Adrienne Arsht Gives $25 Million to Help Communities Cope With Climate Change and Other Disasters

The Washington philanthropist Adrienne Arsht is giving $25 million to endow the newly named Adrienne Arsht — Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center at the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington. The gift marks the next chapter of 100 Resilient Cities, an ambitious program launched by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2013 to help cities deal with natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and other challenges.

The Rockefeller Foundation announced in early April that it would dissolve 100 Resilient Cities at the end of July and that it was giving the Atlantic Council $30 million to take over a new iteration of the program. The Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center is the effort that is taking its place.

With Arsht’s donation, the center will have a total of $55 million to carry out its work. The philanthropist started the resilience center at Atlantic in 2016 with a $5 million donation, and the center carried out its work with little fanfare. The new infusion of money from her latest gift and the Rockefeller Foundation’s grant is likely to bring the center much more visibility.

“It is gratifying that my notion of resilience as a concept that needs to be studied and applied to some of the world’s most intractable problems is gaining such significant support,” said Arsht in an email response to questions about her latest donation. “I am proud to partner with the Rockefeller Foundation and I look forward to watching [the resilience center] become a global center for resilient solutions.”

The 100 Resilient Cities program helped at least 80 cities hire “resilience officers,” executive-level leaders who made sure they had strategies in place to deal with the challenges brought about by climate change and global political instability. It also attracted $3.4 billion from private and government sources that helped the cities carry out the resilience work.

The Resilience Center will function differently by focusing on five areas: community infrastructure, public and private finance, risk and insurance approaches, direct financial services, and educational and awareness campaigns. Its lofty goal is “reaching one billion people with resilience solutions to climate change, migration, and security by 2030,” said Frederick Kempe, Atlantic Council’s president, at a news conference Monday.

Kathy Baughman McLeod, a former executive at Bank of America, was hired in February to lead the center. In her previous post, she directed the bank’s climate-change risk assessment and strategy as well as its global environmental and social risk policy work.

The depth of the Rockefeller Foundation’s involvement with the center is unclear. Rajiv Shah, Rockefeller’s president, called it a “partnership” and said at the news conference on Monday announcing the Arsht gift that the foundation intends to “stay involved as long as it takes and hopefully not be too intrusive.”

The foundation and Shah were widely criticized in late March when Bloomberg reported that the foundation had decided to shutter 100 Resilient Cities and lay off the program’s employees at the end of July. The foundation then officially announced the move in early April.