A year and a half into a proposed initiative to give Americans a renewed sense of national purpose, Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, came to a startling conclusion: it wouldn’t work.
In the current political environment, he realized, most Americans are so disaffected that the project would have been greeted with skepticism and would have failed. But Heintz and his team backed up and came up with another approach, a program called Pluribus, an effort to “put the ‘many’ back in the center of American politics.”
It was a classic example of how philanthropy works, Heintz said.
“Philanthropy has an enormous capacity to foster and sustain an experimental disposition,” Heintz said. “It is a privileged field, and one of the privileges we have is to try things that others can’t. Yes, we may fail in some of them, but frankly, if we’re not failing at least some of the time, then we’re not doing our job -- we’re not trying riskier things that we really need to be trying.”
Heintz was at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy recently to participate in a Foundation Impact Research Group seminar, “Does Philanthropy Matter?” While at Duke, he spoke with Faith & Leadership. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: The Rockefeller Brothers Fund was in the news recently for its efforts to divest from fossil fuels. Tell us about that.
It was a big institutional decision. We had to get a lot of different stakeholders aligned around it. That took us most of a year, but we have been working since 2004 trying to align our investments more directly with our mission and programs.
This was a logical step in that progression, but it is a big shift, a very big shift.
Q: Why take a public stand instead of working behind the scenes or through your grant making?
We are doing those things as well. We are very active through our grant making, and about 50 percent of our grants now are related to climate change and energy. That reflects the Rockefeller family’s long-standing commitment to the environment, and also an understanding of the urgency of the climate crisis and the moral imperative to respond to it to protect the planet.
We do a lot of grant making in this area. It is our biggest priority, and we felt morally compromised by, on one hand, making grants to reduce fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions and, on the other hand, supporting investments in the companies that are producing those fuels and greenhouse gases.
It was a moral assessment for us, but we also came to believe that there is a good economic case for divesting from fossil fuels. Science tells us with 97 percent assurance that we have to keep the rise in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius over the preindustrial levels in order to avoid the worst foreseeable climate disruptions. We’re already about 1 degree over those levels.
So we have a very little window to protect this planet. That means that about 60 to 80 percent of all the known reserves of coal, gas and oil that are in the ground will have to stay there. They simply can’t be burned if we’re going to keep within that ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius.
So the value of those resources, which is currently carried on the books of the major energy companies, is going to decrease, and it’s going to affect the value of those stocks and those companies.
That may not happen for five, 10 or 20 years, but a number of analyses suggest that these are what the investment business calls “stranded assets,” assets that can’t be realized. So there is an economic case to be made for divesting from those assets and redeploying the capital into the clean energy technologies that are going to be the energy economy of the future.
Q: Does your organization feel a particular moral responsibility to be a leader on this issue, given that the source of the Rockefeller family’s wealth was Standard Oil Co.?
Yes, we do, but that has been a consistent theme of the Rockefeller family from John D. Rockefeller down. This family has understood from the very beginning the moral responsibility of wealth.
John D. Rockefeller was born in 1839 to a very modest family, and in his first job, at age 16, he made $45 and gave away $5 to charities. He was already giving away more than 10 percent of his income.
By 1916, he was America’s first billionaire -- a sum that today would be worth about $30 billion. He gave away vast sums of it along the way, because he grew up in a very traditional Baptist home. They believed in tithing and in the responsibility of wealth.
He always said that God enabled him to make great wealth so that he could give it away and do good with it. He did that in his lifetime, and then he helped create the endowments and the trusts that have supported Rockefeller-related philanthropy ever since.
So it’s very consistent with the family’s traditions and values.
We believe in trying to utilize all of our assets to advance our goals, and one of the assets we have is our reputation and our brand name. And in this particular case, divestment from fossil fuels, the brand name carried enormous significance -- ironic significance -- that we knew would be valuable.
The media attention to this story, frankly, has far exceeded our expectations. I’m still doing interviews months later.
Q: You launched a planning effort for a “National Purpose Initiative,” a program to reunite Americans around a common purpose. Can you give us an update?
The short answer is that I am not as optimistic as I was. We began thinking about this in 2012, and working on it in 2013. The idea was that America seems in some ways adrift, not on the right path. People feel like they have no agency, no civic agency, and that things are not getting better.
