A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [96]
The job of program officer required a mix of skills and talents. As Kessinger described it to me, a program officer had to talk to a lot of people, then think about the issues, then consider the context—within the Ford Foundation, in the Indonesian government, among other donors. As Jones put it, one had to think strategically about how to plant money in different places in order to bring about a desired transformation or change. “If you want to increase access to justice, for example, you think, ‘Okay, we’ve got the legal-aid group that works with one set of people,’” she said. “‘It would probably be a good idea to get a couple of really bright people trained in some kind of legal approach so that you can have those people in law faculties in a number of places. It would be good to get some judges or others to have exposure to what’s done in places where there is really good access.’ You put all the pieces together and you get a program.”
As for herself, she said, “I just tended to take really interesting projects and fund them—without thinking very far ahead about what the end result was.”
Within a week or two of starting at Ford, Ann flew to India on a trip that would end up shaping her approach to her job from then on. A young program officer in New York, Adrienne Germain, who had been working with the international program staff to increase Ford’s involvement in the advancement of women, had invited Ann to join her on a trip she was taking. Unlike Indonesia, India already had a movement to improve the condition of poor working women. Ford was in contact with groups organizing street vendors and other self-employed women. Germain, who several months later would become the foundation’s first female country representative and be sent to Bangladesh, had extended the invitation, she told me, “as a way of collaborating with Ann—to say, ‘Look, these are the kind of women-specific programs that are going on that are really quite impressive and that you won’t yet see in Indonesia.’”
They met with leaders of the Self Employed Women’s Association, a then nine-year-old trade union based in Ahmedabad with roots in the country’s labor, cooperative, and women’s movements, which has since gone on to create a network of cooperatives and India’s first women’s bank. They visited the Working Women’s Forum, started by a former Congress Party activist named Jaya Arunachalam, which within a decade would become not just a union of poor women but a network of cooperatives encouraging entrepreneurship by making low-interest loans. They met washerwomen, known as dhobis, in the slums of Madras. Germain had first worked abroad while still an undergraduate at Wellesley College, tagging along for six months on a household survey in Peru that took her to the slums of Lima; she had strong feelings about how one should behave when working in other people’s countries. Ann impressed her, Germain remembered many years later. She listened well—not to get information to do her job but because she wanted to learn. She was not, Germain said, “thinking at the top, which is where a lot of Ford was: ‘Let’s build our universities and let’s get our intellectual capital going.’” Ann seemed to believe that you could not help people unless you learned from them first. “It was the most interactive way of being and of taking time,” Germain recalled. “A lot of times, in all kinds of jobs, people didn’t feel like they had that kind of time; they were there to make grants and move money. Often they didn’t think much about: Could the project really be implemented the way it was? What would be the consequences?