Melissa Berman: Philanthropy pioneer leaves Rockefeller after 20 years

Respected within the philanthropy world for her intellectualism, Melissa Berman’s legacy as a pioneer for philanthropic advisors and women leaders will loom large after she steps down after two decades of heading Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, a leading firm that steers funds toward global development. As RPA’s founding chief, Berman helped define how foundations have operated since the turn of the last century, bringing an impact-driven approach to the field. Under her leadership, RPA has increasingly pushed wealthy donors to consider how they can meaningfully contribute to global efforts to fight climate change and promote equity and human rights, among other areas that often require broad, systemic changes. “I feel that we have made a contribution to how people think about philanthropy, that we have not only helped individuals and companies and big, independent foundations but that we have shared a lot of lessons and insights and models,” Berman told Devex in an expansive interview. “When I started in this field, I remember facilitating a discussion among a group of extremely wealthy women.” --— Melissa Berman, president and CEO, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Berman, who will step down this year after her replacement is found, oversees the New York-based firm’s management of more than $400 million in annual giving from individuals, families, corporations, and foundations. She manages more than 100 employees in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and Lagos. She leaves at a pivotal moment for philanthropic advisory firms. During her 20-year tenure at RPA, such firms have become more essential to funders who want help identifying causes and nonprofits that might not be on their radars. Many also turn to firms to get involved in newer models for giving, such as collaborative funding initiatives that allow donors to pool money and resources to achieve common goals. But as the firms’ influence has grown, so has public scrutiny of them. Much of that is due to their association with wealthy funders such as Melinda French Gates and MacKenzie Scott. Scott, in particular, has relied heavily on advisers at The Bridgespan Group during her nearly three-year, multi-billion-dollar giving spree — a tactic that some have questioned. “The tool kit of the consulting business is based on crunching massive amounts of quantitative data and analyzing it. What it’s bad at understanding is human life,” Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” told The New York Times last year. Scott also has raised eyebrows by making gifts to nonprofits that are simultaneously clients of advisory firms as well as to some of the firms directly. For example, Bridgespan received a $40 million gift from her in 2020, according to Scott’s searchable database of gifts. RPA also received a $10 million gift from Scott in 2021. Yet Berman said she and her colleagues aren’t puppet masters. “The number one thing I want to say is that most mega donors are highly empowered people, “ she said. “The idea that a consulting service that they pay can tell them what to do and how to do it and they will simply say, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever,’ that would be a myth,” she added in a measured tone. And Berman knows a thing or two about myths. Long before she thought about a career in philanthropy, Berman dreamed of becoming a literature professor and pursued studies in folklore and mythology, first at Harvard University and then at Stanford University, where she received a Ph.D. in English and wrote her dissertation on an Old Norse saga. Berman’s father was a cell biologist who worked on bone marrow stem cell research and taught at the University of Miami School of Medicine. Her mother was the head librarian at a synagogue. Initially, Berman wanted to follow them into academia. “I always was interested in knowledge and learning and felt a sense that we have a responsibility to build and spread and share knowledge,” she said. “That’s the ethos that I was raised in.” However, she found herself working at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then the business networking group at The Conference Board, a more than 100-year-old business think tank that produces research on labor markets and other issues. It was at The Conference Board that she became “deeply involved” in the field of corporate philanthropy, she said. Her work caught the eye of the Rockefeller family, the wealthy descendants of American industrialist John D. Rockefeller. They were looking to spin off an advisory service that had been in their family office for decades into an independent nonprofit that could advise other funders, too, according to Berman. That was around 2000 when there was “enormous” growth in philanthropy with the rise of foundations established by U.S.-based tech billionaires like Bill and Melinda Gates and Gordon and Betty Moore. With the emergence of those multibillion entities and ultrawealthy donors, the Rockefellers saw an opportunity to establish an independent, “neutral platform” to help a broad range of funders “do their philanthropy effectively,” Berman said. Berman became RPA’s founding president and CEO in 2002. It has been “fortunate to have had such a visionary leader to build and steward a world-class organization. She leaves behind a truly remarkable legacy, and leaves us positioned to accelerate philanthropy,” RPA Board Chairperson Valerie Rockefeller said in a statement. Getting off the ground When Berman started out, philanthropy and nonprofit advisory services were still in their infancy. The early 2000s were a period of this “burst of recognition of the opportunity to help philanthropists do their work,” according to Jeff Bradach, co-founder and former managing partner of The Bridgespan Group, one of the most well-known firms. Bridgespan, headquartered in Boston, opened in 2000 and works with nonprofits, families, individuals, and foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Like RPA, it also produces philanthropy research and data. Bradach was one of the people Berman turned to for advice when RPA launched. Berman said she also sought counsel from Peter Karoff, the founder of The Philanthropic Initiative advisory firm, as well as FSG co-founder Mark Kramer. “All of those people helped me see what RPA could be, and the role that we can play as well as what we weren't and that's always helpful,” she said. Twenty years after their initial lunch meeting, Bradach recalls that both were uncertain about how to make their firms successful. “I think we talked about things like trying to build an organization from scratch into something,” Bradach said. Specifically, he and Berman shared doubts about what a business model for a philanthropic advisory firm should look like and whether people would actually pay for their services, Bradach said reflectively, his arms crossed. “I mean, philanthropists have had people advising them since [John D.] Rockefeller and [Andrew] Carnegie. But to