The Rockefeller Family Fund works at the cutting edge of advocacy in such areas as environmental protection, advancing the economic rights of women, and holding public and private institutions accountable for their actions. The Fund is best known for its creative and leveraged grantmaking, its role as a catalyst in the nonprofit as well as the funding communities, and its record of public policy innovation.
At present, the Fund has three program areas:
- Environment
This program emphasizes public education on the risks of global warming; implementation of sound solutions; development of initiatives designed to enact aggressive policies at the state and national levels to reduce carbon emissions; disruption of the coal life cycle, from mining and burning to ash disposal and exporting; bringing diverse and compelling new voices into the climate debate; and examining how special interests are distorting science and delaying constructive steps to deal with this impending global crisis.
- Economic Justice for Women
The Fund seeks to improve the quality of life for working women and their families by advocating for equitable employment opportunities and updated employment standards and by building power through support of women’s activism. Working at the national, state, and local levels, the Fund supports research, training, public education campaigns, and advocacy efforts.
- Institutional Accountability and Individual Liberty
This program encourages the active participation of citizens in government, seeks to make government and private institutions more accountable and responsive, and supports efforts to ensure that individuals’ rights and liberties under the Constitution are protected. Past grants in this area have supported work to overcome roadblocks to registration and voting, efforts to expand access to government information, advocacy to promote electronic disclosure of campaign contributions, and a broad range of program initiatives aimed at holding government agencies and public officials accountable for their actions.
Within these program areas, the Fund supports advocacy efforts that are action-oriented and likely to yield tangible public policy results.
The Fund supports tax-exempt organizations engaged in activities of national significance. Thus, the Fund does not ordinarily consider projects that pertain to a single community, except in the rare instance where a project is unique, strategically placed to advance a national issue, or likely to serve as a national model.
Grants are rarely made to organizations that traditionally enjoy popular support, such as museums, hospitals, or endowed institutions.
Grants are not made to/for:
- direct service providers, or social services or human services programs;
- local or community-specific projects;
- academic or scholarly research or any kind of higher educational work;
- film or video projects;
- individuals;
- scholarships;
- international programs or domestic programs dealing with international issues;
- profit-making businesses;
- construction or restoration projects; or,
- debt reduction.
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