When Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin wanted support for a new urban initiative, she cold-called Alex Karp, chief executive of Silicon Valley's Palantir Technologies Inc.

Ms. Rodin praised Mr. Karp for using data analytics to help communities recover after Hurricane Sandy, but she quibbled: "You guys just intervened after the fact."

Instead, she proposed, why doesn't Palantir add technology to help cities identify their weaknesses "before the disaster happens?"

Mr. Karp agreed: "We think this can be transformational," he later told her, according to Ms. Rodin, since it also could be a new business for the company.

Ms. Rodin's approach to Palantir exemplifies the unusual path she has taken at the helm of the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the nation's most prominent philanthropic institutions.

On Wednesday evening, the 71-year-old Ms. Rodin told the foundation's board that she plans to step down, following an 11-year tenure characterized more by forging strategic partnerships with well-known companies than doling out checks to grant seekers.

In an interview at her Manhattan office earlier this week, Ms. Rodin said she felt her work altering the foundation's strategy was largely complete. "Now there needs to be another round of decisions that are going to impact the next five to 10 years," she said. She plans to stay on until her successor is chosen.

Ms. Rodin, who was the Rockefeller Foundation's first female president, has been a trail blazer since taking the job in 2005. Like a corporate CEO, she has emphasized brand-building and hitting shorter-term performance goals, making her a rarity in the nonprofit world.

She unabashedly admits to spending more time with the foundation's corporate partners than with its grantees.

That, plus the rigorous screening process she has put in place for grant funding, have led the Center for Effective Philanthropy to give the foundation low ratings for its relationship with grant recipients. Other critics say she focuses too much on seeking publicity.

Ms. Rodin brushes aside the criticism. "Philanthropy is littered with short-term success and long-term lack of sustainability," she said. "If the markets find ways to benefit from supporting philanthropic goals because it's good business, you really have a much higher probability of sustainability."

As for her prominence, she says the foundation's "bully pulpit" is stronger than ever. "There isn't a president or prime minister I can't talk to," she says.

Hobnobbing with the corporate elite has been a hallmark of Ms. Rodin's tenure. This year, she held a summit at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with 15 world and business leaders, hailing from companies including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and Nigeria-based Dangote Group to discuss tackling food waste. At the forum, the foundation handed out snacks from discarded food scraps. Among them were "upcycled" mango tarts and pickled vegetable salad, which Ms. Rodin made sure former White House assistant chef Sam Kass came by to sample.

On Ms. Rodin's watch, the Rockefeller Foundation has pursued a strategy of making small initial investments in projects, and then forming partnerships with governments and corporations to ramp them up.

Among her major initiatives: awarding grants to 100 cities to hire "chief resilience officers"; developing training and hiring programs designed to make disadvantaged African youth without conventional credentials attractive to employers like Microsoft Corp.; and helping to create "impact investing" benchmarks, so banks like J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. can help clients measure the social good of an investment.

Since Ms. Rodin approached Palantir in 2013, the tech firm has worked with Norfolk, Va., one of the foundation's "resilient" cities, to put together and analyze data sets about flooding, building-code violations and calls to the city's 311 information service to help city officials understand how to best serve neighborhoods.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said one of Ms. Rodin's main missions was to show that "what is good for the world is good for business."

Ms. Rodin, who was the first female president of the University of Pennsylvania, sits on the boards of Comcast Corp. and Citigroup Inc. and serves on their compensation committees—"where the power is," she says. In her office, an old Peanuts comic depicting Lucy, encased in a decades-old plastic frame, reads, "A Woman's Place is in Control."

Government officials have found an ally in Ms. Rodin and her enterprising tactics.

Shaun Donovan, a longtime housing official who is now director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, says Ms. Rodin helped create a sizable fund to develop affordable housing in New York City by bringing together foundations and the private sector. "If it hadn't been for Judy's personal engagement, we would have taken years," he says.

Ms. Rodin's critics include Martin Morse Wooster, a senior fellow at the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank focused on philanthropy. "Foundations that do what we want for the nonprofit sector are the ones that don't seek publicity," he says.

Ms. Rodin's prominence, however, likely helped her pull off her most recent success. Last year, she proposed that the foundation and the producers of the hit Broadway musical "Hamilton" share the costs of tickets for 20,000 students in low-income schools. "At that time, we just had good buzz but hadn't exploded into this international phenomenon," said Luis Miranda, father of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show's creator and star.

As a result, even as theater fans pay brokers as much as several thousand dollars each for tickets to sold-out performances, the students pay just $10—symbolically, because Alexander Hamilton is on the $10 bill.

Write to Shalini Ramachandran at shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 15, 2016 21:05 ET (01:05 GMT)

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