Latest news with #RockefellerFoundation
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Rockefeller Foundation Launches U.S.-Focused Big Bets Fellowship
12 leading innovators in Alaska, California, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wyoming to advance Food is Medicine solutions, drive economic investment, and increase efficiencies for greater prosperity and wellbeing for communities across the United States. NEW YORK, May 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The Rockefeller Foundation announced its first class of Big Bets Fellows focused on driving transformation for their communities across the United States—from Appalachia and the Midwest to the East and West Coasts. Over the course of the four-month fellowship, The Rockefeller Foundation will offer these 12 U.S. Big Bets Fellows—who are working in Alaska, California, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wyoming—programming, networking, and professional development opportunities so they can better implement and scale their bold solutions for greater economic growth and healthier, more resilient food systems to help American communities thrive. "Our U.S. Big Bets Fellows represent the very best of America," said Dr. Rajiv J. Shah, President of The Rockefeller Foundation. "In a time of growing division, these twelve leaders are using their tenacity, innovation, and optimism to bring us closer to one another and to get all Americans, especially those so often left behind, closer to the American Dream. As we have since our founding, The Rockefeller Foundation is proud to support American big bettors, and we are excited for all this latest group will accomplish." Communities across the United States face barriers to opportunity and wellbeing, with 60 percent of American households struggling to afford a quality of life that includes not just food and shelter, but also education, healthcare, and the chance for upward mobility. Harnessing American ingenuity to address the challenges their communities face, the 2025 U.S. Big Bets Fellows are working on bold, locally driven solutions: Alaska – Gretchen Fauske: Empower survivors of domestic and sexual violence to achieve financial independence and break cycles of insecurity, offering financial education, business grants, and access to safe banking options. California – Marina Zhavoronkova: Expand access to high-quality, federally funded construction job opportunities for communities across the United States, including for Veterans, women, and others, through workforce and educational programming. California – Rey Faustino: Leverage cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence, and work with government agencies to streamline how low-income families access critical government services, healthcare providers, and nonprofits. Georgia – Tiffany Terrell: Bring nutritious, locally grown food directly to vulnerable communities via a mobile grocery initiative, improving overall physical health and wellness, reducing food insecurity, and supporting local agriculture. Illinois – Dion Dawson: Reduce food, nutrition, and economic insecurity by logistically connecting the food system and employing local talent to deliver nutritious, locally grown fruits and vegetables to Chicago communities that need it most. Kentucky – Colby Hall: Expand access to meaningful employment in Eastern Kentucky by harnessing technology and entrepreneurship to reduce systemic barriers to workforce entry, such as reliable childcare and transportation. New Jersey – Catherine Wilson: Provide opportunities for low-to-moderate income residents to invest in community developed housing, generating financial returns for residents and creating a cooperative economy. New York – Melissa Bukuru: Enhance low-income workers' wellbeing and financial security by working with employers to increase employees' access to financial coaching, employee savings accounts, and other wealth-building tools. Oklahoma – Jennifer Hankins: Invest in Tulsa's innovative future, supporting the city's entrepreneurs, workforce, and infrastructure through workforce training, attracting and developing new businesses, and supporting industry needs such as the energy transition, building from Tulsa's strengths as a former oil capital of the world. Pennsylvania – Alexandre Imbot: Reinvent convenience stores as retail food pharmacies, making nutritious, fresh food more affordable and available, reducing future healthcare costs and supporting communities often characterized as "food deserts." West Virginia – Jacob Hannah: Revitalize rural Appalachian communities by leveraging local talent to transform dilapidated property into attractive investments for businesses, which then generate additional job opportunity and future prosperity. Wyoming – Paul Huberty: Strengthen Indigenous economies by disrupting status quos to increase access to capital, training, and technical and other assistance to support investments that create jobs, increase wages, and foster small business development in Wind River. Since 1913, The Rockefeller Foundation has worked with partners across political, sector, state, and community lines to deliver results for people in the United States. Over that history, The Rockefeller Foundation has made investments in public health, scientific research, economic opportunity, and more. Since 2005 alone, The Rockefeller Foundation has invested nearly $3 billion in the United States, across