The use of resilience is common in philanthropic circles. Some foundations, like the California Endowment and the MacArthur Foundation use resilience in childhood development and economic contexts, respectfully. Others, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Clinton Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation use resilience in the context of climate change in ways that intersect with the historical, ecological, and governmental forms of resilience that have thus far been covered in other sections of the Resilience Project. Moreover, the use of climate resilience among these philanthropic entities is varied and nuanced; for example, one foundation might discuss climate resilience in economic terms—like Rockefeller Foundation’s idea of a “resilience dividend”—while another does so with an emphasis on health—like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s regional efforts of “enhancing community resilience and well-being” in the Gulf of Mexico. This report will assess the diverse uses of resilience among a selection of philanthropic groups involved in climate action.

Climate resilience is perhaps more pronounced in the Rockefeller Foundation than any other philanthropic entity. From its various initiatives—including the National Disaster Resilience Competition, 100 Resilient Cities, Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN), Rebuild by Design, and the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP)—to the Foundation’s president Judith Rodin publishing her book The Resilience Dividend (2014), the Rockefeller Foundation has made resilience the brand of its climate action plans. According to a page on the Foundation’s website, “New Orleans & The Birth of Urban Resilience,” resilience entered the Foundation’s disaster relief and climate action lexicon following the events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After the severe impact of Katrina on the city and the political gridlock that stalled federal assistance in the wake of the storm, The Rockefeller Foundation was among the first national foundations to pledge its support through its Rebuilding New Orleans Initiative. The Rockefeller Foundation began funding various relief and rebuilding efforts in and around the city. This support continues today (22 million USD later), as “ten years after the storm, New Orleans has emerged as a model of urban resilience.” Because of the strides that New Orleans has made, the Foundation declares that the city is “on its way to becoming a global model for resilience by its 300th anniversary in 2018.”

Keeping with its reputation for resilience, New Orleans is also one of the first 32 inaugural 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), another initiative pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation in 2013. 100RC was created to “help cities build resilience to the physical, social, and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century.” The challenges modern cities are a facing are the result of a “collision of globalization, urbanization, and climate change.” The precipitating crises or disruptions caused by this confluence include cyber attacks, natural disasters, economic or social upheavals,  as well as “acute stresses” such as poverty, crime, and failing infrastructure. Although cities cannot predict which disruptions will occur next and when they will happen, they can plan and learn from them, all the while generating “additional benefits through the same investments, such as opportunities for economic growth or improved parks for city residents.” This, in other words, is what The Rockefeller Foundation calls the resilience dividend: “mak[ing] cities better places to live not just in times of emergency, but every single day.” While investing in the resilience of cities to “acute stresses” like climate-related events, those cities will also benefit from the process of resilience-building (i.e. creating jobs) and its outcomes (i.e. improved infrastructure and improved living standards). Cities, like New Orleans, that are selected to become part of 100RC are eligible to receive various kinds of support, including aid in designating a Chief Resilience Officer, “an innovative new position in government that will lead the city’s resilience efforts.” Jeff Herbert is the Chief Resilience Officer of New Orleans and according to the Chief Resilience Officer profile page on the City of New Orleans government website, he handles the following responsibilities: woking across silos and to create and implement a resilience strategy; serve as a senior advisor to the mayor; promote resilience thinking and act as a global thought leader; coordinate resilience efforts across government and multi-sector stakeholders; liaise with other CROs, 100RC staff, and service providers via the network and platform. 

If Hurricane Katrina initiated The Rockefeller Foundation’s resilience efforts, Superstorm Sandy galvanized them. Sandy was a wake-up call to the damage extreme weather and climate-related events can cause:

Indeed, the October 2012 storm marked a new era of public awareness and local, state, and federal action to address climate change and sea level rise. It wasn’t enough to simply rebuild what existed before—city and federal officials both recognized a need to think differently to ensure communities were able to rebound from future threats.  (“Rebuild by Design”)

The rebounding—a synonym to resilience that can be traced back to Francis Bacon—the Foundation is calling for is not a “bouncing back” but a transformative “bouncing forward.” Seeking new proposals that went beyond “rebuilding what existed before,” The Rockefeller Foundation partnered with the U.S. Department of Housing and Development (HUD) to launch Rebuild by Design, “a multi-stage design competition to develop innovative, implementable proposals to promote resilience in the Sandy-affected region.” $920 million in disaster recovery granted were rewarded to winning designs, and the success of this competition led The Rockefeller Foundation to partner with HUD again in 2015 to extend their transformative resilience efforts beyond the Sandy region; in order to encourage and support a culture of resilience around disaster and preparedness in American communities, the philanthropic and governmental entities drew on the best of the Rebuild by Design competition to create the National Disaster Resilience Competition.

All of these climate resilience-related initiatives say a lot about what The Rockefeller Foundation is doing to promote resilience thinking and building both domestically and abroad; however, to get a better sense of what exactly the Foundation means when it uses resilience, one must turn to the President of the Foundation: Judith Rodin.

