The Rockefeller Foundation

The Rockefeller Foundation for the 21st Century

Since its establishment in 1913, the Rockefeller Foundation has sought to identify and attack at their source the underlying causes of human suffering. The Foundation pioneered the frontier of global philanthropy and continues to find and fund solutions to many of the world’s most intractable challenges.

The Rockefeller Foundation attempts to harness the creative forces of globalization, supporting breakthrough solutions to 21st century challenges. This is smart globalization: ensuring that the opportunities unleashed by globalization are accessible to more people, more fully, in more places — and that poor and vulnerable people are equipped to seize them.

The Foundation operates both within the United States and around the world. The Foundation’s efforts are overseen by an independent board of trustees and managed by its president through a staff drawn from scholarly, scientific, and professional disciplines.

Globalization: How We See the World
How We Work | Integrated Initiatives | Our Focus

Globalization: How We See the World

Globalization is the major trend of our time, the foremost driver of change in the world today, with consequences both beneficial and burdensome.

Around the world, people reap the positive benefits of revolutionary advances in health and medicine and profound progress in physical and social sciences. We share markets and capital, knowledge and ideas, and dramatically more diverse communities. In the last three decades, illiteracy worldwide has dropped by half. Eighty percent of the world’s population lives in countries where poverty is declining. A decade into the new century, we have much to be optimistic about.

Not everyone’s lives, though, are improving fast enough, nor are they improving equitably. Half of the people on earth subsist on less than two dollars a day. A billion people live in abject poverty, with neither running water nor enough to eat. Ten million children succumb to preventable or treatable diseases every year. Climate change and environmental degradation pose the greatest dangers to the communities least prepared to weather them. Both the benefits and burdens — the opportunities and risks — of worldwide progress are propelled by globalization, the economic and social process by which economies and communities grow inextricably interdependent.

Under that broad headline — and building on our history, legacy, and insight into the evolving world in which we operate — the Rockefeller Foundation for the 21st Century recognizes and responds to several major currents of change: shifting geopolitical relationships, widening economic inequalities, deteriorating natural ecosystems, accelerating migration to ill-prepared and poorly planned urban areas, and growing threats to social, physical, and economic security in communities around the earth.

How We Work

The Rockefeller Foundation for the 21st Century employs and infuses several guiding principles in its work: ways of operating made easier and more necessary by globalization. We develop and deploy solutions that are grounded in learning and knowledge, science and data.

We seek and support work that sparks innovation, fresh approaches to problems and their resolutions.

We work across and between disciplines, bridging the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

We bring diverse people and parties together and engage them in meaningful alliances.

We search for and work with partners to leverage as many elements as possible to maximize opportunities for success.

We work to strengthen individual, institutional, and community capacity — empowering more people in more places to build and maintain better lives and futures.

We strive to stay nimble and agile. Almost all of our work is selected because the Foundation sees an opportunity to break a bottleneck, surface a new issue or reframe an old one, take advantage of a current or coming tipping point, or expand a proven solution in concert with others.

The Foundation vigorously and regularly measures impact and outcomes. Our initiatives specify clear time frames, identify anticipated results, and require monitoring and evaluation. This does not mean that we expect to solve the world’s thorniest problems overnight. It does mean that Foundation-supported work defines hypotheses, articulates both short- and longer-term objectives, foresees and adapts to changing circumstances, and fully integrates verifiable methods of assessing progress.

Integrated Initiatives

The Rockefeller Foundation funds a portfolio of linked initiatives. Individually, and together, they draw on the Foundation’s deep-seated commitments to nurture innovation, build individual and institutional capital, pioneer new fields, expand access to and distribution of resources, and, ultimately, generate sustainable impact.

Each initiative is designed to achieve specific, measurable goals within a projected time frame, and we reassess its effectiveness within three to five years. These requirements enable the Foundation to evaluate our work frequently, seize unanticipated opportunities, maintain flexibility, shift tactics when necessary, and recalibrate our approach when a problem demands shorter- or longer-term investment.

Our Focus

The Rockefeller Foundation for the 21st Century focuses its resources and energies on five interconnected – overlapping – issue areas, selected both because they are critical global challenges and because the Foundation is distinctively positioned to address them effectively and with measurable results.

Repairing weak, outmoded health systems — making modern health systems stronger, more affordable, and more accessible in poor and vulnerable communities.

Building resilience to environmental degradation and climate change — developing plans and products to protect those with the fewest means from an imperiled environment and warming global climate.

Addressing the risks of accelerating urbanization — shaping efforts in planning, finance, infrastructure, and governance to manage a world in which, for the first time in history, more people live in urban communities than rural ones.

Reweaving frayed social contracts — reinforcing American workers’ social and economic security, reimagining the regulatory framework that governs our economy, and reinvigorating the notion of citizenship.

Easing basic survival insecurities — supporting sustainable efforts to provide the basic building blocks of increased labor and land productivity and economic growth: nutrition, water, health care, and shelter.

the Foundation

is an active New York citizen, and

nurtures an enabling environment