New Chair of Rockefeller Brothers Fund Wants the Public to Understand How Philanthropy Works

Joseph Pierson is a chronicler of his family’s history, and he thinks he has a pretty good story to tell. As the newly installed chair of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Board of Trustees, Pierson, a fifth-generation descendant of oil baron John D. Rockefeller, sees communicating his family’s philanthropic legacy to a broader audience as a key part of his job.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund was created by the five grandsons of John D. Rockefeller Sr.: John 3rd, Nelson, Winthrop, Laurance, and David.

During her nine-year tenure as chair of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Valerie Rockefeller, another fifth-generation descendent, led the storied family philanthropy into a new, more active form of philanthropy that took a more visible stance in public debates. This summer, after her term was over, Pierson succeeded her.

Pierson is a filmmaker who has had several terms of service on the fund’s board. He says he doesn’t envision the fund making big changes to the programs it supports in strengthening democracy, peace-building, and sustainable development. But he is especially proud of the re-opening this fall of the Pocantico Center on the family’s New York estate. The fund has turned the long shuttered Orangerie, a tropical fruit greenhouse, into a performing arts space, and plans to provide residencies for a diverse set of up-and-coming New York artists.

He and Rockefeller agree that a necessary change is for the fund to better communicate its work to the broader world. That’s where Pierson’s experience as a visual storyteller comes into play.

Different Childhoods

The cousins barely knew each other growing up. Valerie, the daughter of former U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller, grew up in West Virginia, and Joseph, the grandson of former vice president and longtime New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, spent a lot of time on the family’s Pocantico estate. An avid fan of historic preservation, he also made a film about the Hudson Valley home.

With Valerie Rockefeller leading the fund’s 17 trustees (nine of whom are family members), the grant maker was an early champion of divestment — taking its endowment investments out of fossil-fuel companies. Not only did the 2014 decision predate a broader divestment movement among foundations, it had special significance given that the Rockefeller fortunes came from Standard Oil, the conglomerate founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1870.

The assets of the fund reached nearly $1.5 billion in 2020, thanks in part to a $250 million bequest from David Rockefeller, who died in 2017.

The additional money helped fuel a $48 million expansion in its grant making over five years, starting in 2020, including $10 million earmarked for a new racial-justice program.

Following are excerpts from a conversation with Valerie Rockefeller and Joseph Pierson:

Given the challenges facing the world now, have you considered distributing all of the fund’s assets on an accelerated schedule, or do you plan to exist well into the future?

Pierson: The last big discussion about spending down the foundation funds came in the 1970s. Some of the brothers wanted to spend down the entire endowment and some wanted to keep going. And they ended up making a compromise. Half the endowment was spent down.

This is something that we revisit. It comes up periodically in a more abstract way. But the consensus seems to be that everybody is very happy with perpetuity. We think we’re doing good work now and the problems we are facing are not going to get any less complex. One prevailing opinion that comes up is that the work we do and the work most people do in philanthropy, it’s complex work. It’s hard work. It’s not always a result-driven process. And very often if you discontinue your support, whatever you’re supporting isn’t necessarily able to sustain itself. So I think that taking the long view in philanthropy is the only way to really make a difference.

It has also been a way for the family to stay engaged in philanthropy. If we spend down, we would be, in effect, deciding that the future generations of Rockefellers wouldn’t have the opportunity that we do to solve problems.

Some would say all complex problems need is more money. What do you think?

Pierson: By throwing cash at a problem, you can do extraordinary things. If the problem is that people aren’t getting enough food in a certain part of the world, you can get them more food and you can get it to them very quickly. But if the problem is voter suppression in the U.S. South, throwing a lot of money at that isn’t going to fix it. Having people working on the ground changing the minds of legislators, getting different legislators in positions of power — those things take time and nuance. And you can’t fix those things by throwing money at them.

Conservative politicians in several states targeted gifts from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, one of your grantees, as an example of philanthropy getting too involved in politics. Does private wealth tip the scales in a democracy?

Pierson: Why shouldn’t philanthropy be involved in something that affects the way people live, that affects the way they can be represented in the democratic process?

Rockefeller: Philanthropy has generally been too timid about advocacy. We get very strict training about what’s lobbying and what’s not, and we know how to stay within those parameters. But there’s a lot you can do in terms of voter engagement and policy education. And as long as you’re not talking about a specific piece of legislation or connecting with an individual lawmaker, there is a ton we can do to support the policies we believe in. So why wouldn’t we bring every resource we have to enacting the policies we are cultivating by supporting our grantees’ leadership?

