What disappeared is the list of what sits inside them.

Over the same eight years, Ford's mission investments and program-related investments, the money it puts to work on purpose, grew from $158 million to $631 million. That quadrupling sounds like progress until you set it beside the private equity book: about $6.60 went into private equity for every new dollar into mission. In 2017 Ford pledged to put $1 billion into mission investments within ten years. With two years to go, it has $479 million in them, less than half the promise.

The share of Ford's endowment working against its program grew by billions while the share working for it grew by millions, and the public lost the ability to see which was which.

There is another way to see what an institution values: look at who it pays the most. On Ford's most recent tax return, for 2024, the chief investment officer earned $4.77 million in salary, about two and a half times the president and about ten times the head of U.S. programs. Six of Ford's seven highest-paid people work on the endowment. The director of private equity earned $1.92 million, more than double what the role paid in 2013 and about what the president of the entire foundation earned. The person who runs mission investments earned less than any of the four directors running the conventional portfolio. (We don't yet know what Heather Gerken, who succeeded Darren Walker as president, is paid. That will show up in a future filing.)

Pay is a statement of values, and it is also an incentive. Ford pays its top salaries to the people whose job is to chase returns, and the portfolio chases returns: more private equity, less disclosure. A foundation that wants its endowment to serve its mission can start by paying for that.

Every budget line for them, five rows for Ford

If you take a grant from Ford, you account for it. Ford's own 2008 guidance on grantmaking describes periodic reports read by a program officer and a grants administrator, site visits, and a worldwide program of grantee audits that has run since 2003. A 2017 award letter under a Ford-funded program asks for annual reports signed by an officer, a financial report certified by the finance lead, and the right to audit on site for four years after the money is spent.

That is a heavy load. Small organizations spend staff time they don't have writing narrative reports, reconciling budgets line by line and preparing for audits, all to prove they spent a grant the way they said they would. A community group with a $50,000 grant has to show where every dollar went. Meanwhile, nobody outside Ford can learn which private equity firms hold the $6 billion behind that grant, what those firms own, or what happened to the workers at the companies they bought.

Ford demands more and more from the people it funds while telling the public less and less about itself. That is hypocrisy, and the new report comes close to naming it. It complains, correctly, that reporting rules built for another century weigh on nonprofits (page 28), and it promises to lighten the paperwork it asks of grantees (page 32). Good. But the reporting gap that matters most in this story runs the other way. Ford's grantees write pages to account for thousands of dollars. Ford's endowment accounts for billions in five vague lines.

And the ties between Ford and the industry are close. Roy Swan, who runs Ford's mission investments, sits on KKR's Sustainability Expert Advisory Council. Ford has given $1 million to Ownership Works, the nonprofit founded by KKR's Pete Stavros, whose employee-ownership model we took apart in Equity-Washing: KKR, Ownership Works and the Polished New Face of Corporate Greed. We don't claim anything improper. We do claim that when the people steering a social-justice endowment advise the largest buyout firms, the public deserves to see where the money sits.

This matters because private equity is not a neutral place to park money, and the record on it is no longer a secret. Megan Greenwell's Bad Company follows four people, from a Toys "R" Us floor supervisor to a rural Wyoming doctor, through what happened to their workplaces and towns after the buyout. Brendan Ballou, who served as the Justice Department's special counsel for private equity, documents in Plunder how firms buying retailers, medical practices, prison services, nursing homes and mobile-home parks raise prices, cut jobs and cut quality. The research puts numbers on it. When private equity bought nursing homes, deaths among residents rose about 11 percent as staffing fell (Gupta, Howell, Yannelis and Gupta, 2024).

The pattern repeats across industries. A firm buys a company largely with borrowed money, puts that debt on the company's own books, cuts staffing, wages and benefits to pay it down, and collects its fees whether the company thrives or fails. ProPublica traces how that ended at Toys "R" Us, bought for $7.5 billion in 2005 and later liquidated under its debt. Companies controlled by private equity now employ more than 11 million people, and the Private Equity Stakeholder Project tracks the risks state by state: job losses, lower wages and benefit cuts for workers, higher rents for tenants, worse care and closed facilities for patients.

