Becky Lentz

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Becky Lentz is the Ford Foundation’s first program officer for media policy and technology, coming to Ford with combined experience in the corporate sector, state and local government, the non-profit sector, and academia. Appointed in late 2001, she has worked to build a new area of grantmaking at Ford and also within philanthropy that focuses on communications and information policy, having granted approximately $20 million to support issue advocacy, public interest research, capacity building assistance for NGOs, and social movement engagement in issues such as media consolidation, privacy rights, freedom of expression, media diversity, media representation, media literacy, and intellectual property rights. Becky has been supporting a diverse array of organizations in the media reform and justice sector, focusing primarily on building strategically linked institutional capacity for long term protection of public interest values in communications policymaking. Among her grantmaking successes are numerous 'firsts' in the field: Consumer’s Union’s HearUsNow portal; the Center for Public Integrity’s Well Connected project; the Media Justice Fund at the Funding Exchange based in NYC; the Internet Governance Project at Syracuse University; the Media Empowerment Project of the United Church of Christ’s Office of Communication; the soon to be launched Civil Society Fellows visitor program experiment at the Oxford Internet Institute; the Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere media project at the Social Science Research Council; the Rockwood Leadership Program’s Fellowships for leaders in media reform and justice; and the Media Policy Working Group of the affinity group Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media. She is also a founding contributor to the new Media Democracy Fund housed at the Proteus Fund in MA and has supported the Media and Democracy Coalition housed at Common Cause. Becky was instrumental in Ford’s establishment of its first international initiative in intellectual property rights. After her assignment at Ford, she will join New York University’s Department of Culture and Communication as a Visiting Scholar for one year where she plans to publish from her doctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Radio, TV, Film; speak and present on the role of philanthropy in social change related to communications policy; and continue to work with an international project on freedom of expression issues that she initiated while at Ford.