Supporting Economic Justice? The Ford Foundation's 1968 Experiment in Program Related Investments

Urban Farm DB summary

Published 1 November 2019, tracing the Ford Foundation's 1968 experiment in Program-Related Investments — $10 million authorised by its board — in the context of civil-rights-era support for Black entrepreneurship. It lent $500,000 to Leon Sullivan's Progress Plaza shopping centre in Philadelphia and generated a multiplier of roughly five dollars of outside investment for each Ford dollar. Yet some businesses failed and doubts surfaced early about whether foundations had the financial expertise required, raising the question of whether philanthropy should work inside the existing economic system or challenge it more directly.

Only numbers and their conditions are stored, as structured data — never the source's own sentences. Metric and condition names stay in English, as coded.

• 10 million_usd

  authorised amount(ford foundation pri)

  Economics

  region

  United States

  year

  1968

  method

  amount authorised by the Ford Foundation board for program-related investments

• 5 usd_per_usd

  outside investment multiplier(ford foundation pri)

  Economics

  region

  United States

  year

  1968-1973

  method

  outside investment amassed per Ford dollar invested

Direction of conclusions

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• Economic viabilityMixedWith caveats