"Darren thank you so much for being here today welcome to Stanford I'm delighted to be in Palo Alto at Stanford and not in Manhattan today I can only tell you as uh a New Yorker uh we often when people..."

"much to talk about today from your incredible life story to your time in leadership but I want to start with Where Your Story begins tell us about your upbringing and how it shaped you well I grew up ..."

"I didn't know that I was going to be president of the Ford Foundation because I didn't know what a foundation was but I had enough support from my mother who was a single mother of four kids I never k..."

"propelled me forward has stopped for far too many Americans and I think the fact that it has has impacted our politics it's and it has profound I would say existential um implications and consequences..."

"let race or racism um and I say this often to young people and people today you know throw me off my game I think one of the things that people who are racist just focusing on Race hope to [Music] do ..."

"becoming a corporate lawyer and then an investment banker but not necessarily something you'd expect from someone who would go into philanthropy what drove those early career choices well one of the t..."

"lot of people did not want to live in Harlem and so I met this amazing minister at the abis indan Baptist Church uh cin but and he everything sort of converged and I said oh great I'm just going to co..."

"just to get a quart of milk you had to go to this BEDA and hope that it hadn't expired well it's a really interesting decision you made to leave the corporate world give away bonus season in Wall Stre..."

"that's a goal set that goal and and the the challenge is and this is what I found uh friends who later on in their careers would call me after really the sort of golden handcuffs are tightly around yo..."

"and you're really not happy doing that work anymore but you're locked into a lifestyle and so I think figuring out earlier because the longer you stay in that example the harder it is to extricate you..."

"been uh Foundation material or certainly not you know no I mean when I interviewed at Rockefeller I remember I I went back for so many interviews um and I would remember I'd take the a Tran back to Ha..."

"leader but just because he's a road scholar he's the first professor in the department of Economics to blah whatever he's the youngest partner at what we now know and certainly from research but anecd..."

"task because at every opportunity when given a chance to lead I've been able to do that Y and so things accrete reputation accrets uh your own personal brand and how people experience erence you you h..."

"issue inequality and I think we can all agree in this room how important that is to give everyone hope to level the playing field to make sure that everyone has a fair shot yet since 2020 the world's ..."

"begin having said that for a democracy I'm not talking about other forms of government or other countries for this country with the history of a Nation where the mobility escalator our ideas of opport..."

"prioritize uh in our larger Collective ambition for us as a country um and so for me I I think we've got to uh question the systems and structures that are designed to generate these outcomes because ..."

"Hope because hope is the oxygen of democracy and when you have a society where there is hope and opportunity that air is full yeah and when you have a society where hope where inequality is growing th..."

"false binary and philanthropy can never make up for the uh consequences of inequality what I'm talking about the problems that we have to solve in the world today philanthropy can't make up for for th..."

"privilege when I was a an associate I just joined the law firm and you know when you join the and they give you the orientation they give you all of your materials and there's one to open your Banking..."

"you just would like just open your bank statement and your Morgan Stanley private bank account statement once a quarter and it's amazing yeah and and at the same time so many people so many people in ..."

"organizations and so we make through those strategic uh choices then cascading down a set of choices among organizations We Believe are most likely to help contribute to that progress towards those go..."

"remembered well I would like to be remembered as someone who was less concerned about leaving a mark than impacting people and um and what I mean by that is by being an example that um you can certain..."

"be in this seat but you know I'm I'm just not I get really uncomfortable I mean we just you know they literally are planning my going away party and they and I I was like are you kidding me like they'..."

"think Mike is an example and there are others who can step in when there is a bottleneck when there is a Tim limited Challenge and with a tremendous amount of resources make a huge differ thank you um..."

"you um thank you I'm June I'm an MBA 1 here um while doing International developments how do you handle unpredictable or even hostile reactions from foreign governments especially last summer when Pre..."

"that countries that we used to call developing countries rightly feel so there was a time when American institutions including the Ford Foundation had a pretty Colonial mindset in our development work..."

"situation um and I uh admire him and I think he and I just needed to uh sit down and have a conversation about our shared interests uh and you have to also understand that for um for a lot of leaders ..."

"to all right we'll take one last question hello hello hi my name is Grace pan I was wondering if you could provide us with an update on the mission Investments portfolio I know that the Ford Foundatio..."

"have more money to give away uh of course you know sidebar when I asked for when we first reorganized the foundation around inequality and some of the issues that I spoke to I wanted an audit of the p..."

"about you you are happily investing in uh improving the public health of people in this community and you're investing in one of the largest contributors to asthma rates so the mission Investment Port..."

"it will grow thank you thank you so Darren we have a tradition here A View From The Top where we like to wrap up every interview with a set of Rapid Fire questions okay so I'm going to throw out a que..."