In a recent interview with Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin, we discussed the Foundation’s upcoming 100-year anniversary and the evolution of the philanthropic sector, the role of innovation in achieving human progress, leadership lessons in effecting large-scale change, the 21st century demand for collaboration across sectors, and much more.
The year 2013 marks one hundred years since John D. Rockefeller established The Rockefeller Foundation. To commemorate the occasion, the Foundation is launching a Centennial initiative that will celebrate the richness of their past work and look ahead to the development of innovative approaches to address the global shocks and deepening stresses of the 21st century. The Foundation views its Centennial as an unprecedented opportunity to raise the effectiveness of their work and find solutions to global challenges. To achieve this, the Foundation is hosting convenings throughout the world that focus on a number of global imperatives, publishing a series of books that draw on their past to provide lessons for philanthropy in the future, and engaging with people through new digital platforms to encourage discussion on a variety of different issues and allow people to participate in the Centennial from all over the world.
The first event in their Centennial series took place last week in Washington on the topic of building social, economic and environmental resilience. More information about that event including video streaming of the panels can be found here.
Judith Rodin is the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world’s leading philanthropic organizations. Prior to the Rockefeller Foundation, she was the president of the University of Pennsylvania, and provost of Yale University. She was the first woman named to lead an Ivy League Institution and is the first woman to serve as the Rockefeller Foundation's president in its nearly 100-year history. Since joining the Foundation in 2005, Dr. Rodin has recalibrated its focus to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Today the Foundation supports and shapes innovations to strengthen resilience to risks and ensure that more people have access to the benefits of globalization. Dr. Rodin is the author of more than 200 academic articles and has written or co-written 12 books and has received over 16 honorary degrees and serves as a member of the board for several leading corporations and non-profits. Dr. Rodin is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and earned her Ph D. in Psychology from Columbia University.
Rahim Kanani: As you think about the Rockefeller Foundation and its impact on the world over the last 100 years, how would you describe the evolution of philanthropy as a sector, and where has the Foundation pioneered efforts to lead the way in this regard?
Judith Rodin: The extraordinary genius of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie 100 years ago was their recognition that the great wealth they had amassed could be put to public good and used to solve the complex problems for which there were no other sources of capital. This was the invention of modern American philanthropy as we know it. The idea of systematizing giving to achieve human progress was the true innovation of John D. Rockefeller, and ultimately the Rockefeller Foundation’s legacy.
Philanthropy has experienced three distinct changes over the last 100 years. In the first phase of American philanthropy, foundations were seeking to solve huge sweeping global social problems. Diseases like Yellow Fever, hookworm and malaria were rampant, yet the basics of public health as we know it today were still unknown. Foundations engaged partners and other institutions. They were always envisioning, creating, and establishing new organizations that implemented, and operated towards, their strategy and goals. This phase in Rockefeller’s history saw significant achievement – a Nobel-prize-winning vaccine for Yellow Fever, the professionalization of the field of public health, and the spread of western medicine in Africa, Asia and around the world.
The second phase of philanthropy came after the Second World War – following the establishment of the Marshall Plan and the Bretton Woods Doctrine. With the creation of the World Bank and the IMF, large sources of capital and different mechanisms for setting common agendas and bringing about global collaboration were established. Because this was a role historically fulfilled by Foundations like Rockefeller, there was a significant shift in the way Foundations began to think about solving social problems. Philanthropy started to seek out and fund work through civil society organizations and the NGO sector was developed. There was a real emphasis on how to create lasting opportunity for individuals and communities, not just how to fix disease or create food security. As John D. Rockefeller said, “The world owes no man a living, but it owes everyman the opportunity to make a living.” This phase of philanthropy resulted in the creation of the ‘social safety net’. For The Rockefeller Foundation, this phase continued to be one of strategic growth and innovation – a time of betting on big and new ideas. During this phase, the Foundation experienced powerful energetic moments. Most significantly, during the 1960s and 70s, Norman Borlaug and other Rockefeller Foundation scientists developed rice and wheat varieties that saved a billion lives throughout Latin American and Asia – mobilizing the most significant agricultural revolution of our time. Today, more than half of the people on earth eat rice and wheat varieties containing these genes. This post-war era served to strengthen the foundations of development and gave rise to new ideas, new ways of leveraging research, and critical new alliances.
I think we are now in the third phase of philanthropy. The world has fundamentally changed, and globalization is not only impacting the problems we are seeing, but also the way we work to address these challenges. As a result, the Foundation seeks out innovations on the ground - sourcing ideas from the crowd - and looks to scale them as often as we look to create them. Technology has given us unprecedented access to innovations, often from unlikely sources, allowing us to effect change in completely new ways. We haven’t rejected the earlier phases of philanthropy, but with a new set of tools and approaches we can’t and we don’t rely on the old institutional way of working. The Rockefeller Foundation’s current work aims to pioneer efforts to scale new innovations, from our role in developing and scaling the field of impact investing to our commitment to exploring how mobile technology can transform health systems and health access throughout the world.
Rahim Kanani: With the Centennial theme for the Foundation being "Innovation for the Next 100 Years", how did it come about to put innovation at the center, or at the core, of Rockefeller's thinking and practice moving forward?
Judith Rodin: Innovation is in The Rockefeller Foundation’s DNA, and is woven so deeply throughout our history over the course of the 20th Century. In the early days, our predecessors talked about scientific philanthropy; that was their term for innovation. They identified, tested, challenged, and used the best of something, discarded what wasn’t working, and kept forcing themselves and those they funded to continuously innovate. It was this drive for innovation that invented the field of public health, identified the need to blend the biological and chemical disciplines that led to a Nobel Prize for bio-chemistry, and helped launch the field of Artificial Intelligence.