That is a model built to move wealth upward, and it is the force Ford's report says it wants to fight.

The opportunity is enormous

This is the exciting part. Ford has done hard versions of this before. It was one of the first foundations to make program-related investments, in the late 1960s. Its BUILD program proved, as this report says, that long-term flexible money changes what organizations can do. Its mission investment team already backs community lenders and funds run by people the industry ignores. The skills exist inside the building.

And the endowment is not locked. At the end of 2025, Ford had about $1.6 billion in private equity and other investment commitments that had not yet been called, according to its audited financial statements. Every one of those dollars is still a decision. So is every new fund commitment the investment office signs next year.

Imagine Ford's endowment pulling in the same direction as its seven new funding areas. Inclusive economies with workers at the center would mean capital for businesses that become durably employee-owned, with real stakes and real governance, rather than buyout funds that offer workers a bonus at the exit. It would mean deposits and loans with the community lenders and credit unions that keep wealth in places Wall Street drains. It would mean housing owned by the people who live in it.

Ford already funds a small version of this. In 2021 it committed $5 million in program-related investment to Apis & Heritage Legacy Fund, a diverse-led fund that buys businesses and converts them to employee ownership, and it had paid out about $3.5 million of that by the end of 2024. Five million dollars, beside $6 billion in conventional private equity. Imagine that commitment a thousand times bigger.

The report points in the right direction. It promises to expand impact investing and engagement with the private markets (page 31). But it hands those tools to Ford's grantmakers, which keeps them inside the grants budget. The investment office, and the $18 billion it manages, isn't mentioned. Impact investing at Ford will stay a carve-out until the endowment itself is part of the plan.

The scale is within reach. If Ford had matched every new private equity dollar since 2017 with a mission dollar, it would hold about $3.3 billion in mission capital today, nearly a fifth of the endowment. Even moving 10 percent of the endowment, roughly $1.8 billion, would be about twelve times the $152 million Ford holds in program-related investments today.

Ford has already shown it knows how to buy a seat at the table. In 2024 it put $5 million, alongside Omidyar Network and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, into shares of Anthropic sold out of the FTX bankruptcy (ImpactAlpha). As Omidyar put it, the point was to have mission-aligned shareholders reinforcing the company's commitment to safety. Whether the most powerful AI systems are built carefully or rushed to market is one of the most consequential questions of our time, and Ford's new report puts AI and the information ecosystem near the center of its work (pages 13, 19 and 20). Ford holds a shareholder's voice in that question. It should use it publicly, and we would be first in line to cheer it on.

Now look at the size. Five million dollars is about three hundredths of one percent of the endowment. Ford knows how to invest for a voice. It does it with pocket change, while $6 billion sits in funds where it has none.

We know this can be done because we did it with our own money, on a far smaller scale. We sold out of public equities and rebuilt our portfolio around community lenders, employee ownership and non-extractive capital. If two people with a family fund can do it, an $18 billion institution with a full investment office certainly can.

Three things Ford could do this year

Ford's report says it wants to keep asking what democracy requires of it in this moment. For the endowment, we think the answer starts with three moves.

First, bring the transparency back. Publish the names of the funds and managers that hold the endowment, the way Ford's tax returns once listed every holding and the way Ford asks its grantees to account for every dollar. Information as a public good should begin at home.

Second, stop the drift. Freeze new private equity commitments that fail the test the report sets for everyone else: do they put workers at the center, or extract from them? Then match every dollar that does go to private markets with a dollar of mission capital.

Third, take the report at its word. Ford says every asset in its arsenal should serve the mission. Close the gap on the $1 billion pledge before 2027, then set a target for the whole endowment, measured in billions and reported every year alongside the grants.

Ford's new mission is to strengthen democratic values, fundamental freedoms and inclusive economies. Its endowment can be the proof of that mission or the quiet contradiction of it. Heather Gerken and Ford's trustees have just told the world they are willing to make hard choices. This is the one that would show it.

We would love to talk with anyone at Ford, or at any foundation, ready to take that step. We will share everything we have learned, including our mistakes. The world can't wait.