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The Rockefeller Foundation Today
November 2006Welcome to the re-configured Rockefeller Foundation website. If you’ve visited the site before, you’ll notice quite a few changes, both in content and navigation. But whether you come often or rarely, you should know that these changes are not just cosmetic, and certainly aren’t limited to our web presence.
For nearly 18 months, since the Spring of 2005, we’ve been taking a hard look at the world in which we operate, the way we’ve worked and the way we think we need to work, how best to organize ourselves to pursue our mission, and the specific types of initiatives we think are most promising today.
Now we’ve reached conclusions about these questions. First, we arrived at some judgments about the most important forces of our times, and particularly those shaping the issues faced by those we serve: poor or vulnerable people around the world. These we summed up in a paper crafted in the second half of 2005. Next, we began a close look at the way we and others have conducted philanthropic work, and the way that work needs to change at Rockefeller in these early years of the 21st century. Again, we recorded our observations; this document was circulated internally in the Spring of 2006. Finally, we got quite specific about a new way of working, a focus on particular initiatives selected for their potential to produce meaningful and lasting change.
Of course, all of this analysis and planning, while necessary, is not sufficient to actually have any effect on the lives of those we serve. That effect must come, and is coming, from the new initiatives we’ve launched and will soon be launching. You’ll see a list of these initiatives in a drop-down menu at the top of every page of this site. They are our real work, ranging from increasing agricultural productivity in Africa (in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) to supporting the planning process in New Orleans. These initiatives will be characterized by—and we will hold ourselves accountable for—flexibility, agility, and genuine, measurable impact over time-limited periods.
There is more to come, and we hope you’ll come back often to chart our progress and that of our grantees, to learn more about our history, and to offer your own ideas about how we can best fulfill John D. Rockefeller’s charge that we work to “promote the well-being” of humanity “throughout the world.”
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