Heather Gerken will be the 11th president of the Ford Foundation, chair of the board of trustees Francisco Cigarroa announced yesterday. Gerken will take over the role from Darren Walker, who announced his resignation in July last year after eleven years of leading the Foundation.
Gerken is the current dean of Yale Law School where she has worked to address economic barriers to the legal profession and increase access for underrepresented students. Under her leadership, the school launched its first full-tuition scholarships for students from low-income backgrounds. She also founded and leads the school’s San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project Clinic that allows students to work with San Francisco deputy city attorneys to litigate public-interest lawsuits.
Previously, Gerken clerked for United States Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and Judge Stephen Reinhardt in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, then became an associate at Jenner & Block in Washington D.C. In 2000, she became a professor at Harvard Law School, before joining Yale in 2006.
‘I extend my warmest congratulations to Heather Gerken as she prepares to lead the Ford Foundation into its next chapter,’ Darren Walker said in a statement. ‘Her experience and dedication to philanthropy and the field of law will undoubtedly propel the foundation’s mission forward.’
The Ford Foundation is an American private grantmaking organisation with an endowment of $16 billion, committed to ‘reduc[ing] poverty and injustice, strengthen[ing] democratic values, promot[ing] international cooperation, and advanc[ing] human achievements.’ Under Walker’s leadership, the foundation has supported numerous arts programmes and institutions including Jeffrey Gibson’s pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, the Los Angeles Museum of Art and New York’s The Kitchen and the Whitney.
Heather Gerken will start her new role in November.
