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By Root 1050 0

its mission as strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation, and advancing human achievement. After going from a local to an international foundation in 1950, it had operated initially by hiring expatriates with specialized knowledge, and making them available to emerging countries trying to build democratic forms of government. By the early 1980s, countries such as Indonesia had experts and institutions of their own, so Ford was becoming a source of funding more than a supplier of outside expertise. Thomas, after ten years in community-based development in New York, believed in local talent. The Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which he had headed, had enlisted neighborhood people in the work of urban redevelopment. At Ford, he wanted local people engaged in every aspect of the foundation’s international work. “There was an evolving sense that you probably had more knowledge in the experience of people in almost any setting than you could bring in from the outside, no matter how diligently the outsiders worked or studied,” Thomas told me. Tom Kessinger, arriving in Jakarta in August 1979 to head the Ford office, had set about making contact with Indonesia’s small but growing universe of civil-society organizations, in which an emerging generation of leaders was working for social and economic change. He wanted to know how those organizations could be nurtured. It was easy to find the bigger ones; they tended to be based in Jakarta and had English-speaking staffs who knew how to write reports. Harder to reach were the smaller, more numerous, less sophisticated, so-called nongovernmental organizations scattered all over the archipelago. “What Ann represented to me was getting out into the NGO circuit beyond what I could do because of my obligations and my poor Indonesian,” Kessinger told me. She arrived at Ford, Thomas said, “at a time when the institutional focus had shifted from the elite to the grassroots. She personified someone all of whose ties were at a non-elite level.”

Kessinger also wanted someone interested in women. There was a new focus at Ford on gender equality and the status of women. In Indonesia, the position of women had been relatively high compared with what it was in some other Muslim and even non-Muslim countries. But population pressure and technological change were pushing rural women into menial work. The extent of the problem was difficult to gauge, because there had been few studies of village women. Members of the Ford staff in Jakarta had suggested hiring someone to spend half their time as a program officer based in Jakarta, developing and managing projects addressing the need for paying work for village women. The rest of the time, he or she would work as a so-called project specialist at the Bogor Agricultural Institute, helping Indonesian researchers analyze village-level data on women, and teaching younger scholars how to do field research. Sidney Jones, the only female program officer in the Jakarta office of Ford at the time, invited Ann and Tom Kessinger to dinner at her house. Not long after that, Kessinger hired Ann.

“At first impression, you would say she was easygoing,” Kessinger told me. “Once you got to know her, she was really quite intense and, in a certain sense, driven.” She was serious and focused, and willing to engage with people. “But there was also a little bit of reserve as well, which I never totally figured out,” Kessinger said. “I could see that some people might see that as a kind of snobbishness—though I don’t mean snobbishness. When someone is distancing, sometimes it’s personality or they’re protecting themselves. Sometimes it’s read as not very open or warm. Ann had that quality. I felt it the first evening we had dinner at Sidney Jones’s house. I was doing the interview kind of thing—not the formal interview. I just had a sense that there were areas where I was going to get a certain distance, not further. There seemed to be a time when the conversation had to go in a different direction.”

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