Key Points
- Ursula Burns elected chair of the Ford Foundation board on June 23.
- First African American woman to chair the board in its 90-year history.
- She is the 13th chair, succeeding Dr. Francisco Cigarroa.
- In 2009 she became the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company.
One of the most powerful philanthropies in the country has a new chair. The Ford Foundation elected Ursula Burns as the 13th chair of its board of trustees, succeeding Dr. Francisco Cigarroa — making Burns the first African American woman to hold the role in the foundation’s 90-year history.
The résumé is historic on its own. In 2009, Burns became chairman and CEO of Xerox and, in doing so, the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. She joined Ford’s board in 2015 and chairs its Audit Committee; today she founds the private-equity firm Integrum and serves as non-executive chairman of Teneo.
The read: who chairs a multibillion-dollar foundation is a quiet but real lever on where institutional money flows — civil rights, the arts, economic justice. Putting an operator with Burns’s corporate and investment fluency atop a legacy philanthropy is a bet that the next era of grantmaking gets run more like capital allocation. It is the same move toward ownership and stewardship that defines this tier of Black executive power, from boardrooms to consumer chains.
Source: Ford Foundation, citybiz
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