A top Rockefeller Foundation executive insisted Monday that the grant maker isn’t ending its commitment to curbing climate change and helping urban areas avoid major catastrophes despite its controversial decision to end its 100 Resilient Cities program.
Steven VanRoekel, Rockefeller’s chief operating officer, said in an interview with the Chronicle that the foundation does not view the move as an end to the program but rather the development of its next phase of grant making on climate and resilient cities.
“The decision to transition the work is really one that started when this effort started back in 2013,” said VanRoekel. “The original commitment was 100 cities, $100 million. It was a five-year commitment, and from the outset in May of 2013, [the goal was] self-sufficiency and transitioning of the work within the scope of this program.”
The Rockefeller Foundation stunned many of its staff members and beneficiaries when it announced last week it will end its ambitious $165 million program to make 100 cities around the world more resilient to climate change, economic collapses, terrorist attacks, pandemics, and other challenges facing cities around the world.
The pioneering 100 Resilient Cities program was the brainchild of Rockefeller’s then president, Judith Rodin, who announced the program in 2013 on the day the Rockefeller Foundation celebrated its 100th birthday. The program helped at least 80 cities hire “resilience officers,” who made sure they had strategies in place to deal with natural disasters and other challenges. It also attracted $3.4 billion from private and government sources, which committed dollars to help the cities carry out the resilience work.
In its place, the foundation, now led by Rajiv Shah, who took over from Rodin in 2017, announced two new efforts. One, the Climate and Resilience Office, will make sure nonprofits that focus on the core causes Rockefeller supports — food security, economic mobility, community health, and other areas — will make curbing the impact of climate change and other challenges a key part of their work. Through the second effort, the U.S. Jobs and Economic Opportunity Initiative, the foundation plans to back a variety of organizations that are working to make their regions more resilient to the aftershocks of climate change and other problems.
Foundation officials said they do not yet know how much money they will allocate to these two new efforts.
Long Commitment
Shah gave a speech about the Resilient Cities program soon after he took over for Rodin in which he pledged a “strong and continued commitment to this initiative for many, many years to come.”
Through a spokesman, Shah declined the Chronicle’s request for comment about why he appears to have changed his mind.
VanRoekel said the decision doesn’t mean 100 Resilient Cities was a failure.
“If it wasn’t working, the executive decision internally would have been let’s stop spending and stop dedicating resources and efforts to this,” said VanRoekel. “I think to reinforce what Raj said in 2017, we’re taking the best of the best aspects and really looking at how do we move those forward.”
In its announcement the foundation said it was awarding $30 million to the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington that houses a center on resiliency, to keep a version of the program running and about $15 million to Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, 100 Resilient Cities’ fiscal sponsor, in part to provide severance packages for the program’s 86 staff members who will lose their jobs on July 31 when the program ends, said Matthew Herrick, a foundation spokesman.
Some of that $15 million will also go toward making sure the program’s financial commitments to grantees are met and help with costs associated with the transfer of the program to Atlantic, said Herrick.
Leaders from the Atlantic Council declined to comment on the grant and the move. An Atlantic spokeswoman and Herrick both said the organization would announce plans for the program and the grant either later this month or shortly thereafter. Shah is a member of the Atlantic Council’s Board of Directors.
Close Scrutiny
The program had attracted so much attention around the world that the news it was ending elicited scrutiny from several major media outlets. Bloomberg broke the story, and Reuters and Fast Company also published detailed stories questioning the shift. But the foundation provided few details about why it would change course — and why it thought the new efforts were smarter ways to fight climate change and implement resiliency practices.
That prompted some observers to wonder if the reason had little to do with the merits of the program and more to do with the fact that nearly all new foundation chief executives want to make their mark by starting new efforts, something that is often challenging to find the money for unless another program is canceled.
Ted Nordhaus, who founded the Breakthrough Institute, a research center that promotes the use of technology to solve environmental and other challenges, said it’s not unusual for foundation leaders to make big changes early in their tenures.
“I can’t speak to the wisdom of ending the resilient-cities program or the foundation’s new initiatives, but I do wonder if there has ever been a new president at a major foundation like Rockefeller who didn’t immediately initiate a new strategic plan,” said Nordhaus. “Has there ever been a president who showed up and said, ‘We’re doing great work. Let’s stay the course and keep funding the things we’ve been funding’? If so, I can’t think of an example.”
Record of Success
VanRoekel said foundation officials and leaders of the program started discussions about the move in October and, with the blessing of the Board of Trustees, finalized the decision in March during Rockefeller’s annual board meeting. He also said there are no plans to end or shift other Rockefeller programs or priorities.
The foundation commissioned the Urban Institute to evaluate the program’s progress and assess its successes and identify where it needed improvements through 2021. The most recent report, which was released in December, found the program has largely been a success in most of the participating cities but that managing political instability and political transitions has been a “dominant challenge.”
The institute will issue its final report in 2022. Foundation officials also talked to mayors and other city leaders to find out what aspects of the program they thought were most important and needed to continue, VanRoekel said.
Obama Ties
With assets that stand at $4.3 billion, the Rockefeller Foundation remains a highly influential grant maker. It gave out $157.7 million in grants in 2017, according to its most recent tax filing, and has devoted a total of $500 million to date toward climate and resilience efforts, including what it put into the 100 Resilient Cities Program.
Shah was appointed to lead the foundation in 2017 after working for nearly a decade at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and serving under President Obama as director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which distributes money to nonprofits working overseas. VanRoekel also worked short stints with the agency in 2011, and from October 2014 to May 2015, and for Bill Gates’s Microsoft, earlier in his career.
Shah came under fire last year when a group of Rockefeller Foundation staff complained that he was mismanaging employees and directing foundation grants and contracts to people with whom he had personal or professional ties, according to a report by the Chronicle last June. The foundation hired a law firm to conduct a review of his leadership and concluded he did nothing wrong.