every state in the nation, to advance Food is Medicine initiatives, tax policies that work better for American workers and their families, and efforts to expand economic opportunities for all. The Big Bets Fellowship began in 2024, with 16 fellows who are developing scalable solutions to improve lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. During the course of their fellowship, these leaders sharpened their theories of change, developed skills to build and navigate unlikely partnerships, and crafted compelling stories to mobilize resources and support. For example, 2024 Fellow Marcela Angel reflected on her organization's theory of change, which was using technical solutions to predict landslides, and expanded it encompass other natural events. She is now spinning off a research center from MIT to scale the solution. Valmir Ortega was inspired by a fellow class member to expand his organization's model to new markets and Carlos Mango refined his impact measurement approach to support diversified funding engagements. About The Rockefeller Foundation The Rockefeller Foundation is a pioneering philanthropy built on collaborative partnerships at the frontiers of science, technology, and innovation that enable individuals, families, and communities to flourish. We make big bets to promote the wellbeing of humanity. Today, we are focused on advancing human opportunity and reversing the climate crisis by transforming systems in food, health, energy, and finance. For more information, sign up for our newsletter at and follow us on X @RockefellerFdn and LinkedIn @the-rockefeller-foundation. View original content: SOURCE The Rockefeller Foundation Sign in to access your portfolio
Time Magazine
20-05-2025
- Business
- Time Magazine
Darren Walker
In the early months of the pandemic, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker came up with an idea so radical that, he recalls, 'everyone asked me, 'You can really do that?!' Everyone.' His brainstorm: with interest rates near zero and stocks tanking, major philanthropies should issue 50-year bonds to raise money for COVID-19 relief. It would save them from having to sell assets at a moment when their value had dropped significantly. 'It was an arbitrage play, really,' he says. Ford's 'social bond,' the first in U.S. nonprofit history, raised $1 billion to buck up hundreds of flailing nonprofit grantees during the unprecedented crisis. He lobbied 14 other major philanthropies to also issue bonds but only four followed his lead initially. 'Too many operate from a culture of no as opposed to asking, How do I get to yes?' Walker says. 'I believe philanthropy should be doing the bold, risk-taking work that the government or private sector isn't willing to or cannot do.' (After seeing how successful the social bonds were, some of the leaders who had initially refused issued them too.) Walker, who will step down from Ford at the end of 2025 after 12 years in charge, has been a transformative figure. Under his direction, the $16 billion foundation, among the nation's wealthiest, turned its attention sharply to issues of social justice and inequality, with a focus on boosting educational opportunities and civil rights for people of color and those with disabilities—Walker established the first disability-rights program by a major foundation. In 2014, he chaired the committee to lead Detroit out of bankruptcy, corralling automakers, unions, and other stakeholders to strike an $816 million ' Grand Bargain '—Ford contributed $125 million—to pay off the city's debt without jeopardizing the pensions of local-government workers or selling off the city's art-museum collection. This can-do instinct comes, he says, from his own rise from poverty in rural Texas to work first as a lawyer, then an international investor, and for the past quarter-century, in the nonprofit sector. In 2006, he became vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Seven years later, he took over Ford, becoming the first out gay Black man to run a multibillion-dollar philanthropy. ' 'Philanthropy should be doing the bold, risk-taking work.' ' The perpetually sunny Walker chuckles as he considers what Henry Ford, the legendary car maker also known for his racist views, would think of someone like him leading the philanthropy that the industrialist established in 1936, then shrugs. 'Things evolve.' Walker is now often the philanthropy head others turn to for advice and perspective; he believes that's partly because he's one of the few who knows what it's like to be poor or marginalized. 'My experience and my background are unusual,' he says. 'I tend to see the world through a lens of abundance and not limitations.' While he's often lauded for his groundbreaking yet collaborative approach— winning the Council on Foundations Award for Distinguished Service in 2024—Walker regards his own record as 'mixed' largely because, in focusing so heavily on poverty and diversity, he worries he failed to notice an important national shift. 'These last few years, we've seen inequality impacting working class white Americans who were not a demographic that was a priority for philanthropy because for most of the 20th century, they were doing better,' he says. 'Now we're seeing white households with indicators of poor well-being, downward mobility, and lower life expectancy. We need to pay attention to that.' It's one of the reasons he decided to step down—so a new leader can look at the Ford Foundation's mission with new eyes. But Walker, whose longtime partner died of heart failure in 2019, also wants to look at his own life anew. His parting advice to fellow heads of philanthropies? 'It's easy to convince yourself that you're a success when you're a foundation president because people tell you you're doing a good job all the time,' Walker says. 'Don't believe that. We need to assess ourselves with some humility.' —Steve Friess
