Ford Foundation Just Created a Department Whose Job Is Ending Grants. Here Is How to Not Be Assigned to It.

Foundations almost never say out loud which grantees they are leaving. They let renewals quietly not happen, and the organization finds out in the eleventh month of a twelve-month cycle.

The Ford Foundation just did something considerably more honest and, for its grantees, considerably more unnerving. It is building the exit into the org chart.

Per reporting on September 10, 2026, Ford president Heather Gerken will present a revamped grantmaking strategy to the foundation's trustees this fall. If trustees approve, then starting in January the foundation splits its staff into three units:

1. One group refining the new grantmaking strategy
2. One group maintaining current grants
3. One group devising tie-off funding for grantees that will not be part of the foundation's future

The new strategy is expected to be in operation by January 2028.

Gerken has characterized the changes as "evolutionary, not revolutionary," and notably, the program design came from Ford staff rather than outside consultants. She has also been explicit about the interim: "The world doesn't stop turning because the Ford Foundation is going through a strategy refresh. And so we want to do right by our grantees and keep moving grants forward."

Both things are true at once. Ford is being unusually transparent about a transition. And it has just formally staffed a function whose deliverable is the last check you will ever receive from them.

Why 2026 to 2028 is a 24-month planning problem

Read the timeline carefully. Trustees see the strategy this fall. Staff reorganize in January 2027. The strategy is operational in January 2028. That is roughly two years during which Ford's grantmaking is being run by three teams with three incompatible mandates — one designing the future, one holding the present steady, one negotiating endings.

For a nonprofit, that structure has an immediate, practical consequence: the unit you get assigned to determines your next two years of revenue, and the assignment is being made during a period when the criteria for the new strategy are, by the foundation's own description, still being refined.

This is not a reason for panic. It is a reason for precision. Organizations that treat a funder transition as weather — something that happens to you — consistently do worse than organizations that treat it as a decision someone is making about them, on a known schedule, with inputs they can influence.

The BUILD precedent tells you what tie-off actually looks like

Ford has run this play before, recently and at scale, and grantees should study the tape.

The Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD) initiative was Ford's flagship: launched in 2015 with a $1 billion, five-year commitment, renewed in 2021 with another $1 billion, delivering five-year general-operating and institutional-strengthening grants of roughly $2 million to more than $10 million to 574 social justice nonprofits across 47 countries. Of the $2 billion committed, roughly $1.9 billion had been spent when Ford announced it was discontinuing BUILD as a standalone program.

Two features of that wind-down are directly instructive:

First, Ford honored the paper. All grantees received the funds promised under their grant agreements. The remainder was allocated to BUILD grantees over the following year. Ford did not claw back or truncate signed commitments. If you have a multi-year agreement in hand, the BUILD precedent says it gets honored.

Second, Ford built a transition mechanism. BUILD grantees became eligible for Life After BUILD Support (LABS) — a program designed to help organizations transition, which could result in either a new grant from another Ford program or a "responsible" tie-off grant.

That fork is the whole game. LABS had two exits: migrate into another Ford program, or receive a dignified ending. The new three-unit structure institutionalizes the same fork across the entire foundation. Unit 1 and Unit 3 are the two branches.

Also worth noting: Ford framed BUILD's closure not as a failure but as absorption — the principles of the work would "continue across all of Ford's grantmaking worldwide." Outgoing president Darren Walker said the closure was intended to "create the space" for Gerken. That is the pattern to expect again. Programs will not be described as cut. They will be described as integrated. Whether integration comes with money attached is the question that matters, and it is answered in Unit 1's design work over the next fifteen months.

What Gerken's actual grantmaking reveals about the new strategy

The strategy has not been announced, and no one outside Ford should pretend to know it. But Gerken, who began leading Ford in November 2025, has already deployed discretionary capital in a way that is legible.

In April 2026, Ford routed $60 million into democracy and election infrastructure — deliberately through both Republican and Democratic election lawyers, veteran poll workers, and nonpartisan civic groups, drawing on presidential reserves rather than ordinary grantmaking cycles. We covered the structure of that deployment in our analysis of Ford's $60 million democracy bet.

Three signals worth extracting from it:

• Cross-ideological coalitions are a feature, not a compromise. Ford paid for a Republican election lawyer and a Democratic one to work in the same organization. A grantee whose theory of change requires that only one side of the aisle be correct is less legible to this president than to the last one.
• Infrastructure framing is favored. The $60 million was explicitly framed as treating election systems the way government treats bridges — durable public goods requiring sustained investment regardless of who holds power. Organizations that can describe themselves as field infrastructure rather than as advocacy campaigns have an easier translation.
• Speed is valued. Gerken used presidential reserves specifically to avoid a twelve-month review cycle. A foundation president who is impatient with her own process tends to design a new process with fewer gates and, usually, fewer grantees.

None of this is a prediction. It is the only evidence available, and it beats speculation.

Five moves for current and prospective Ford grantees

1. Find out which unit you are in — by asking, not inferring. Between January and mid-2027, your program officer will know. The single most valuable question a development director can ask in this window is a direct one: given the strategy refresh, how should we be planning for FY2028? Ford's public posture is transparency. Use it. A vague answer is itself an answer.

2. Model a Ford-free 2028 budget now, even if you expect renewal. Not as a prediction — as a stress test. If Ford is more than 15 percent of your revenue, build the scenario, identify the gap, and start the replacement pipeline in 2027 while you still have runway and a live relationship. Organizations that begin diversifying after a tie-off conversation are eighteen months late.

3. If a tie-off comes, negotiate its shape. Tie-off grants are not uniform. Term length, restriction level, and whether they can be paired with a formal introduction to another funder are all variable, and Ford's LABS precedent shows the foundation is willing to build transition support. A two-year unrestricted tie-off is a genuinely different asset from a one-year restricted one. Ask for the former.

4. For non-grantees: this is the wrong two years for a cold approach and the right two years for visibility. Ford does not accept unsolicited proposals; grantmaking is invitation-based and relationship-mediated. During a strategy refresh, program officers are not building new pipelines — but they are absolutely scanning the field to figure out what the new strategy should fund. Published work, convenings, sector research, and introductions from current grantees matter more in this window than at any other point in the cycle.

5. Watch which peer funders move. Ford's strategy shifts reset norms across the sector; BUILD's multi-year general-operating model was copied widely. If Ford's new strategy narrows, some grantees will be released into a market where other large funders are simultaneously repositioning. Being early to that market is worth real money.

The honest read

Ford is doing this the right way — announcing the transition publicly, honoring signed commitments, staffing the endings rather than letting them happen by neglect, and designing the strategy internally rather than importing it. Grantees of less careful foundations receive none of that.

But a transparent contraction is still a contraction, and a unit dedicated to tie-off funding exists because someone expects to write tie-off grants. The organizations that come through this well will be the ones that spent 2027 treating Ford as a relationship to actively manage rather than a line item to renew.

The strategy lands in January 2028. The decisions about who is in it are being made now.

Granted maintains profiles on more than 130,000 U.S. foundations, including grantmaking history, program areas, and recent strategy shifts. Research funders at grantedai.com.