How do you do it, Ms Rodin?

Judith Rodin has blazed many trails. As the first female president of an Ivy League university, she guided the University of Pennsylvania, her alma mater, through a period of unprecedented growth before joining the Rockefeller Foundation in 2005 as its first female president. How does Rodin keep one of the most venerable foundations in the world — which celebrated its centennial in 2013 — relevant in today’s rapidly changing world? We asked the mother-of-one who Forbes magazine has called one of the 100 most powerful women in the world. The development field is in transition. How is the Rockefeller Foundation adapting? When I began my tenure at the Rockefeller Foundation in 2005, it was clear — as there is any time there is a leadership transition — that we had an opportunity to look at the organization and how it fits both the changing world and the changing development landscape. We had the added benefit of being on the cusp of our centennial, which we [celebrated] in 2013. Looking back was a great rallying cry — we knew we needed to rise to the occasion for this generation of philanthropy in the way that our predecessors had when they cured hookworm in the American South, started the field of public health and created the Green Revolution. But the strategies that worked then won’t work today — the Rockefeller Foundation is no longer the biggest kid on the block in terms of philanthropy, which was the case 100 and even 50 years ago. And philanthropy itself isn’t the biggest kid on the block anymore, either. There are many more actors doing this kind of work than there were 100 years ago: multilaterals and bilaterals, both relying on more commitment to foreign aid from governments, and social business, as well as corporations who are recognizing that doing good for the world is actually beneficial to their bottom line. So we gave a good deal of thought not just to what we work on, but how we work. We began to think more deeply about how we rally other sources of funding, which is what led us to our work to accelerate the development of the field of impact investing and lead on innovative finance, with the recognition that there needs to be more private sector money around these problems. The second, more specific to us, was that we needed to develop a model that enabled us to find more strategic partners, to reanimate our innovation capabilities, and to test and learn more effectively as we go. In response, we developed an initiative model to search for relevant problem spaces where there was dynamism to produce shorter, high-impact, highly measured, highly leveraged work. And because we know that the wisdom doesn’t always sit in our offices, we wanted to be able to scan the globe with the use of technology. We developed sensing mechanisms much closer to the ground. A third change was that not only do we fund intervention kind of work, but we are creating an enabling environment for innovation and influence and how they can spread and scale for impact. Innovation is the theme of the foundation’s centennial. What innovative solution to a pressing development challenge are you most excited about right now? The Rockefeller Foundation has a hundred-year history of innovation, from creating the field of public health to sparking the Green Revolution, which fed more than 1 billion people around the world. As we begin our second century, innovation is just as critical to our mission to promoting the well-being of humanity throughout the world as it was in 1913. One of the most exciting innovations is our Smart Power for Environmentally-sound Economic Development Initiative, or SPEED. The challenge: India has the largest un-electrified population in the world, with nearly half of rural households without access to power. The lack of access to electricity can stifle economic and social opportunity, which is reflected by the reality that the concentration of energy poverty in India mirrors the regions with the highest rates of income poverty. This is true not only in India, but the world over. SPEED is pursuing a solution that would promote decentralized, renewable electricity mini-grids — installations that generate and distribute electricity that can serve between 500-2,000 households. These decentralized grids aren’t the innovation in and of themselves — rather it’s how they are financed and sustained. India has more than 250,000 cell phone towers, with plans to add 150,000 more in the next several years. These towers are located in mostly in remote, un-electrified areas, and must rely on expensive and dirty diesel fuel. We saw a market-synergy between cell-tower operators who seek a more affordable alternative to diesel, and energy service companies who need the assurance that there is enough customer demand to be viable in these parts of the country. With the cell tower as the anchor customer, the ESCOs can create a power plant at the scale required to supply electricity to an expanding base of local enterprises — agricultural processing, cold storage facilities, ATMs and other retail services, even irrigation for farming. By targeting off-grid rural communities, this innovative model is aimed at supporting the poorest 25 percent of the population. The energy not needed for the cell phone towers provides sufficient electrification for the rural villages and allows availability for both household and small business use. The cell phone towers make the rural electrification models viable where the small amounts needed by the rural villages were not sufficient for the ESCOs to e successful. In the longer-term, the large scale adoption of renewable energy will also contribute to a decreased reliance on dirty fuels. This innovative approach demonstrates that by reframing the problem from a question of, “How do we get electricity to these rural populations” to a question