Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on December 4, 2025.
In 2015, the Ford Foundation launched its Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD) initiative as a $1 billion commitment to help social justice organizations build long-term resilience.
The move was a game changer. In a philanthrosphere where most foundation funding is restricted, BUILD provided recipients with five years of general operating support and extensive consulting with Ford staff. Nonprofit leaders who were accustomed to running the annual grant application treadmill and contorting their missions to secure project-based grants could finally engage in thoughtful, long-term strategic planning without worrying about funds drying up.
In 2021, Ford committed another $1 billion in five-year BUILD grants. Since its launch, the program has disbursed $1.87 billion in flexible grants to nearly 350 grantee partners in more than 30 countries. BUILD also transformed Ford itself, as over 80% of the foundation’s grants now take the form of flexible, general operating support. Throw in a 2025 evaluation report showing that 85% of grantees said they were more “financially resilient” today than before the start of BUILD, and the casual observer might expect Ford to commit to supporting a new cohort of grantees.
Instead, Ford in November revealed it is winding down BUILD after spending the past decade integrating the program’s ethos across its grantmaking. Most notably, today, over 80% of Ford’s grants are in the form of flexible, general operating support. “In recognition of this successful transformation, we are discontinuing BUILD as a standalone program and ensuring the principles of this work continue across all of Ford’s grantmaking worldwide,” the foundation told IP in a statement. “The remaining $130 million we have committed to BUILD will be distributed over the next several months. We are proud of the BUILD team’s incredible legacy — they have made an indelible impact at the Ford Foundation and across the entire philanthropic sector.”
Given Ford’s deep pockets and vocal advocacy for trust-based giving, I, along with other philanthropy observers, am eager to see how BUILD’s principles inform its grantmaking under the leadership of its new president, Heather Gerken.
The prognosis is encouraging. Gerken “has made it very clear to the entire staff that she is a strong supporter of BUILD and looks forward to carrying forward its next iteration,” said Ford’s statement.
We’ll see how the next iteration plays out. Until then, here’s a slightly premature postmortem of Ford’s BUILD program.
BUILD successfully built grantees’ financial resilience
“The second iteration of BUILD was always designed as a time-bound initiative with the goal of modeling and embedding the practices of flexible, multi-year funding across the philanthropic sector and within the Ford Foundation itself,” read a statement from Ford to IP. “Since its inception, we understood that BUILD would evolve.”
This probably sounds familiar. Funders frequently establish time-limited initiatives or informally decide that programs have run their course. Nonprofit leaders who came to rely on those grantmaking dollars are invariably disappointed, but those who applied for funding with the knowledge that the initiative was time-limited can’t say they weren’t warned.
BUILD wasn’t envisioned as an initiative that ramped up funding for undercapitalized fields, but rather as one that transformed grantees with multi-year, unrestricted gifts that could boost their financial resilience, which Ford’s 2025 evaluation defined as “freedom, over time, to make financial decisions and power to conduct programs in line with strategic objectives rather than having to implement external priorities such as those held by funders, public pressure and governments.”
It can be argued that Ford succeeded in this regard, so it makes sense that it would draw the curtain and apply the program’s principles across its larger grantmaking portfolio.
BUILD showed funders how to give unrestricted support while retaining control
Opponents of unrestricted giving fear that grantees will misappropriate the money and that program officers, by abdicating their project-grant-focused oversight role, will be left superfluous.
“It’s hard to come by a philanthropy job, right?” Mission Telecom Giving Director Ashindi Maxton mused when I recently asked her why flexible funding isn’t the philanthropic norm. “We’re highly accomplished people. We’re Type A, we work in really nice buildings, and it takes incredible humility to say, ‘I don’t know better than the people who are in place what needs to get done, and I trust them.”
I’ve heard this sentiment repeatedly from experts attuned to funders’ reluctance to give unrestricted support. And while it’s clearly a valid concern, I’m afraid a binary narrative has become so ingrained across the sector that leaders forget that they can disburse unrestricted support while still exerting some control over the process.
In August, BUILD Director Victoria Dunning and Ford’s Deputy Director, Strategy and Learning Subarna Mathes talked to me about how BUILD staff interact with grantee partners. The underlying machinery looked operationally indistinguishable from how many funders manage organizations across the project-based grant management lifecycle.
At the beginning of a BUILD grant, both parties agree to what Dunning calls “a clear timeline and pathway — five years of general support coupled with a focus on institutional strengthening.” As the relationship unfolds, BUILD staff and grantees engage in what Dunning called a “different set of ‘higher order’ questions,” like “where is the grantee heading?” and “what assumptions do they have, and how are those assumptions shifting?” These conversations informed staff’s decision about when to offer a second five-year BUILD grant to an organization or transition the grantee back to regular funding, which typically entailed maintaining a post-BUILD commitment to multi-year, flexible support.
In other words, Ford’s BUILD program, far from condemning its staff to strategic irrelevance, took a maximalist approach toward engaging its grantee partners while disbursing unrestricted support. By doing so, it bucked conventional wisdom and provided an elegant solution for funders who feared that giving unrestricted support wouldn’t effectively advance their strategic goals.
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BUILD dramatically transformed how Ford operates
Ford has also spent the last 10 years using its formidable bully pulpit to encourage other funders to emulate its approach. For example, when former Ford President Darren Walker referenced my conversation with Dunning and Mathes on LinkedIn in August, he noted that the pair discussed “what we have learned from this journey and why philanthropy must adopt more BUILD-like principles to truly address systemic change.”
Has philanthropy adopted more BUILD-like principles? In a recent post ruminating on the durability of big foundations, IP Editor-in-Chief David Callahan noted that “despite some positive shifts since the pandemic, restricted funding still makes up about two-thirds of foundation grants.” This figure is all the more concerning considering how developments over the last half-decade, research affirming MacKenzie Scott’s trust-based approach and, in 2025, a cascade of federal funding cuts further accentuated the importance of unrestricted support. If this perfect storm didn’t compel funders to loosen the reins en masse, it’s hard to imagine that great swaths of the sector took operational cues from BUILD.
What is irrefutable is that BUILD has profoundly changed Ford. In its statement to IP, the foundation cited the following percentages of non-BUILD grantmaking that is flexible funding, which includes general operating and core support: 2020 (83%), 2021 (78%), 2022 (76%), 2023 (78%) and 2024 (81%). “We anticipate the number to be even higher for 2025, potentially reaching 85%,” the statement read, while noting that the high 2020 figure was due to Ford’s pandemic response.
The next step — ensuring BUILD’s ethos lives on across Ford’s portfolio — seems self-evident.
For close to a decade, BUILD staff have spent countless hours gathering anecdotal and empirical evidence attesting to the benefits of flexible, unrestricted support. It would be philanthropic malfeasance of the highest order for Ford to let this invaluable accumulated intellectual property evaporate into the ether. So, while there’s been some understandable head scratching and outright frustration about BUILD’s dissolution, I’m inclined to take Ford at its word on embedding the program’s learnings across its operations, although how that actually plays out in the practical sense — reconfiguring existing project-based grants as unrestricted grants — remains to be seen.
BUILD is dead. Long live BUILD!
