© 1999-2003 The Ford Foundation
(To view the videos in this series, visit the GrantCraft web site.)
With the dot-com boom came a host of new tech-wealth foundations, some with assets rivaling the largest established foundations. Some of these new foundations turned to the Ford Foundation - one of the grandparents of American philanthropy - to learn about the techniques of good grant making.
One of Ford's responses to this demand for wisdom is GrantCraft, a package
of learning tools for grant makers, which includes a series of video portraits of grant makers along with 
illustrations
of particular grant-making techniques. Working under executive producer Junko
Chano (a visiting fellow at Ford from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Japan),
we co-produced nine of these videos over a three-year period.
We've been touched and inspired by the work we've seen along the way. Among
the many examples: the first government sanctioned, full-service domestic
violence clinic in India; Hurricane Mitch relief efforts in Nicaragua; sustainable
fisheries development in Bangladesh; the sustainable forestry/certified wood
products movement in the US; 
the creation of postwar democratic institutions in Namibia; and inner-city
education reform in the US.
Volume I of the Grant-Talk series has been translated into Spanish (using subtitles). If there is sufficient demand, it is likely the rest of the series will be translated as well.
At
the end of the project, Ford had us digitize and encode into streaming
files
every Grant-Talk interview (186 of them with both program officers and grantees)
from the three-year project, to make them accessible to Ford program
officers
around the world over the internet. We also had all of the still photographs
(about 10,000) scanned to disc. One set
of these
CDs is used by Ford's communications office in New York, while a second set
was given to the respective grantees. We also cleaned up and processed
all of the typed
transcripts, which provides word-searchable access to all 186 interviews.
In 2003, we completed a DVD that contains all nine programs in this series.