of, “Who will pay for it?” we are able to find new solutions that can be applied not only in India, but potentially throughout Asia and, eventually, Africa. How do you create a culture of innovation within your organization? Over the last several years, we have looked inward at our internal processes and structures to reanimate those innovation pathways and integrate innovation as a core competency at all levels. I think there are three key lessons that we’ve learned. First, a culture of innovation begins at the top. Leadership must create a sense of pride in the organization to try bold, new ideas that challenge status quo thinking and existing consensus. This requires people to take risks and step out of their comfort zone. While everyone must be ultimately accountable for results, leaders need to support this risk taking to achieve outsize results. Second, as demonstrated with our SPEED initiative, innovation often happens from the recombination of ideas. This requires a constant flow of knowledge throughout the organization and the time and space to create, test and adapt new solutions. Leaders must build a team’s collective accountability for sharing ideas and reduce individual competition for authorship. Finally, as with any culture building exercise, stories matter. We’re lucky at RF to have so many to draw from. It’s through this storytelling that employees can see the tangible benefits to innovation and buy in to the behavior changes innovation requires. What can large development organizations do to help foster entrepreneurship and support innovators in the developing world? By leveraging technology, particularly crowd sourcing, we are able to find innovations — and innovators — wherever they may be, and provide the resources and funding to help those ideas scale to achieve greater impact. One way we have embraced throughout our work is through Innovation Challenges in the spirit of InnoCentive — a private sector platform that originated to help pharmaceutical companies find solutions to completing their research and development. Our most recent challenge asked for solutions that improve livelihoods for poor or vulnerable workers in the world’s informal economies. We received more than 2,200 ideas of which we chose 10 that we thought had great potential, ranging from tools to help employers link in with qualified workers to disaster risk management for street vendors. With Rockefeller Foundation grant funding, these individuals are working with organizations to develop tools and technologies and chart new paths to better quality jobs for millions of poor and vulnerable individuals around the globe. This is the new face of innovation in the 21st century, and we’ve also supported the capacity of many of our partners, including the G-20, to conduct similar competitions. Many international NGOs are reevaluating their role in development. Some are merging, others abandoning their broad global brand in favor of a more specialized, narrow focus. Mid-size NGOs in particular are feeling the crunch. What advice would you have for the leader of a mid-size NGO today? I would urge them to consider how they develop and use their brand and influence more broadly. In 2010, the Rockefeller Foundation gave a grant to the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard to develop and test a framework for the role that brand can play in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors for realizing institutional missions and achieving impact. I would recommend any leader of an NGO take a look at this framework to apply new ways of thinking to better manage and leverage their brands as another tool in their box, not just for fundraising but for building cohesion internally and sustaining impact and influence to truly achieve ambitious social goals. It can be found on our website. Another big trend in aid is “going local.” How are you shifting staff and adapting your operations to meet donor and partner expectations? It has always been a part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s strategy to fund local solutions to global challenges — from our work to bring western medicine to China, to addressing hookworm in Thailand. If you look at many of the projects funded and supported by the foundation, it is evident that our mindset is to start in, and expand out. For instance, the foundation developed and is funding the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network, which aims to catalyze attention and action to build climate change resilience among a network of ten core cities in India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. Each community has its own deep-rooted social, technical, physical and financial challenges. For example, in India, the city of Indore’s largest risk is water scarcity and the availability of clean water supply. As the city’s population continues to grow, and a high rate of migration to the area continues, there is an indubitable need for sustainable water sources. ACCCRN has launched an intervention in the area with the objective to demonstrate alternative viable and sustainable models for cost effective, reliable urban water management through community involvement, which can be mainstreamed into the municipal system. This is an example of a “going local” solution — but we are constantly looking for ways in which those local innovations can then be improved upon and scaled for results in other parts of the world. ACCCRN is now expanding to the Philippines and Bangladesh and our 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge builds on all these local learnings, and is taking them global. Is the foundation’s approach to partnership changing? What types of partnerships are you most eager to strike up in the next year or two? The Rockefeller Foundation has a rich history of partnerships, both with private and public