Judith Rodin became the president of The Rockefeller Foundation in 2005. Prior to joining the Foundation, Rodin served as president of the University of Pennsylvania and provost of Yale University. Her academic training is in Psychology: a B.A. from Penn (1966) and a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1970). She also completed postdoctoral work in Neurobiology for Social Scientists at the University of California, Irvine (1971). In light of Rodin’s academic background and The Rockefeller Foundation’s climate action efforts under the banner of resilience, it is plausible that the psychological strain of resilience may be as relevant as engineering and ecological resilience in the context of climate change; Rodin’s training in Psychology and the Foundation’s emphasis on resilience since she became president might prove to be an inroad for psychological resilience that has so far been neglected in these resilience reports. At any rate, a page on The Rockefeller Foundation’s website, “What Will it Take to Make Our Cities More Resilient?” quotes Rodin’s thoughts on resilience:

We can’t continue to delude ourselves that things will get back to ‘normal’ someday. They won’t. It’s a losing game to continue to devote our resources to recovering from disasters that, by now, we should know to expect.The good news is that today we have the tools, the networks, and the know-how to become more resilient. And it’s not just about keeping bad things out. Resilience ensures that a city—or other entity—can continue to operate at its highest function on its best and its worst days. It’s a lever for unlocking greater economic development and business investment, as well as improved social services and more broadly shared prosperity. This is what I call the resilience dividend.

As we can see, Rodin’s thoughts on resilience are on par with the Foundation’s. Moreover, it is interesting to note that Rodin is talking about climate change as a continuum, one in which we should expect recurring disasters; therefore, Rodin posits that investing solely in post-event “bouncing back” or restoration is a wasted effort. Instead, transformative change to reduce vulnerability is needed. Moreover, this transformative change is not just “about keeping bad things out” by building resilience in anticipation of future events, as it is also a means for optimizing a city’s potential on a daily basis, “on its best and worst days.” Barring the readiness for climate-related events, the economic and social benefits of resilience building is an added incentive to invest in resilience projects—a reward that Rodin calls the resilience dividend.

The resilience dividend (and note the frequent use of economic terms by Rodin and The Rockefeller Foundation) is also the title of Rodin’s latest book. In a video embedded in the promotional website for the book, ResilienceDivideng.org, Rodin mentions that the triangulation of globalization, climate change, and urbanization can have severe impacts on cities and their inhabitants; therefore, building resilience is needed to soften these impacts—“reduc[ing] the likelihood that every disruption becomes a disaster.” The triangulation that Rodin speaks of  is reflected in the 100 Resilient Cities page when it mentions the “collision of globalization, urbanization, and climate change” that create many of the challenges that cities face. Additionally, the sentiment that by building resilience we can prevent disruptions from becoming disasters is similar to NOAA’s claim that coastal resilience is “the ability to precent a short-term hazard event from turning into a long-term community-wide disaster.” One must also note that Rodin’s definition of resilience in her book is nearly identical to the definition of the term on The Rockefeller Foundation website. Rodin writes: “Resilience is the capacity of any entity—an individual, a community, an organization, or a natural system—to prepare for disruptions, to recover from shocks and stresses, and to adapt and grow from a disruptive experience” (3-4). Compare this to the definition from The Rockefeller Foundation’s website: “Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities and systems to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of stress and shocks, and even transform when conditions require it” (“Resilience”). Both definitions describe resilience as a capacity of an entity—whether it is an individual or a community or a system—to grow, adapt, and transform to face shocks.

The Rockefeller Foundation (or, more specifically, Judith Rodin’s Rockefeller Foundation) took the resilience dividend one step further at at the Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21) in Paris this past December. The Foundation announced the creation of the “Detailed Resilience Pledge”: If a mayor of a city invests “the equivalent of 10 percent of the city’s budget per annum to fund defined resilience goals,” the city is promised $5 million “in Platform Partner goods and services” from the Rockefeller Foundation and its corporate allies (“The 10% Resilience Pledge”). Quite literally, The Rockefeller Foundation will pay a dividend to any city that makes a pledge to build resilience.

The economic language used by Judith Rodin and The Rockefeller Foundation to describe climate resilience is distinct to that particular philanthropic entity. The Kresge Foundation, for example, makes rhetorical appeals to one’s sense of community rather than one’s pocket book. The Kresge Foundation’s Environment Program webpage contains the following tagline: “We help communities build resilience in the face of climate change.” Kresge shares Rockefeller’s focus on cities or urban centers, but it differs from Rockefeller through its emphasis on strengthening community rather than focusing on economic prosperity through building resilience. The program overview of The Kresge Foundation’s resilience efforts states the following: “Communities that address climate change head-on will be better prepared for new circumstances and uncertainties. Decisions about infrastructure, building design, land use, transportation and other policy and funding issues can make communities stronger, more equitable and more resilient to changing climate.” Maintaining a collectivist approach to building resilience, The Kresge Foundation stresses decision-making about things like infrastructure, land use, and transportation that are equitable—fair and evenly distributed among the members of the community. Interestingly, the San Francisco Foundation also stressed equity in its Disaster Resilience Program (created in 2007), but shifted its focus this June to advancing “racial and economic equity across the Bay Area” (“Disaster Resilience”). At any rate, the Kresge Foundation offers its own definition of resilience on its Environment Program webpage: “For us, resilience means the capacity not just to withstand stresses and shocks but also the ability to prosper under a wide range of climate-influenced circumstances. Resilience in the long term is possible only if society acts quickly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and, thus, avoids the worst impacts of climate change.” The Kresge Foundation advocates for a type of resilience that is more than just the ability to absorb or withstand impacts that are associated with the engineering definition of the term; it supports a type of resilience that allows communities to prosper or even flourish within the climate change continuum. Kresge is also unique in its mention of mitigation in its definition of resilience; the focus—at least among the foundations I reviewed—tends to lie solely on adaptation efforts. 

