Darren Walker, Who Reoriented the Ford Foundation, to Step Down

Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, one of the nation’s largest and most influential philanthropies, recently recalled the day his assistant excitedly told him that President Barack Obama wanted to meet him. He gently corrected her.

“I said that President Obama wants to meet with the president of the Ford Foundation — he isn’t interested in meeting with Darren Walker,” he said. “It’s important to have that clarity so that when the day comes that you’re no longer president of the Ford Foundation, you can still find joy and happiness and satisfaction.”

For Mr. Walker, who turns 65 next month, that day will soon arrive. He announced Monday that he would step down as the president of the Ford Foundation at the end of 2025 after what will have been a consequential 12-year tenure in which he shifted the institution’s focus to inequality and oversaw the distribution of $7 billion in grants.

It is a momentous departure. In reorienting the Ford Foundation to address inequality, Mr. Walker was aiming to address “not just wealth disparities,” he wrote in 2015, “but injustices in politics, culture and society that compound inequality and limit opportunity.” He played a key role in getting Ford and other foundations to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to help the City of Detroit exit bankruptcy in a way that spared retirees from deeper pension cuts and safeguarded the collection at the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

But he also faced criticism at times, and raised eyebrows early in his tenure when he joined the board of PepsiCo, which struck some philanthropy experts as discordant, given the company’s role lobbying against public health legislation. In response, Mr. Walker said at the time that he would bring his “perspective as someone who is deeply concerned about the welfare of people in poor and vulnerable communities.”