build an entity that can do that, what does that look like?” he said. It wasn’t as simple as just copying a for-profit consulting firm, he added. RPA intentionally didn’t model itself after global management consulting giants Bain & Company or McKinsey & Company, which bring in consultants to offer fresh insights, analysis, and experience and then leave clients with recommendations, she said. Instead, RPA sought ways to make long-term impacts in priority areas such as climate and environment, health, education, and human rights and equity, and has steered clients to donate to these areas. At RPA, the founding team decided “we would be an organization that not only did strategy work on philanthropy, but implementation,” Berman said. That implementation work included developing grantmaking criteria, researching potential grantees, recommending grants, and evaluating results, she said. “We do some traditional sort of consulting assignments that have a beginning, middle and end. But really one of the things we look at when we're thinking about whether to put a proposal in is do we think this is going to turn into a long-term relationship in which we're engaged as an outsource part of their program development and management,” Berman said. In addition to providing “management and implementation” services and “tactical heavy lifting of grantmaking” for funders, RPA staff also sometimes acts as program managers for funders without their own staff. Additionally, RPA provides guidance to donors through its research. Under Berman’s leadership, the firm published the “Philanthropy Roadmap” series of donor guides detailing issues funders might want to consider when developing a strategy, such as whether they want to give as a couple or to local organizations. The project’s backers included the Gates Foundation. More recently, RPA has published reports on how equity-focused funders can work on “shifting power to shift systems” and how democracy-focused funders can choose models that allow for “deeper impact.” From RPA’s earliest days, Berman advocated for philanthropy to adopt measures to assess the “success” of their work, similar to those in the business sector. The firm was among the first to produce studies about impact investing, according to Amir Pasic, dean of Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Impact investing refers to the practice of making investments in organizations or companies with the goal of creating social or environmental benefits as well as financial returns. Berman also was a leader in the creation of the “theory of the foundation” concept which examines how foundations can operate as institutions in an evolving sector, he said. That research filled a need for educators, Pasic said. “There’s not a lot of systematic academic work on how foundations work. And some of RPA’s work is used in our classes,” he added. Berman’s work at RPA is helping to train future philanthropists, he said. Opening doors Pasic also credits Berman for being a role model for women seeking to enter philanthropy at a time when that was uncommon. “When she started, I would imagine she was the only woman in a lot of those places that were focused on high net worth advising and money,” he said. Berman agrees that women leaders and women funders were largely an anomaly at the start of her career. “When I started in this field, I remember facilitating a discussion among a group of extremely wealthy women,” she said. “And they were very candid and said that it was easier for them to make a whole lot of small grants and stay under the radar than to make a huge grant. That felt uncomfortable to them. They didn't like taking that risk. They didn't like the spotlight that came with it.” The emergence of a new crop of women confidently entering the sector is something Berman has been heartened to see. The role of women in public life has grown “tremendously” around the globe, she said. In the United States, you have women advocating on the frontlines of major movements like Me Too, Black Lives Matter and on climate issues, she said. You also have women donors like Scott and Laurene Powell Jobs who are now much more willing to step forward, she said. Their voices are resonating within the nonprofit and philanthropic communities, Berman said. Lessons learned and next steps As she prepares to exit RPA, Berman has been looking back on her time at the firm and the growth of the sector as a whole. When asked about lessons learned in philanthropy over the past 20 years, she points to some of the trends that exploded and then faded. Among them was the emergence of a market-based, for-profit-like approach to philanthropy, or “philanthrocapitalism,” in the early 2000s. Another was microcredit, an intervention that adhered to that same school of thinking and it turned out not to be the “magic formula” for ending poverty that many had believed it to be, she said. “In some places in the world, particularly India, as for-profit banks began to come into the field, they began to develop practices that sort of led to levels of indebtedness among individuals that were unsupportable, and led to just terrible, tragic outcomes. So I think we learned a lot from that.” More recently it’s been the use of randomized control trials to help charities determine the effectiveness of interventions. In such trials, a particular action or intervention, such as providing cash transfers to impoverished people, is provided to a group that is then tested against a control group that does not receive that intervention and is chosen at random, similar to what is done in the pharmaceutical industry. The trials have been popular among effective altruist and tech-donor-led organizations such as GiveWell and Open Philanthropy, which seek to maximize the impact of every dollar spent. The trials give extremely valid information, Berman said. “But the information is only applicable to the time and the place. If you run the same trial in a different community, in a different economic environment, you get different results.” Over the years, the sector has learned that it's important to understand the systems that the individual project or initiative operates in, she said. “You don't have to try and fix everything. But you have to understand how what you're trying to fix is tangled up in all the other things, right? So that you don't inadvertently either do harm or just throw money down the drain,” she said. Berman hopes to impart lessons like these to the next generation of people entering the philanthropy and nonprofit fields as a part-time instructor. However, she isn’t yet sure where she’ll be posted, and she won’t leave RPA until her replacement has been found. For the past 10 years, she also has taught global philanthropy as an adjunct instructor at Columbia University’s business school. “I don't want to be working full-time or have a sort of day job,” she said, noting that she’s interested in positions that would allow her to travel. “I'm particularly interested in Paris or Hawaii. Those are nice places,” she adds jokingly, leaning back in a chair in her home office.