Fox News
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Defunding PBS and NPR could make them even worse
President Donald Trump has now made good on his threat to defund public media— to cut off the $535 million a year that public radio and television receive from the federal government. He's not wrong that, too often, they've been vehicles for biased journalism — both by commission (all diversity and "reproductive choice" stories all the time) or omission (not covering the Hunter Biden laptop story). But as satisfying as it might be to zero out the budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — where I once served on the board of directors and tried to warn my colleagues about the threat that liberal bias posed — Trump's move could backfire. PBS and NPR could emerge both financially stronger and insulated from public accountability. Cutting off federal funds will not put public media out of business. Both PBS and NPR are federally chartered non-profit organizations which will continue to exist. So will some 1,000 local public broadcasting TV and radio stations. At the national level, don't be surprised if liberal foundations — Gates, MacArthur, Robert Wood Johnson, Carnegie and Ford (which helped invent public broadcasting) — step up to fill what will not be that big a budget gap. The bull market of recent years has swelled the endowments of all. These types of foundations already provide the systems with financial support, including for specific types of programming. Incredibly, the Rockefeller Foundation, whose endowment is based on oil industry profits, is funding NPR's "climate desk" reporting staff. The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative has contributed to the same cause, while the Walton Family Foundation has done the same for NPR and the PBS News Hour, targeting its support for "environmental journalism" This is a very worrisome way in which the federal funds vacuum can be filled — by liberal donors effectively buying the type of stories that should be included in the "news." As anyone who has worked as a journalist knows, the decision about what to cover is more consequential and fundamental than the coverage style itself. This is the essential point in sociologist Herbert Gans seminal 1979 book about CBS, "Deciding What's News." Absent federal funding, Congress would no longer have any standing to call public media executives to account, as Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene did in March. The leverage of threatened cuts can be more powerful than the loss of funding itself. Consider the fact that, in a recent week, the "PBS News Hour" has seen fit to include among its guests both the Manhattan Institute's Chris Rufo — who has led the charge against university DEI programs — Oren Cass, head of American Compass, a key Trump-friendly policy thinker with close ties to Vice-President JD Vance, and Christopher Scalia of the American Enterprise Institute, author of the new book, "Thirteen Novels Conservatives Will Love." The "News Hour" was likely feeling pressure to become more politically diverse. That's a good thing. Better than an abrupt threat to public media funding would be a change in the rules governing it, per the Public Broadcasting Act. As matters stand, public media serves mainly liberal audiences in blue states and college towns. Congress should insist that the services show that they can serve the country at large — meaning they'd have to adjust their programming and news content to attract a geographically and politically diverse audience. Annual hearings on that count would help. In other words, attach constructive strings to the federal funding — requiring annual reports about who's watching and listening, including their cities and states and their political affiliations. Turn the diversity metrics on their head to hold NPR/PBS's feet to the fire. At the same time, local stations, which currently have to pay NPR dues and pony up to carry "All Things Considered," should get to keep the $267 million in "community service grants" — half of CPB funding. They should be required to use the funds to cover their local governments at a time when the closing of newspapers is creating news deserts. NPR listeners in New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas and Los Angeles already get more local news — yes, sometimes with a progressive slant — than they otherwise would. Make no mistake. Public media deserves much of the criticism it's received — and has not shown an openness to change that it should, especially in terms of the topics and locales of its journalism. I learned that firsthand during my time on the CPB board, when my criticisms, not dissimilar to those of Trump, were ignored and I was marginalized, including by being stripped of committee assignments and pushed to resign. But defunding it, although it looks like a conservative victory, could leave NPR and PBS still standing — and immune from accountability.
