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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-12/the-demise-of-rockefeller-s-100-resilient-cities
Bloomberg CityLab
The Rise,
Fall, and Possible Rebirth of 100 Resilient Cities
Internal
communications shed new light on the Rockefeller Foundation’s decision to
stop funding the global climate nonprofit, and hint at what might come next.
By
Laura Bliss
Laura Bliss is a writer and editor for
CityLab in San Francisco, focused on transportation and technology. She also
writes MapLab, a biweekly newsletter about maps.
@mslaurabliss
June 12, 2019, 11:56 AM
EDT 
A man shines a flashlight on
standing water inside the South Ferry 1 subway station in New York, in the
wake of Superstorm Sandy. Craig Ruttle/AP
In late April, at a town-hall
meeting in New York City, Raj Shah, the president of the Rockefeller
Foundation, addressed the staff of 100 Resilient Cities. The nonprofit,
launched by the philanthropy in 2013, has helped cities around the world plan
for natural disasters and social shocks, especially the ravages of climate
change.
Earlier that month, the foundation
had abruptly announced plans to shutter the program. Now Shah was explaining
why.
“This is not about whether 100
Resilient Cities works,” Shah said. “It’s a shift in the foundation’s focus
to delivering measurable results for vulnerable people ... with a budget
framework that works.”
In a video recording later viewed
by CityLab, a few people who dialed in from satellite offices were
broadcasted at the bottom of the screen, their expressions grim. By August 1,
the organization’s 86 employees would be out of a job. In city halls around
the globe, officials who’d come to rely on their support wondered how they’d
keep climate-prep initiatives afloat, including the hiring of hundreds of “resilience
officers.”
But now plans are being hatched to
advance some of 100RC’s work beyond its expiration date. Last week, the
nonprofit’s president, Michael Berkowitz, told staff that he and a group of
soon-to-be-former 100RC officers were preparing to start a new nonprofit with
the mission of helping cities implement resilience projects.
What’s more, the Rockefeller
Foundation has confirmed that it may keep some elements of the 100 Resilient
Cities program alive.
These are significant turns of
events from just a few weeks ago, when the future of 100RC looked bleak,
despite its well-regarded status in climate-planning circles. For local
governments, the whiplash may be a reminder of the risks of relying of
private dollars to create public policies.
Established in 2013 by the
Rockefeller Foundation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy,
100 Resilient Cities was born out of the idea that local governments needed
help planning for disasters and combating persistent social maladies. Across
a network of more than 100 global member cities—from New York to New Orleans,
Rome to Ramallah, Montevideo to Montréal—the group underwrote salaries
for chief resilience officers,
shepherded resilience plans, and supplied local leaders with ideas,
financing, and technical assistance.
FEMA
Administrator Brock Long addresses a plenary session as 100 Resilient Cities
President Michael Berkowitz looks on at a meeting of the National Governors
Association in July 2017.
Stephan Savoia/AP
While the nonprofit was best known
for climate adaptation plans, its work encompassed much more. For example, in
Boston, leaders defined resilience as breaking down structural racism. In
Panama City, it was about improving mobility. A city became “resilient” by
identifying virtually any social and infrastructural fault line that a shock
might expose. Change was measured on a long-term basis. In contrast to other
nonprofits that give grants for specific projects, the 100RC model was
unusually flexible.
But in April, the Rockefeller Foundation suddenly
announced that it would discontinue its funding for 100RC, which had
amounted to $164 million to date. Leaders said that they planned to “transition”
the nonprofit’s work by setting up a new office at the foundation focused on
economic resilience, and by funding the resilience efforts of the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Little
explanation was given publicly, but foundation leaders later offered staff a
two-part rationale: As it existed, 100RC had grown too costly, and its model
no longer aligned with Rockefeller’s goals.
That shift was partly due to new
leadership. Shah started as president of Rockefeller in 2017, after serving
as the chief administrator of the federal U.S. Agency for International
Development. It was his predecessor at Rockefeller, Judith Rodin, who helped
design the resiliency program and spun it off as a grantee of the foundation.
At the meeting in April, Shah told 100RC staff that he had promised the
foundation’s board that he would focus on quantifying the impact of
Rockefeller’s investments at the level of individual lives.
For example, he said, one of the
foundation’s new goals was to save 6 million lives by improving maternal and
children’s health through the use of predictive analytics, especially in
developing counties. Another target was to bring renewable power and
solutions to 200 million people who live in “energy poverty.”
“That was a big pivot for the
Rockefeller Foundation, which had been focused on new ways of thinking about
finance and resilience and inclusive economies in a more conceptual way,” Shah
said. “That is great, but this is a different direction.”
