New Leader, New Era: Rockefeller Foundation Plots Its Course

Rajiv Shah, the new president of the Rockefeller Foundation, is no stranger to politics or philanthropy. He spent nearly a decade at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and served under President Obama as director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which distributes money to nonprofits working overseas.

What may be just as important in his new role, however, will be his reputation for having worked with Republicans and Democrats as he reshaped USAID.

Under his leadership, USAID invested more in development groups and used loan guarantees to attract financing from banks and businesses for big projects.

Mr. Shah, 43, is optimistic, despite challenges, that if foundations do a better job of measuring and communicating the results of their grant making and impact investments, philanthropy can gain support for its priorities.

“I have found, especially in my time in government, that when we do that, we can build extraordinary bipartisan support,” he said.

Environment and Aid

Mr. Shah’s appointment to replace longtime Rockefeller leader Judith Rodin was announced less than three weeks before President Trump was inaugurated. The new administration has put foundations like Rockefeller, which has more than $4 billion in assets and gave grants of nearly $200 million in 2015, in a tricky position as the White House seeks big changes in areas like the environment and international aid.

In a speech last week at the Global Philanthropy Forum, Mr. Shah conceded that “many of us who focused on advancing these progressive global-agenda goals must now admit that we’ve missed the rising resentment toward institutions, and what many see as an out-of-touch global elite.”

That, he said, requires “doing things differently. With society so skeptical of institutions, it’s hard to see people trusting us to solve these problems, especially if we seem to be removed from the realities of today.”

He added: “It will require making big bets, managing real and diverse partnerships, and being transparent and open and honest about what works, what we can do, and the limits of our capacities.”

Working in partnership will not be easy for many in philanthropy, he told the forum. “Our egos, our desire for control, our confidence in our own intelligence, and our natural desire to go launch programs and then find others to co-fund it instead of actually talking together about what we can do in a more collaborative way all make it hard to be really great partners.”

But most important, he said in an interview at The Chronicle’s offices just hours before he delivered the speech, is for foundations to speak out about the limits of their own pocketbooks, and about their concerns over federal priorities.

“When we need to use our voice to defend a set of priorities that have been a part of America’s leadership around the world for years, decades even, we will do so.”

In an interview with staff writers Rebecca Koenig and Alex Daniels, Mr. Shah discussed what he expects to come next in the job he has held since March 1.

Do you have any new priorities for the foundation?

The Rockefeller Foundation has been remarkably consistent in focusing on health, food, and economic opportunity here at home and around the world. It has been remarkably consistent at doing uniquely important things that respond to the moment in time, whether funding the operations of the League of Nations when the U.S. Congress wouldn’t, or putting in place a refugees scholar program that protected and brought many great Jewish scholars from Europe to the U.S. in the lead-up to World War II, or today’s focus on resilience in environments that have been devastated by climate shocks and storms and natural disasters.

I’m studying all of that, and what we do going forward will be pretty consistent with that history.

How much of a partner do you think the Trump administration will be with philanthropy?

I hope a real partner. There is no way to replace the scale and volume of the federal government.

I used to run USAID, and the budget cuts proposed for USAID could not be filled by almost all of the largest foundations in American coming together.

So governments have an extraordinary responsibility to continue to invest in the types of things that make opportunity more possible for people in poor parts of the world, but also right here at home. There’s truly no way to replace that.

One way to encourage that is to come up with innovative new partnerships that this administration and others can get excited about. The way we’ve done that in the past is consistent with how we’ll try to do that in the future: focus on genuine partnerships across public and private sectors. Really try to innovate to bring technology and know-how to those types of partnerships. And ultimately and importantly, a focus on measuring real results and reporting on what works.

How credible a partner do you think the federal government is?

I’m not sure anyone really knows the answer to that.

Our approach is, we’re going to make a handful of big bets in areas like health, food, economic opportunity abroad and at home with an eye toward helping as many people as we can and be super results-oriented. And we’re going to do it in a way that embraces public-private partnership and innovation and technology, all of which I believe should be appealing to a lot of public-sector partners, including the current administration.

But when we need to use our voice to defend a set of priorities that have been a part of America’s leadership around the world for years, decades even, we will do so.

Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images

You have a reputation as someone who can work across the aisle. Do you have any plans to try to protect the budget for USAID?

I was noticing some of the statements Bill Gates has made about the need to protect the budget. I think he’s an extraordinary messenger because he’s invested his own resources in efforts to immunize children, fight malaria, and improve school performance here in the U.S. and therefore can speak from that experience about the value of public investment.

Similarly, the Rockefeller Foundation has done this work for more than 100 years.

While it was a little while ago, efforts like the Green Revolution actually moved a billion people off the brink of hunger and starvation. Efforts in public health effectively created the field of modern, science-based, international public health. Smart investments in global governance like a subcommittee of the League of Nations that led to the creation of the World Health Organization.

