Events

New Ford Foundation President Visits China

Ford Foundation President Luis Ubiñas, second from right, visits the BNU campus with, from left, He Jin, a program officer in the Beijing office; Andrew Watson, the office representative; and Kathryn Fuller, chair of the Ford Board of Trustees.

Luis Ubiñas, the Ford Foundation's new president, accompanied by Board of Trustees Chair Kathryn Fuller, visited the foundation's regional office in Beijing in October 2007. Our Beijing office serves China.

Said Andrew Watson, the Ford Foundation representative in Beijing:

"We were really pleased to welcome Luis to China shortly after he was named the new president of the foundation. Luis clearly had done a lot of thinking about the foundation's role in China, and he arrived with some focused questions in mind. His experience at McKinsey (the consulting firm where Luis previously worked) meant that he had thought a lot about the complexity of managing an organization with a large number of global offices operating in different contexts and conditions.

Luis Ubiñas, the new Ford Foundation president, discusses public policy with Madame Liu Chuansheng, vice president of Beijing Normal University.

"He was clearly comfortable with the idea of local diversity across an organization with common core values and approaches. He was interested in both the nature of our fields of work and the details of how a program of grant making is structured and implemented and the procedures for appraising and evaluating both the effectiveness of initiatives and the work of program officers.

"We reviewed our work on law and rights reform; economic, education and environmental issues; strengthening civil society and political participation; and addressing HIV/AIDS. All of our efforts in China encourage cooperation across various sectors of society, from community organizations to universities and government.

"Given his previous work in China, Luis had a good sense of the processes of change taking place in the economy and society. What was interesting was how he translated his experience in the for-profit sector into perspectives on the needs of the social sector and the importance of building capacity and responding to the needs for social justice."

The Ford Foundation is an independent, nonprofit grant-making organization. For more than half a century it has been a resource for innovative people and institutions worldwide, guided by its goals of strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation and advancing human achievement. With headquarters in New York, the foundation has offices in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Russia.