The Foundation has always chosen to innovate as a way of transforming opportunity and achieving human progress. We have the privilege of celebrating our centennial by reflecting on our past and thinking about the future of our own work and the future of philanthropy more generally by recognizing that innovation must always stay at the core of what we do. Innovation is about building upon invention, about catalyzing the use of it in new and path-breaking ways so that circumstances, people and outcomes change as a result.
In this phase three of philanthropy, as I described earlier, we have a whole new set of tools for thinking about innovation. Innovation is no longer just about products, but process innovations like crowdsourcing and design thinking; it is market innovations like Social Impact Bonds, and it is service innovations like mobile health. All these examples are elements of the innovation processes that we can utilize and catalyze. It would be impossible to celebrate our centennial without celebrating innovation; past, present and future.
Rahim Kanani: As President of the Rockefeller Foundation for seven years, what are some of the leadership lessons you've acquired in the context of effecting large-scale change?
Judith Rodin: I have been honored and privileged to have led The Rockefeller Foundation for the last seven years, and I am excited to be leading the Foundation as we enter our centennial year. Over the course of my time at Rockefeller, and my time leading other institutions, I have learned three important lessons.
First, a leader must always convey a compelling vision and a clear rationale for change. A rationale for change isn’t enough, and a compelling vision isn’t enough. They must go together to be successful at bringing along the institution.
Second, you can develop the best strategy, and I think we have at The Rockefeller Foundation, but I always say that culture eats strategy for lunch. A leader must recognize that change is as much about influencing the culture as it is about influencing the domains of work.
Finally, I have learned that you can never communicate too much – both internally and externally. Internally, you must always keep filling in the holes and blanks for your staff that can all too often be filled by interpretation. Externally, it is critical to ensure that others understand what you are doing and why you are doing it, not to influence or change others, but to make sure your goals are credible and understandable to the broader ecosystem in which you work.
Rahim Kanani: In order to effect the kind of change necessary for long-term growth and prosperity, we certainly need better partnerships across sectors and increased collaboration. How have these concepts evolved in your own thinking at the Foundation, and what are some ways in which we can break down the barriers of working in silos and begin to think of ourselves as part of a larger ecosystem, rather than separate individuals or organizations trying to tackle extremely complicated issues in isolation?
Judith Rodin: The world’s growing interconnectedness enables us and demands of us that we create better partnerships and collaborations that allow us to touch every element of the problem we are trying to address. At The Rockefeller Foundation, we take a systems-based approach to problem solving, believing that the challenges we face in today’s world are increasingly complex, and philanthropy alone cannot intervene in every part of the system. It may, and most likely will, take interventions in every part of a system to leverage catalytic change. Partnerships, networks and collaboration are critically important as we address these complicated issues, whether they are funding partners, action partners, developing partners, or translation partners.
For example, The Rockefeller Foundation funded Ashoka Changemakers last year to create a collaborative competition for the G20. The goal of the competition was to source the best ideas in the world to finance small and medium-sized enterprise so they have the resources to grow to scale. We received hundreds of applicants and ideas. Seventeen winners were chosen and the G20 committed half a billion dollars to fund their innovations. It only cost the Foundation half a million to mount the competition, but the initiative on the whole leveraged over $500 million. These kinds of partnerships are incredibly important because they are necessary to really scale this kind of work.
Unfortunately I have heard all too often that philanthropy doesn’t work with government or doesn’t work with the private sector. At Rockefeller we believe that you must work with everyone. I think a good portion of our success will come from linking networks and partners from the most unlikely places and in the most unlikely ways.
Finally, we can’t overlook the need to identify new sources of capital through partnerships and networks. The days when Rockefeller, or any philanthropy or government, had enough money to fix the world’s problem are gone. This is why The Rockefeller Foundation is trying to develop and intermediate the field of impact investing, which brings private capital into solving social problems.
Rahim Kanani: If you were to address philanthropists of all stars and stripes on the highest leverage bets they can make to effect real social advancement around the world, what are the few choice bets you would advocate for?
Judith Rodin: I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to say that I have all the answers. I believe that it is the diversity of approaches and the different experiments being done throughout the philanthropic sector that allow us to make true progress. The challenge and the need is to make sure we all have the collective judgment and the will to decide what to do next and what should be taken to scale. If we don’t reduce the number of every flower blooming and weed what isn’t working then our impact can only be compromised. If we don’t partner and collaborate on projects that others have developed then we are not going to catalyze real change.
This is why the sector is so focused on evaluation right now, because we have to know what works, and much more importantly, what doesn’t work. Then we have to be willing to share that information with each other.
Rahim Kanani: And finally, when you think about the Foundation's vision and strategy to lead for the next 100 years, what are you most excited about and what are you most afraid of?
Judith Rodin: I think I am most excited about the fact that this is a pivotal moment for the Foundation as we build on our 100 years of experience. We are lucky to have this vast resource of learning, of influence, of reputational capital to deploy, and a mission that remains unchanged. We have so many new tools to fulfill that mission combined with the excitement of our centennial that gives us tremendous credibility and opportunity for the next 100 years.
As I look to the future, the thing I most fear is that there is such opportunity for really deep and unpredictable upheavals in the world that can upend our capacity to make transformative change. This is one of the reasons that The Rockefeller Foundation is focusing so much on building resilience. We can’t predict all of these cataclysmic potential changes, whether economic, financial, or climate, but we can help make the world more resilient to them. I don’t have the same confidence that we can help the world develop more equitable growth, which is the Foundation’s other main pillar. Inequity has grown in every country that has developed growth at the macro level, both in the developed and the developing world. We are seeing the leading edge of the upheavals that inequity is creating and I fear that will only accelerate unless there is a stronger focus on the equitable part of growth and more deliverables to achieve it.