Bradford Smith
Mr. Bradford K. Smith joined the Foundation Center as its President on October 1, 2008. Previously, Mr. Smith was President of the Oak Foundation in Geneva, Switzerland, a major family foundation with programmes and grant activities in 41 countries and in North America, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. Before joining the Oak Foundation he developed and led the Ford Foundation's Peace and Social Justice Programme, the foundation's largest programme area, providing hundreds of millions of dollars during his ten-year tenure as vice president to organizations working on human rights, international cooperation, governance, and civil society issues in the United States and around the world.
Mr. Smith has devoted his entire career to the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors. He first joined the Ford Foundation as a programme officer in its Brazil office. Prior to that, he directed the Brazil programme of the Inter-American Foundation. At the start of his career, he worked for the YMCA USA, both in Costa Rica and New York, where he became manager for world development at its Center for International Management Studies.
Mr. Smith holds an M.A. in Economics from the New School for Social Research in New York and a B.A. in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology from the University of Michigan.
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