For the first time since polling began on these attitudes, the vast majority of Americans now believe that their children’s generation will not have as good a life as they have had. It always was the reverse.
People don’t trust the institutions of government. They don’t trust politics. They don’t trust politicians. All they see is hyperpartisanship, division, dysfunction, the influence of money, and they say, “What can I do to change it?”
So we thought about what could be done. What could philanthropy do to turn this around and help Americans find a shared sense of purpose? How might we organize a national conversation about these challenges with the hope that, over time, we can come to a kind of shared sense of priorities and how to change our politics in order to accomplish these priorities?
We started with that idea, and then we started testing the theory and doing a lot of research, talking to a lot of people, convening a lot of groups. What we discovered in a year’s worth of work was that it wasn’t going to work. Americans feel so disaffected by the political culture today that they were unlikely to participate in a meaningful way in that kind of process. They didn’t have faith that it would produce any concrete results.
This was a very disturbing and disappointing finding. But it is a measure of just how unhappy and disaffected the American public is. So we redesigned this effort, and it’s now called Pluribus -- from our national motto E pluribus unum, “From many, one.”
Our goal is to find a way to put the “many” back in the center of American politics, which now seems dominated by special interests, by money and by people at the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum. The vast majority in the middle feel unconnected, uninspired, and in many cases, very concerned about where they and their families stand and what the future may hold.
Pluribus is going to work on two sets of activities. One is to gather stories of civic efficacy, because there’s an awful lot of remarkable local civic activity all across this country. It is actually producing positive change, but those stories don’t filter up and get shared across the country.
People don’t get a sense that, “Gee, all these things are happening in our cities and towns and communities. We can do this at the national level. We can change the future of this country.”
So one part of Pluribus is going to be to gather these stories and tell them in a compelling way using all the forms of media that are available, recruiting and empowering a very diverse set of storytellers from all kinds of communities -- from the prophetic community to poets and the cultural and artistic community to politics to the university to young people.
The second dimension of Pluribus is about the crisis in representation in our system of democracy. At the heart of democracy, of course, is representative government. But at present, the process is distorted by the influence of money and special interests and by these ideological extremes. There’s very little hope of changing the rules while the people in power were elected through those rules.
We want to try to alter the ways political campaigns are conducted in order to give voters more say and to put them more at the center of campaigns.
That is a tall order, but we are working with an interesting community of people who’ve been involved in Republican politics and Democratic politics. We’re working with younger people and people who are thinking very creatively about how to use social media and other new tools to reduce the influence of ideology and money and bring citizens to the fore in political campaigns.
Q: It’s interesting that a year into the National Purpose Initiative, you realized that it wasn’t going to work. That would have been difficult in many institutions. How were you able to say, “We were wrong; we’ve got to do something else”?
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund is a learning organization that approaches all our work wanting to be risk takers, wanting to experiment. Philanthropy has an enormous capacity to foster and sustain an experimental disposition. It is a privileged field, and one of the privileges we have is to try things that others can’t. Yes, we may fail in some of them, but frankly, if we’re not failing at least some of the time, then we’re not doing our job -- we’re not trying riskier things that we really need to be trying.
So this was a classic example. Fortunately, the change came after the expenditure of fairly modest amounts of money. It was the honest thing to do, and the institution treasures and respects honesty and believes in this experimental disposition.
With Pluribus, we’re still in a very experimental framework. There is no guarantee that this is going to succeed. It is a very big problem that we are trying to tackle, but that’s what philanthropy is for. It’s about funding ideas and experiments, trying things and learning from them and making that available to others who can then take it forward.
Q: What role can churches and other religious institutions play in the kind of renewal that you’re talking about?
Churches and mosques and synagogues, the religious community, the faith community, has an enormously important role to play in this renewal and revitalization, just as faith communities have ever since our country’s founding.
There is this broader sense of institutional disappointment that affects how people think about government institutions, about religious institutions, even business. There is the sense that institutions are failing us in some way. So all of us who are involved in institutions and leading institutions have to find ways to make our own institutions more vital for the times in which we live.
We tend to get stuck in our ways while our publics are someplace else. This is true of churches and faith-based institutions, but they have such a hugely important role to play, because in the end, so many of these questions are moral questions.
They are questions of belief and of values, and that’s the conversation that churches have always contributed to in the most meaningful kinds of ways.