April 29, 2009
Ford Foundation to Close Offices In Hanoi and Moscow
By Ian Wilhelm
After losing almost one-third of its assets during the last year, the Ford Foundation has announced it will close its offices in Russia and Vietnam.
“Given our obligation to our grantees worldwide, and the people they serve, we have been forced to make some very hard choices to bring about further savings,” Luis A. Ubiñas, the foundation’s president, wrote in an e-mail message he sent to Ford employees on Tuesday. “It is with great regret that I share the news that the foundation will be winding down its operations in Vietnam and Russia by the end of September.”
The move will eliminate 30 staff positions and save the organization at least $4-million in its fiscal 2010, which starts October 1, Alfred Ironside, the foundation’s director of communications, told The Chronicle.
He said Ford chose the two offices, both of which opened in 1996, because their closures would be “considered least disruptive to staff and operations.”
In his e-mail message, Mr. Ubiñas wrote that the foundation last year was able to reduce its operating expenses by $22-million thanks to cost-cutting efforts, but that amount was not enough to prevent drastic moves and layoffs.
Mr. Ubiñas, a former business consultant who joined Ford in 2008, said the staff members in the Hanoi office and Moscow office were informed of the decision in person by foundation officials Tuesday morning.
The foundation recently announced changes in its grant making, saying it would not alter the types of causes it supports but would try to spur collaboration and efficiency among its grantees. The decision to shut down the offices was unrelated to those changes.
As for its Russian and Vietnamese programs, the foundation is “enormously proud of the work” of the staff and grantees, said Mr. Ubiñas, and he praised them for helping to build stronger nonprofit groups and improved human rights and economic development in their respective regions.
He also said that Ford would continue to operate two signature programs in the regions: the International Fellowships Program, which provides scholarships for graduate study to people from developing countries, and a project to ease the health and environmental damage caused by Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.
Ford, the second wealthiest American foundation, will continue to have a global presence with 10 other overseas offices in Indonesia, South Africa, and elsewhere
Despite the closing of the foreign offices, Ford, which has its headquarters in New York, still needs to trim its budget, Mr. Ubiñas said.
“We are all affected, both personally and professionally, by the severity of this global recession,” he said. “At the foundation, our challenge is to make the decisions required of us to ensure that our grant budgets are as robust as possible in this time of need and that our costs are structured to meet our long-term needs.”
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