Time of India
08-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
New carbon credit scheme targets 60 plants by 2030 for coal phaseout
Singapore: The Rockefeller Foundation aims to sign up 60 projects by 2030 to a new carbon finance scheme for phasing out coal-fired power in developing countries, it said on Wednesday, after its rulebook was given the go-ahead. Around 2,000 coal-fired power plants need to be decommissioned from now until 2040 in order to meet global climate targets, the International Energy Agency says, but only 15 per cent are covered by decommissioning pledges. The Rockefeller Foundation's Coal to Clean Credits Initiative (CCCI) is one of several schemes under development that aim to use carbon finance to help close them earlier than scheduled and replace them with renewable power. "That target of 60 projects by 2030 is our overall goal, our ambition," said Joseph Curtin, who runs the Rockefeller Foundation's "coal to clean" programme. In Singapore on Tuesday, carbon standards organisation Verra launched CCCI's methodology for determining which projects are eligible and how emission reductions from early coal plant shutdowns will be calculated, allowing them to generate carbon credits. The first project to use the methodology will be the South Luzon Thermal Energy Corporation (SLTEC) plant in the Philippines, with the transaction expected to be completed next year. "Obviously if we can close one transaction - and we're getting much closer - we think that will have a very strong impact on the market and will hopefully reverberate across the region and send a signal that this is indeed possible." Curtin said his team has identified around 1,000 coal-fired plants in developing countries that would be eligible under the methodology. The 60 project target could attract $110 billion in public and private investment by 2030, he said, citing research commissioned by the foundation. The early retirement of SLTEC is backed by Philippine energy firm ACEN together with Singapore clean investment group GenZero, the infrastructure conglomerate Keppel, Japan's Mitsubishi and its subsidiary Diamond Generating Asia. Revenue from carbon credits will be used to cover foregone cashflows brought about by the closure, help pay for the energy storage needed to support renewables and protect the interests of local workers and communities, said Eric Francia, ACEN's chief executive. CCCI went through seven rounds of consultations on its methodology, partly to allay concerns of environmental groups, who say carbon finance should not be used to bail out coal asset owners. "The risk with this is how do you determine you are not giving finance to something that was a stranded asset, that wasn't going to be viable in the future?" said Jonathan Crook of Carbon Market Watch, a research group. The CCCI initiative's criteria will only select projects that are profitable and owned by companies or countries that have made firm "no new coal" commitments, said Curtin. While there is a moratorium on new coal plants in the Philippines, new facilities approved before the ban are still expected to come on line in the next few years. But the early retirement of SLTEC would still deliver progress on the energy transition, ACEN's Francia said. "Of course we need to manage the perception, which is admittedly not good, but we look at the substance, and that is really the equation here," he said.
Time of India
07-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
New carbon credit scheme targets 60 plants by 2030 for coal phaseout, ET EnergyWorld
Advt Advt Join the community of 2M+ industry professionals Subscribe to our newsletter to get latest insights & analysis. Download ETEnergyworld App Get Realtime updates Save your favourite articles Scan to download App Singapore: The Rockefeller Foundation aims to sign up 60 projects by 2030 to a new carbon finance scheme for phasing out coal-fired power in developing countries, it said on Wednesday, after its rulebook was given the 2,000 coal-fired power plants need to be decommissioned from now until 2040 in order to meet global climate targets, the International Energy Agency says, but only 15 per cent are covered by decommissioning Rockefeller Foundation's Coal to Clean Credits Initiative (CCCI) is one of several schemes under development that aim to use carbon finance to help close them earlier than scheduled and replace them with renewable power."That target of 60 projects by 2030 is our overall goal, our ambition," said Joseph Curtin, who runs the Rockefeller Foundation's "coal to clean" Singapore on Tuesday, carbon standards organisation Verra launched CCCI's methodology for determining which projects are eligible and how emission reductions from early coal plant shutdowns will be calculated, allowing them to generate carbon first project to use the methodology will be the South Luzon Thermal Energy Corporation (SLTEC) plant in the Philippines, with the transaction expected to be completed next year."Obviously if we can close one transaction - and we're getting much closer - we think that will have a very strong impact on the market and will hopefully reverberate across the region and send a signal that this is indeed possible."Curtin said his team has identified around 1,000 coal-fired plants in developing countries that would be eligible under the 60 project target could attract $110 billion in public and private investment by 2030, he said, citing research commissioned by the early retirement of SLTEC is backed by Philippine energy firm ACEN together with Singapore clean investment group GenZero, the infrastructure conglomerate Keppel, Japan's Mitsubishi and its subsidiary Diamond Generating from carbon credits will be used to cover foregone cashflows brought about by the closure, help pay for the energy storage needed to support renewables and protect the interests of local workers and communities, said Eric Francia, ACEN's chief went through seven rounds of consultations on its methodology, partly to allay concerns of environmental groups, who say carbon finance should not be used to bail out coal asset owners."The risk with this is how do you determine you are not giving finance to something that was a stranded asset, that wasn't going to be viable in the future?" said Jonathan Crook of Carbon Market Watch, a research CCCI initiative's criteria will only select projects that are profitable and owned by companies or countries that have made firm "no new coal" commitments, said there is a moratorium on new coal plants in the Philippines, new facilities approved before the ban are still expected to come on line in the next few the early retirement of SLTEC would still deliver progress on the energy transition, ACEN's Francia said."Of course we need to manage the perception, which is admittedly not good, but we look at the substance, and that is really the equation here," he said.(Reporting by David Stanway; Additional reporting by Simon Jessop in London; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Sonali Paul)