The Clinton Foundation also mentions resiliency in relation to communities in describing its climate action efforts. In 2006, the Clinton Foundation started a program to fight climate change: the Clinton Climate Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to “develop scalable projects that can be tailored to local conditions while also serving as innovative models for tackling global climate change.” As vague as that sounds, it appears that the Clinton Foundation supports projects that can work on a local level but can also—with modifications—be scaled to be implementable on regional, national, and even international levels (this is similar to the scaling of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Rebuild by Design Competition to the National Disaster Resilience Competition). The Clinton Climate Initiative also “collaborates with world-class partners to increase the resiliency of communities facing climate change, and create replicable and sustainable models for others to follow.” This is the only use of resilience (or rather, resiliency) on the Clinton Climate Initiative webpage, and here we can see that the Clinton Foundation seeks to measure resilience among communities.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation also stresses community in its climate resilience efforts, yet it sets itself apart from the other philanthropies though its emphasis on health. The homepage of the Foundation states that its mission is “to improve the health and health care of all americans” (rwjf.org). Therefore, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation supports research and programs which are working to help “build a Culture of Health.” But what does building a Culture of Health mean and how does one do it? An exact definition can be difficult to procure because it can look very different to different people, but the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation broadly defines a Culture of Health as “one in which good health and well-being flourish across geographic, demographic, and social sectors; fostering healthy equitable communities guides public and private decision making; and everyone has the opportunity to make choices that lead to healthy lifestyles” ("What is a Culture of Health?”). As we can see, building a Culture of Health means building equity—ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to lead healthy lives. The Foundation also recognizes that in order to build a sustainable Culture of Health, its resilience must be accounted for. Responding to the question of why The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has incorporated resilience into its mission of building a Culture of Health, specifically in the Gulf region, the Foundation states the following:

RWJF recognizes resilience as a principle that undergirds its commitment to building a national Culture of Health. The challenges to human health and a sustainable environment in the Gulf of Mexico did not begin with the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, nor have they ended there. In a region where residents have long faced persistent health and social disparities and high levels of chronic illness—and are especially vulnerable to climate change—the risks are only escalating. (“What’s the Formula for Community Resilience”)

The reasons behind The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s endorsement of resilience are similar to those of the Rockefeller Foundation. Although events within the climate change continuum precede and have followed Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, these events compelled The Rockefeller Foundation to invest in building resilience; likewise, it was the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico that has driven The Robert Wood Johnson to do the same. Both philanthropic entities recognize that communities are still vulnerable to future climate-related events and therefore need to focus on transformative change to be more prepared for these events rather than merely rebuilding and restoring their communities to the way it was before Katrina, Sandy, or Deepwater Horizon. It’s not a bouncing back but a bouncing forward that the philanthropies are referring to when they talk about resilience. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation differentiates itself from The Rockefeller Foundation and other philanthropies, however, through its emphasis on health, which is made clear in the description of its “Enhancing Community Resilience and Well-Being in the Gulf of Mexico Region” grant:

[The] grant has social justice at its core, and focuses on people, not just physical infrastructure. Because we believe that good physical and mental health, social, emotional and economic well-being, and community cohesiveness are keys to absorbing and rebounding from shocks of any kind, our interest is in testing ideas that enable all individuals and communities to equitably develop and grow these assets. (“What’s the Formula for Community Resilience?”)

Not only does the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation include infrastructural and economic resilience (like Rockefeller) and community cohesiveness and equitable development (like Kresge), but it also factors such things as physical and mental health and emotional well-being into its resilience building in the Gulf of Mexico region. 

Philanthropic resilience is not monolithic; it is nuanced. Among the national foundations studied in this report, one can see the subtle (and, at times, quite obvious) differences between the ways they define resilience and their objectives when building it. Furthermore, for some—like The Rockefeller Foundation—resilience is the driving force behind their programs, research, and initiatives, while for others resilience is just a component of larger agendas—like The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation building a Culture of Health. It can be inferred, however, that across the board the philanthropic entities discussed in this report advocate for the kind of resilience associated with transformative change and bouncing forward; resilience for these foundations does not suggest merely reacting to climate-related events and restoring communities and infrastructure to a prior state, nor does it mean taking the necessary measures  before an event in order to absorb shocks and maintain the status quo. These foundations see building climate resilience as an opportunity to improve upon the status quo, for communities be able to grow, prosper, and flourish under a wide range of climate-related influences.