RF Annual Report

1996 ANNUAL REPORT ABOUT THE FOUNDATION – THE FOUNDATION The Rockefeller Foundation is a philanthropic organization endowed by John D. Rockefeller and chartered in 1913 for the well-being of people throughout the world. It is one of America's oldest private foundations and one of the few with strong international interests. From its beginning, the Foundation has sought to identify, and address at their source, the causes of human suffering and need. Foundation programs are organized around nine core strategies listed on the following page. Together, these strategies constitute the Foundation's commitment to help define and pursue a path toward environmentally sustainable development consistent with individual rights and a more equitable sharing of the world's resources. The Foundation's work is divided among the following program areas: the arts and humanities, equal opportunity and school reform, agricultural sciences, health sciences, population sciences, global environment, and African initiatives including female education. While concentrating its efforts in these areas, the Foundation adjusts its course to reflect needs as they arise. The balance of the Foundation's grant and fellowship programs supports work in international security, international philanthropy, and smaller, one-time "special" initiatives. The Foundation maintains the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in northern Italy for conferences of international scope and for residencies for artists, scholars and policymakers, and other professionals from around the world. The Foundation is administered by its president through a staff drawn from scholarly, scientific and professional disciplines. An independent board of trustees, which meets four times a year, sets program guidelines and financial policy, and approves all appropriations. © 2003 The Rockefeller Foundation 1996 AR > 1 This chart depicts by program area the grants and fellowships totaling $107,420,637 appropriated from the 1996 budget. © 2003 The Rockefeller Foundation 1996 AR > 2 CORE PROGRAM STRATEGIES The following are the nine core strategies around which Foundation program work is organized, along with corresponding appropriations from the 1996 budget. © 2003 The Rockefeller Foundation 1996 AR > 3 Core Program Expenditure AFRICAN INITIATIVES $4,842,000 STRATEGY: Build human capacity and institutional infrastructure in Africa with an emphasis on closing the gender gap in school enrollment and achievement. AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES $15,795,136 STRATEGY:Increase crop yields of smallholder farmers in developing countries profitably and without degrading natural resources. ARTS AND HUMANITIES $12,519,984 STRATEGY:Understand and engage difference across changing societies through the arts and humanities. HEALTH SCIENCES $12,512,700 STRATEGY:Build human capacity for population-based health care in developing nations. EQUAL OPPORTUNITY / SCHOOL $16,698,333 REFORM STRATEGY:Create job opportunities and $10,498,333 community support that will enable all those who can work to join the mainstream economy. STRATEGY:Improve public education $6,200,000 systems in urban communities to help young people succeed in school and society. GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT $12,632,000 STRATEGY:Build international leadership $6,370,000 capacity capable of initiating and carrying out innovative approaches to sustainable development. STRATEGY:Facilitate the transition to a new $6,262,000 energy paradigm based on sustainability, renewable resources, efficient use, economic viability and equity in access. POPULATION SCIENCES $14,878,809 STRATEGY:Mobilize resources to satisfy unmet demand for family planning and reproductive health services. © 2003 The Rockefeller Foundation 1996 AR > 4 THE PRESIDENT’S LETTER Philanthropy -- the practice of applying assets of knowledge, passion and wealth to bring about constructive change -- is vital to human efforts to survive and prosper with freedom in a fragile, dangerous and interdependent world. In the past three decades philanthropy has played a major role in helping the nations of Asia feed themselves, protecting billions of people from disease and building a durable inner--city renewal movement in America. These and dozens of other successes were not the accomplishments of foundations alone. They resulted from the work of scientists, neighborhood groups, nonprofit corporations and public agencies that attracted the support of philanthropy. These philanthropic partnerships served as wellsprings of social venture capital. They took risks and invested in new directions toward which the private and public sectors were sometimes indifferent and occasionally hostile. During the past few decades, the importance of the nonprofit sector -- and its vital engine, philanthropy -- has increased dramatically, in both financial impact and influence around the globe. The nonprofit sector has functioned as a source of new ideas, as a locus of research and experimentation, and as a seedbed of entrepreneurial activity. As we approach a new century, we find that our reliance upon the entrepreneurial spirit of the nonprofit sector has grown. At critical junctions in the past, the technological or organizational achievements of the commercial sector were vital to the emergence of new patterns of human behavior. At other moments, the forces of the state or of religious institutions were decisive. But the transition we must all now undertake to a global pattern of interdependent, sustainable development will depend more than at any earlier moment in history upon innovations pioneered in the nonprofit sector. We see the seminal impact of the nonprofit sector initiatives mounted by the environmental movement around the world. We see that the beachheads of progress gained on the resistant terrain of urban deterioration have almost all been based on the work of community groups and movements. The human rights movement has altered the terms of debate between the individual and the state. And entrepreneurial organizations like the Ashoka Society, the Grameen Bank and Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee in Bangladesh, Acción in South America, and the Forum for African Women Educationalists have been powerful forces for change that have sparked imitation and replication. What do these efforts have in common? They are all initiatives that arose in the independent, nonprofit sector. Often scorned by the state and shunned by the private sector, they have wound up improving the living conditions of individuals, affecting the actions of governments and changing the policies of multilateral institutions. Cooperation among all three sectors -- public, private and nonprofit -- is both needed and unavoidable. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in two areas that are the subjects of public reports released by the Rockefeller Foundation early this year. © 2003 The Rockefeller Foundation 1996 AR > 5 The first is called "Stories of Renewal: Community Building and the Future of Urban America." This report on the status of the fight for equality and opportunity in America's cities compiles two decades of lessons drawn from the accomplishments, scale and sophistication of community building around the country. This is an area where progress has been most striking when cooperation among community nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), business and government has been strongest. The challenge is immense and daunting. The encouraging news is that, after many years of uncertain efforts and some dispiriting results, there is now in place in the central city neighborhoods of urban America a real base of knowledge and achievement in the process of community renewal. In the 1990s a clear choice has emerged for America: whether to throw the power of her faith and the might of her resources behind the success stories being written by a generation of enterprising and increasingly effective community organizations tested in the cauldron of America's inner cities; or, instead, to turn her head and her heart away, blindly slashing domestic expenditures and placing punitive limits on communities finally beginning to make progress, against steep odds, in renewing themselves. There are more than 2,000 community development corporations (CDCs) in America's cities -- a success story surprisingly unknown to many of those who seem ready to write off our urban centers. The National Community Building Network (NCBN) embraces not only the world of CDCs, but also scores of experienced, effective, local antipoverty planning and action organizations around the country who have come together to learn from each other's experience in agenda setting, organizing research and forming coalitions for action. It marks the beginning in this country of something we have desperately needed for a long time: a national alliance of serious, seasoned and professional community organizations that can bring a concerted voice to bear on shaping the urban agenda. The sector of society in the United States that devotes the most intense energy, the most persistent ingenuity and the most sustained resources -- human as well as financial -- to this exercise in identifying, applying and disseminating successful community--building techniques is the nonprofit sector. Foundations play a vital role in that work. But just as the community--renewal effort is growing and succeeding, legislatures in Washington and in state capitals are cutting funds on which these communities rely. The budget reductions imposed nationwide in 1996 fell in an overwhelmingly disproportionate way on

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