As an institution, based on that history and the current work, we have the ability to speak credibly on these issues, and I expect we will.

As a former administrator at USAID, how do you spread that expertise to a larger audience?

The first thing we’ll do is look across our portfolio and focus our efforts on a few big bets that can truly be transformational.

As we look around the world, the crises around Ebola or Zika continue to represent real threats, and we’re looking at what we might do to protect the world from pandemic threats.

We have an exceptionally thoughtful portfolio in an area called “planetary health” that is studying humans’ impact on the environment and the consequences for people.

If you take New Delhi, for example, the air pollution created by human activity is leading to significant and immediate health consequences for children in that city. So we’re looking for things we can do in that sort of space.

In food and agriculture, we have big investments in improving agriculture productivity in Africa to fight hunger and poverty.

Today, we’re in a food crisis in Africa once again, with almost 18 million people on the brink of severe food insecurity because of drought and conflict and a lack of productive agriculture. We will try to link our investments to those consequences.

All of those things give us, in my view, the credibility to be a voice that encourages others — governments but also companies, other philanthropists, and local communities — to be a part of solving these problems together.

How large is a big bet?

We have seen time and again, especially in last 15 years, that when private philanthropy partners with government, brings technology and science and a results orientation to the table, and works with real intention to improve people’s lives, you can in fact immunize 400 or 500 million children and reduce child deaths dramatically.

You can launch agriculture-production programs in 19 countries and move 12 million children out of hunger and poverty sustainably, without giving out food but helping them be more productive with their own endeavors.

Even today, in one of Rockefeller’s programs, 400,000 young people have access to jobs in the digital economy because of their connection to our Digital Jobs Africa program. We have to take these things and make sure they have broader reach through bigger partnerships.

How much are philanthropy leaders getting together, though, to talk about some of these issues and what they can do together?

I suspect that the pressures on philanthropic organizations to be visible or claim credit for things might sometimes overpower the desire to hold hands with others and do things collaboratively.

That question is more important today than maybe five or 10 years ago.

Were there meetings postelection of foundation leaders to say, Let’s talk about these issues together?

I’m sure they’re happening.

It’s not just the election outcome that people see as transformational. All the root causes that led up to it — of successive generations of Americans feeling that the opportunity to do better than their parents did [is] slipping away. So many communities feel like they don’t have as much hope and instead react out of despair and have crises of violence and crime or opioid use and addiction and mortality.

These are deeply important phenomena that are changing the character of our country, and we need to be responsive to that, as we at Rockefeller have been for a very long time.

Our initial investments in philanthropy were in the American South, to address the hookworm prevalence among young children and improve learning outcomes and help improve local agriculture in those settings. That grew into a global philanthropic enterprise.

So we’ll be very intentional to seek opportunities to partner with our philanthropic colleagues on these types of issues, domestically and abroad.

Do you see Rockefeller moving more into impact investing?

We already helped create the Global Impact Investing Network. We have a long history of testing and coming up with innovations that lead to program-related investing becoming a big part of a number of big initiatives at Rockefeller and elsewhere.

Today we’re going to double down on that and make sure we use all the tools at our disposal. The one that we’re most excited about initially is accelerating the use of program-related investments and thinking about the types of innovations that can help unlock billions of dollars in private capital toward our purposes.

One example: [Rockefeller Foundation managing director] Saadia Madsbjerg pulled together insurance partners and hotel proprietors on the coast of Playa Del Carmen [in Mexico], and they came up with a very innovative new insurance model. Rockefeller helped structure it. Those business owners are now paying for insurance products that will ultimately pay for the restoration and protection of the coral reef throughout that region.

It’s those kinds of market-based solutions, driven by real innovations and financial thinking and edged along by our program-related investments, that can have real impact.

How much are you going to accelerate this sort of work?

It’s an important area. I spent a couple years in private equity before joining the Rockefeller Foundation, so I have a little bit of experience with bigger institutional investors, like pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, that are allocating capital for environmental, social, and governance causes or other categories of social investment.

That’s a very important trend to continue to accelerate. If we can help create models that absorb billions of dollars from those types of partners into vehicles that are investing in companies that help improve the results we can deliver on the other end, that’s very important to us. We will be more active in that space.

Governments around the world seem increasingly uneasy about foreign philanthropy. Is that affecting your work?

This was important when I was at USAID, and I think it’s very important now that people in this space, especially government to government, work to protect civil society to be an effective part of social progress.

That’s been a core responsibility of, certainly, American foreign policy on a bipartisan basis for many decades and I hope that will continue.

It’s important for philanthropy in particular to be transparent and clear about their operations and the results they seek to deliver. That’s just a good business practice for a sector that otherwise might not always prioritize such transparency.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.