Photo by Olivier Bunic.
The Fund in 2025: Shoulder to Shoulder
Serbian students and other protesters calling out corruption take part in a blockade of Serbia’s public broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) in Belgrade, April 16, 2025.
The Fund in 2025: Shoulder to Shoulder reflects on how the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and its grantees met an unprecedented constellation of threats and found strength in the horizontal bonds of community and collective action.
Last May, Stephen Heintz, the longest-serving president in Rockefeller Brothers Fund history, announced his plans to retire the following summer after more than 25 years of leadership. Heintz’s tenure saw the Fund become a truly global institution, embracing the interconnected nature of today’s challenges and practicing what he called “acupuncture philanthropy”: leveraging modest assets at key inflection points to catalyze broad change. Grantmaking surged from $25.6 million in 2001 to $65 million in 2025, while the endowment more than doubled to $1.4 billion, despite a financial crisis, a global pandemic, and fossil fuel divestment. Paramount to Heintz’s successful stewardship of the RBF were longstanding values rooted in the Rockefeller tradition of philanthropy and the charitable organizations that help us realize our mission, which in 2025 faced an unprecedented constellation of threats.
The Fund in 2025: Shoulder to Shoulder details how the RBF and its grantees met the urgency of the moment. For example, the RBF increased flexibility with grantees—inviting renewal applications earlier and expediting grant payments—to afford greater stability amid uncertainty. The RBF also brought together grantees who have long worked to defend and restore democracy in Central America with peer organizations in the United States to share strategies on slowing or stopping the slide into authoritarianism.