Rockefeller September 11 Fund Focused on Support for Poor and Excluded

On September 11, senior managers at the Rockefeller Foundation and members of its board of trustees

were flying back to New York City from the organization’s conference center in Italy when the federal government halted flights over U.S. air space. That decision left many of the managers and trustees stranded together in Gander, Newfoundland — a fate that allowed them to quickly establish, without much hoop-jumping, a $5-million fund to help those affected by the terrorist attacks.

Once back in the office, top managers requested that everyone in the foundation submit ideas for how the money should be spent. The foundation’s “staff council,” which has dozens of members and is widely representative of all 140 Rockefeller employees in the New York office, made the first cut in determining which charities would receive money.

A few grants went to help Arab-American groups counter the backlash against people who were perceived to be of Arab descent. Some $500,000 was provided to the New York Foundation, which made grants to groups working with displaced immigrants, who otherwise might have had difficulty obtaining relief funds and unemployment insurance.

“At Rockefeller, our mission is to help the poor and excluded throughout the world,” says Gordon Conway, the foundation’s president. “Immediately after September 11, we said, ‘Who are the people who are poor and excluded?’ That brought us to funding the families of those who were low-paid, who died, or had lost their jobs.”

Jonathan Rosen of the New York Unemployment Project, one of the organizations helping people laid off from low-wage jobs obtain unemployment insurance, says the support from Rockefeller was crucial, especially since many other grant makers were reluctant to support groups that specialize in community organizing.

“They immediately walled off some serious New York money, and did a great deal of work supporting legal services to ensure that people had the money they were entitled to,” Mr. Rosen says.

In January, Rockefeller went a step further in its efforts to help New York nonprofit groups.

The foundation published a book, Endure: Renewal From Ground Zero, filled with photographs of how people responded and rallied around one another following the World Trade Center attacks. The book was sent to dozens of nonprofit organizations, which were ecouraged to give copies to their donors and volunteers to raise awareness about the new challenges they faced following September 11.