Indeed, 100RC’s open-ended model
was at times a weakness, said Carlos Martín, a senior fellow in the
Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute,
who authored a series of evaluations of the program. “The value and benefit
is that it’s up to the city to decide what the most critical shocks are,” he
said in an interview with CityLab in April. “The negative is that you have a
gazillion things going on.”
And while academic research
supports the theory of building urban resilience through institutional
change, it was challenging to measure short-term results directed by the
program, Martín found. Emails sent among 100RC staff in February that were
viewed by CityLab pointed to the pressure that the nonprofit was under from
the Rockefeller Foundation to identify “marketable evidence” of their impact.
But 100RC achieved many points of
positive impact, according to Martín’s report, and it defined the “urban
resilience” movement to date. Many member cities continued to employ a chief
resilience officer after their original grant to do so ran out. Leaders
described a shift in their way of thinking after engaging with 100 Resilient
Cities; they were better able to connect ongoing social challenges to
pressing infrastructure needs, the evaluation found. Nearly 80 “resilience
strategies” that outline ideas for public-works projects and
economic-development strategies reflect this, and more are still being
released.
Resilience officers around the
world also extol the benefits of having a network of like-minded colleagues.
Those relationships were “the most powerful thing that Rockefeller has
created,” Piero Pelizzaro, the chief resilience officer of Milan, told CityLab in April. “Our
daily exchange with other CROs and the mutual learning that went on let us
make improvements every day.”
More recently, 100RC had also
pivoted to helping implement city plans,
shepherding projects like reinforcing old masonry in Wellington and building
green “oases” in Paris schoolyards.
Apart from their philosophical
differences, however, Rockefeller Foundation leaders also had financial
concerns about 100RC. At the staff meeting in April, Shah explained that the
nonprofit had spent an average of $30 million to $40 million annually in recent
years, and that the run rate that Rockefeller would have preferred was $5
million to $6 million. Starting in late 2018, the foundation had begun to
look for outside sponsors to support 100 Resilient Cities, Shah said. But he
had judged that the odds of finding adequate funding were slim.
“These decisions were about budget
balance, and not about the work that 100RC has done,” said Steve VanRoekel,
the chief operating officer of the Rockefeller Foundation, who sat next to
Shah at the meeting.
But these numbers took senior staff
at 100RC by surprise. In emails and slides viewed by CityLab, Rockefeller
Foundation officers indicated plans as recently as January to provide another
$50 million in funding over the next several years, and that 100RC had projected
lower annual spending into the future.
There was also at least one sign of
faith from an outside supporter. According to an email sent from the Macquarie Group to
100 Resilient Cities and viewed by CityLab, the nonprofit was a semifinalist
for a $10 million (AUS) philanthropic award from
the Australian investment bank, until it was disqualified after Rockefeller’s
announcement that it would shutter.
If staffers launch a new resilience
venture, the idea would be to work on a project-by-project basis, rather
than across a network of cities. The proposed nonprofit would also rely on
multiple funders, not just one, a resiliency lesson that 100RC learned the
hard way. A formal announcement of this venture is expected in July,
Berkowitz told staff.
The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the oldest and largest U.S.
philanthropies, maintains $3.7 billion in assets. It has also said it
plans to keep “resilience” as part of its portfolio. It is currently hiring for a new managing
director of climate and resilience, and has granted the Atlantic Council with
$30 million to launch the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience
Center. Another $12 million grant will support and transition the members
of the 100 Resilient Cities network out of the program, Matt Herrick, who
was then the foundation’s director of communications, told CityLab in April.
But now the Rockefeller Foundation
is holding out the possibility to maintain the 100RC name and network in some fashion, according
to Nick Spence, a communications officer. VanRoekel has been engaged in talks
with a group of chief
resilience officers from around the world who want to see a future for their
collaborative. “As the next phase of our climate and resilience
work begins to take shape, we are excited for what lies ahead,” VanRoekel
said in an email to CityLab.
The foundation declined to provide
further detail.
The potential continuity of 100RC’s work may be reassuring
to some of those rocked by the abrupt announcement of its demise. That
includes not only its staff, but officials in city halls around the world.
Against climate change’s hydra-headed environmental and social catastrophes
(and, in some countries including the U.S., the absence of a meaningful
national response), local governments on six continents had come to rely on
the resources and pull of 100RC to steady themselves.
And few were consulted prior to the
Rockefeller Foundation’s decision to pull the plug. As CityLab reported in April, the
program’s sudden shuttering may be a sign of the risks of the public sector using private funds
to plan for serious threats. The work of readying cities for a
profoundly uncertain future is vast, said Marissa Aho, the chief resilience
officer of Houston, which joined as the 101st member of 100RC one year
after Hurricane Harvey. Aho has been involved in the recent talks with the
foundation to help the network of resilience officers survive.
“It is very clear that this work is
just beginning globally,” Aho said. “There need to be many, many entities
supporting it.”
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