Courtesy of Rockefeller Brothers Fund

Since the onset of the pandemic, many grant makers have eased the process for potential grantees and provided additional general operating support. What changes have you made and why do grant seekers need to take a quiz before applying?

Rockefeller: Our applications were definitely streamlined, and we’ve tried to make that permanent. Our giving for general operating support is at about 30 percent. We’ve talked about doing more. There is such an interesting creative tension there, though, because giving more in general support is the more democratic thing to do. And in the past few years, because staff are just so overworked and stressed and it’s just been such an incredibly challenging past several years, it’s easier from our perspective to give fewer larger grants, and those are more likely to be for general operating.

But we do have a pretty clear mission and strategies in our program architecture, and we are very clear about what we want. We’ve encouraged people to go on the website, look at our programs, see who else we’ve funded, and do the grantee quiz. Just make sure you meet some very basic criteria before you submit an application. If there’s really no chance that you’re going to get the money, please don’t waste time applying when we know what we’re looking for. So I don’t know that general operating support is ever going to get to be over half of our grant budget.

Valerie, Joseph is a historian of the Rockefeller estate. What will he bring to his position as chair?

Rockefeller: The beauty of Joseph being chair now is that he really knows the ins and outs of the Pocantico campus and has spent a ton of time keeping it beautiful. He has an incredible aesthetic sense. It is sort of one of these serendipitous things that right when the estate is opening up, not just because of Covid, but because of the creative arts center having more capacity to host conferences and artist residencies, that the chair is someone who literally knows every door knob on the estate.

Because Joseph is an artist and a filmmaker, he tells stories and writes in beautiful ways. That’s increasingly important for philanthropy and not just in a defensive way, because I do think we’re legitimately tackling those questions of how to have more equity in society and how to use this concentration of wealth that we have for systems change. That communication piece of it is going to be increasingly important.

Philanthropy has increasingly been called out of touch and lacking in accountability. How can you respond to those critiques?

Pierson: The challenges that we’ve faced from the outside have really required us to defend and really explain what we’re doing. That’s actually made us a stronger, healthier organization because when you’re operating in a vacuum, you think you’re doing the great thing and you think you’re doing the right thing.

Rockefeller: The name Rockefeller does kind of represent money, right? Like in hip hop music, and elsewhere, for lots of people that’s the first thing they think about. And so I think we’ve all been raised with a lot of practice in acknowledging that, yes, it’s a little weird.

It’s given us the opportunity, therefore, to try to support others to have the opportunities that we’ve been given. And we’re proud of our family tradition of effective philanthropy, and we want to continue that.

Being under the spotlight has been good because it forces you to constantly re-evaluate and explain what you’re doing. I know this does sound arrogant, but there is so much wealth with young people right now through the tech industry. And there’s very little transparency into what people are doing with their money. I really hope that the MacKenzie Scott model of philanthropy is really inspiring to a lot of these billionaires. What they have is an opportunity to give back to the society that created them.

Do you feel like you have any sway with some of those newly minted billionaires? Can you influence their philanthropy?

Rockefeller: A little bit. There’s a conference that I go to that a few of them attend. Having been married twice and had different last names twice, for sure I get a lot more attention when I’m the Rockefeller at these conferences. People do come up to me or I get invited to participate in a panel, and I think probably it would be easier to get a meeting. But most of my connection is through trying to bring together other families and foundations to look at sustainable investing.

Some of your philanthropic peers are supporting efforts to change the free-market system that created their wealth to begin with. Is this worth pursuing?

Rockefeller: We talk about systems change, we talk about democracy, we talk about rights. But it’s all within the system of capitalism still at this point. We don’t really have a democracy truly or fully in the United States of America yet. So how do we keep strengthening that democracy and protecting democratic traditions and practices? I think we’d say the same thing around capitalism, that it’s the system in which we were created. We can acknowledge it was not fair if there was this concentration of wealth. But what we want to do, I think — John D. Rockefeller Sr. and Jr. both did this — is to look at the root causes of problems. That’s why they were focused on grounding everything in science. To me, that feels pretty radical

Pierson: What it fundamentally comes down to, and this has been the issue we’ve been facing in so many areas, is do you dismantle it or do you fix it? Do you defund the police or do you try and make the police serve their communities?

How did you get all of the family members on board to divest from fossil fuels?

Pierson: Fossil-fuel divestment began to interest people at the fund because it was an all-encompassing way of addressing climate change. And for people who are more interested in investing, it appealed to them. Often in families the younger generations are pushing sustainable investing. For us , it was actually someone in the generation above us who first started talking about it. We didn’t need to force our parents’ generation to be more radical or progressive because they already are.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.