actors working in different parts of the system to reach shared goals. Perhaps the best early example is our efforts to eradicate hookworm from the Southern United States in the early part of the last century, which required partnerships with medical practitioners, educators, engineers and sanitation workers to succeed. These connections formed the early infrastructure for the field of public health. In the 1990s, we engaged with Product Development Partnerships, based on private sector models, to foster an enabling environment for the development and access to drugs, vaccines, microbicides and diagnostics for such diseases as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. One example is the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which has served as a model for public-private partnerships in global health. Partnerships are even more critical to achieving impact today. For one, the problems we face are much larger and more complex, crossing all sectors and, thanks to globalization, affecting multiple regions. For another, philanthropy alone no longer has enough money to address the world’s staggering social and environmental needs. We are going to fall woefully short of solving those problems without the engagement of market-making actors. That is why the Rockefeller Foundation has been so involved in building the field of impact investing, social impact bonds and other innovative finance mechanisms to align markets for social impact. But partnerships are a key to the strategies behind all of our work, from partnering with private sector actors to building urban resilience. In our 100 Resilient Cities Challenge, we will be working with private sector partners Swiss Re and Palantir, who will be providing chosen cities with services and information technology to increase resilience to shocks and stresses, along with Architects for Humanity and the World Bank. Over the next several years, we will continue to seek out partnerships to successfully scale the pilots and demonstrations we are able to conduct as a philanthropy. In other areas, like with our Digital Jobs Africa initiative, which seeks to connect high-potential, low-income youth to digital job opportunities, our partnerships with the private sector will be critical to change hiring practices, provide training and create new job opportunities to reach improve the lives and livelihoods of 1 million people in seven years. The post-2015 development framework will obviously shape future development programs, and debates about what that should look like are in full swing. What idea or issue has not yet received the attention it deserves? Today, more than 150 million individuals worldwide face catastrophic health care expenditures, and as a result, approximately 100 million are pushed into poverty each year. Universal health coverage would ensure that anyone can receive the treatments and services they need without causing financial hardship. Since 2009, the Rockefeller Foundation has been a leading and vocal advocate of making UHC the umbrella health goal for the post-2015 development framework. While the U.N. General Assembly resolution passed by more than 90 countries in 2012 in recognition of UHC is a step in the right direction, there is still more to do to ensure UHC gets not just the attention but the action needed to advance UHC in countries around the world and ensure that it is done so in an equitable way. What is the most important lesson on leadership you have learned in your career, and how are you using that to position the foundation for another hundred years of groundbreaking philanthropy? When I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania, I was extremely discouraged to see the plight of the neighborhood around the university. But I was advised that as the leader of an Ivy League institution, it wasn’t my role to do anything about it. Two months later, a graduate student was murdered in the neighborhood, and I threw that advice out the window. We partnered with the neighborhood and set out a five-part strategy to rebuild that neighborhood safely and securely, with commercial and retail development, job training, better public schools and housing. At first, the university was the only one financing it — but we gained believers. It was enormous leadership opportunity and lesson for me about taking smart risks. The best leaders I know have been willing to take smart risks, but remain vigilant so that they are continuously learning from what they are doing. I believe this risk-taking ethos is critical if the Rockefeller Foundation continues to be a groundbreaking philanthropy. The risk for foundations isn’t about losing grant dollars sometimes if a particular idea does not bear fruit; indeed, the greatest risk lies in not realizing the potential of those grant dollars — in many ways, the most precious capital there is. More than any other sector, philanthropy is well-positioned to take risks. Businesses are bound by the need for short-term financial returns and governments are limited by politics and elections. Philanthropy can take on the hardest parts of the job so that other critical actors can act. While risk has always been a part of our DNA, we have found ways to reanimate this skill. One example is putting in place a time-bound initiative model. We have found that if we give ourselves a clear timeframe — whether it’s five years, ten years — risk becomes a much bigger part of the strategy. We also serve as risk capital for many larger scale projects — providing the early layer of financing and de-risking these investments to bring development finance institutions or commercial capital in behind it. Join the Devex community and access more in-depth analysis, breaking news and business advice — and a host of other services — on international development, humanitarian aid and global health.