A year after after leading a successful fight for structural parity as chair of the Montpelier Foundation Board, James French has stepped down from the board and is looking to the future. 

“I think the time is right,” French said in a June interview on Charlottesville Right Now, explaining his decision to resign from the board. French, also the founding chair of the Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC), joined the Foundation board in 2019 and was the only representative of the MDC on the board at that time. Three years later, after a lengthy and public dispute between the previous Foundation board leadership and the MDC, descendants emerged victorious and now comprise more than half of the Foundation board.

“I like to call it a virtuous struggle for parity,” French said, recalling the eventual appointment of 11 prestigious members of the MDC in spring 2022 including the new Foundation chair, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a history professor at The Ohio State University. 

“They now are in a slight majority on the board, and we’re very happy and proud of that,” French said. 

Under French’s leadership, the new board created a set of goals for Montpelier they call the Four Pillars. One of those pillars is memorializing ancestors who were enslaved at Montpelier; that goal was achieved with the awarding of a $5.8 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.

“This was the original purpose of the MDC. This is what brought us all together in the first place,” French said. “It’ll be our first project of the four pillars, but it really gives us the visibility and the momentum to build out all four pillars and to become a museum cultural site that’s known for presenting the whole story of our founding. “

French said the experience he gained leading both the MDC and the Foundation board has led to new opportunities to share those lessons with other organizations around the world.

“I am getting calls really from everywhere right now about our model,” he said. “There are lessons that we learned about leadership, about organizational, institutional change. And there’s been a lot of interest expressed by organizations both here and abroad about how those lessons can be adapted to for them.”

Listen to the entire interview with James French here.