Rockefeller Foundation - Programs: Scale and Scope

Programs: Scale and Scope

Through the years the foundation has expanded greatly in scope. Historically, it has given more than $14 billion in current dollars to thousands of grantees worldwide and has assisted directly in the training of nearly 13,000 Rockefeller Fellows.

Its overall philanthropic activity has been divided into five main subject areas:

• Medical, health, and population sciences
• Agricultural and natural sciences
• Arts and humanities
• Social sciences
• International relations

In the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation started a program to eradicate hookworm in Mexico. The program exemplified the time period's confidence in science as the solution for everything. This reliance on science was known as scientific neutrality. The Rockefeller Foundation program stated that there was a crucial correlation between the world of science, politics and international health policy. This heavy reliance of scientific neutrality contradicted the hookworm program's fundamental objective to invest in public health in order to develop better social conditions and to establish positive ties between the United States and Mexico. The Hookworm Campaign set the terms of the relationship between Mexico and the Rockefeller Foundation that persisted through subsequent programs including the development of a network of local public health departments. The importance of the hookworm campaign was to get a foot in the door and swiftly convince rural people of the value of public health work. The roles of the RF's hookworm campaign are characteristic of the policy paradoxes that emerge when science is summoned to drive policy. The campaign in Mexico served as a policy cauldron through which new knowledge could be demonstrated applicable to social and political problems on many levels. A major program beginning in the 1930s was the relocation of German (Jewish) scholars from German universities to America. This was expanded to other European countries after the Anschluss occurred; when war broke out it became a full-scale rescue operation. Another program, the Emergency Rescue Committee was also partly funded with Rockefeller money; this effort resulted in the rescue of some of the most famous artists, writers and composers of Europe. Some of the notable figures relocated or saved (out of a total of 303 scholars) by the Foundation were Thomas Mann, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Leó Szilárd, enriching intellectual life and academic disciplines in the US. This came to light afterwards through a brief, unpublished history of the Foundation's program.

Another significant program was its Medical Sciences Division, which extensively funded women's contraception and the human reproductive system in general. Other funding went into endocrinology departments in American universities, human heredity, mammalian biology, human physiology and anatomy, psychology, and the pioneering studies of human sexual behavior by Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

In 1950 the Foundation mounted a major program of virus research, establishing field laboratories in Poona, India; Port of Spain, Trinidad; Belém, Brazil; Johannesburg, South Africa; Cairo, Egypt; Ibadan, Nigeria; and Cali, Colombia. In time, major funding was also contributed by the countries involved, while in Trinidad the British government and neighbouring British-controlled territories also assisted. Sub-professional staff were almost all recruited locally and, wherever possible, local people were given scholarships and other support to be professionally trained. In most cases, locals eventually took over management of the facilities. Support was also given to research on viruses in many other countries. The result of all this research was the identification of a huge number of viruses affecting humans, the development of new techniques for the rapid identification of viruses, and a quantum leap in our understanding of arthropod-borne viruses.

In the arts it has helped establish or support the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada, and the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut; Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.; Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio; and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. In a recent shift in program emphasis, President Rodin eliminated the division that spent money on the arts, the creativity and culture program. One program that signals the shift was the foundation's support as the underwriter of Spike Lee's documentary on New Orleans, When the Levees Broke. The film has been used as the basis for a curriculum on poverty, developed by the Teachers College at Columbia University for their students.

Thousands of scientists and scholars from all over the world have received foundation fellowships and scholarships for advanced study in major scientific disciplines. In addition, the foundation has provided significant and often substantial research grants to finance conferences and assist with published studies, as well as funding departments and programs, to a vast range of foreign policy and educational organizations, including:

• Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) - Especially the notable 1939-45 War and Peace Studies that advised the US State Department and the US government on World War II strategy and forward planning
• Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington - Support of the diplomatic training program
• Brookings Institution in Washington - Significant funding of research grants in the fields of economic and social studies
• World Bank in Washington - Helped finance the training of foreign officials through the Economic Development Institute
• Harvard University - Grants to the Center for International Affairs and medical, business and administration Schools
• Yale University - Substantial funding to the Institute of International Studies
• Princeton University - Office of Population Research
• Columbia University - Establishment of the Russia Institute
• University of the Philippines, Los Baños - Funded research for the College of Agriculture and built an international house for foreign students
• McGill University - The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Montreal Neurological Institute, on the request of Dr. Wilder Penfield, a Canadian neurosurgeon, who had met David Rockefeller years before
• Library of Congress - Funded a project for photographic copies of the complete card catalogues for the world's fifty leading libraries
• Bodleian Library at Oxford University - Grant for a building to house five million volumes
• Population Council of New York - Funded fellowships
• Social Science Research Council - Major funding for fellowships and grants-in-aid
• National Bureau of Economic Research
• National Institute of Public Health of Japan (formerly The Institute of Public Health (国立公衆衛生院, Kokuritsu Kōshū Eisei-in?) "School of Public Health"ja) in Tokyo (1938)
• Group of Thirty - In 1978 the Foundation invited Geoffrey Bell to set up this high-powered and influential advisory group on global financial issues, whose current chairman is a longtime Rockefeller associate Paul Volcker
• London School of Economics - funded research and general budget
• University of Lyon, France - funded research in natural sciences, social sciences, medicine and the new building of the medical school during the 1920s-1930s
• The Trinidad Regional Virus Laboratory
• The Results for Development Institute - funded the Center for Health Market Innovations