Rockefeller Fund Defends Its Mission

To the Editor:

We at the Rockefeller Foundation were delighted to see Pablo Eisenberg’s suggestion that our arts and culture program has been “the most effective in philanthropy.”

But we were disappointed by his suggestion that we’ve stopped work in this field.

In fact, Rockefeller continues to be an active supporter of arts and culture. In just the last two years, we’ve provided major support to organizations such as United States Artists, Renew Media, and Creative Capital, among others.

What’s changed is that we have eliminated our Creativity and Culture program silo, along with all of the Rockefeller Foundation’s other program silos. We did this to spur crosscutting initiatives, to, in Mr. Eisenberg’s own words, “try innovative ideas and explore new frontiers.”

But this is, admittedly, not all that has changed in our approach to arts funding.

Mr. Eisenberg’s piece also calls on foundations to “link their investments to their missions.” Again, we agree. The mission of the Rockefeller Foundation, since many years before I became president, has been to “expand opportunities for poor or vulnerable people and to help ensure that globalization’s benefits are more widely shared.”

The grant we made in support of Spike Lee’s award-winning When the Levees Broke, for instance, enables us to do this, in a number of ways:

• By linking support for the arts to mission-driven goals, such as our initiative in support of the rebuilding process in New Orleans.
• By thinking about support for the arts more broadly, as exemplified by our grant to Teachers College of Columbia University to create a curriculum, “Teaching the Levees,” which will explore issues of race, class, and democracy in America.

One additional area in which we’ve re-oriented our support for arts and culture has been to tie more of that support to work in our own hometown of New York, as is the practice of many leading foundations across the country.

A first example is our creation of two Jane Jacobs Medals to be awarded annually to visionary urbanists by a distinguished panel of judges, extending the legacy of Jacobs’s Rockefeller-supported work in The Death and Life of Great American Cities and beyond. We expect to announce another new foray supporting arts and culture in New York City in the months just ahead.

Judith Rodin
President
Rockefeller Foundation
New York