Transcript

Michael Quattrone: Hi there. Thanks for that kind introduction and thanks to Synergos and the GPC for having me here.

It is a real privilege to spend a few minutes with you remembering my grandfather, David Rockefeller. And as an early supporter of Synergos and a founding member of the Global Philanthropists Circle he would be so pleased that we are here coming together as individuals and as families from all over the world to reflect on the field of philanthropy and to give our attention in particular to the subject of values. Since his death on the first day of spring at the age of 101 much has been written about grandpa’s international business accomplishments, his civic leadership, and the astonishing philanthropic legacy he leaves behind. His role in the founding of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, and the David Rockefeller Fund, which are three successive generations of family foundations, demonstrates grandpa’s lifelong devotion to family and an equal commitment to the field of philanthropy itself. I am so proud of his generosity establishing those and other institutions, and of his lifetime giving the total of 2 billion dollars.

But when I think of my grandfather there are a few indelible personal moments that come to mind before those sorts of historical facts. Here is one: early last year my wife Kala and I brought our three children to visit their then 100-year-old great grandfather at his house in Tarrytown. He was a doting great grandfather. Nothing brought him more pleasure than spending time with his great grandchildren so he just lit up. And as was our custom we brought him a photo album to show him some of our adventures from the previous year. So, the five of us cuddled up next to him on the couch, or stood behind to peer over his shoulder as he flipped through the book and remarked on the pictures: “This one really captures you,” he said to my daughter Willow and, or, “My goodness, is that you?” he would ask my boys in noticing how much they had grown.

And in the middle of the book, he looked up for a moment and he spoke of his late son, my uncle Richard who had died two years before. And grandpa said what a good man he was and how much he loved him before turning back to the book of pictures. Soon thereafter we moved to the dinner table and again grandpa spoke of Richard so I asked him if something in particular had called Richard to mind. And he looked around the table at the five of us and, and said, “The love of children,” and, and then added, “Over my many years it has become increasingly clear that love is the most important thing. In fact, could we all hold hands for a moment?”

So, holding hands before dinner, it was his request but I think we should do it now, too. Holding hands before dinner is a ritual my immediate family does each night but we had never done it with my grandfather before. And, and I will never forget that spontaneous outpouring of affection and wisdom from grandpa, and what moves me the most, and fills me with gratitude, is that my children had a chance to witness their great grandfather in that moment with his heart wide open speaking after a century of life about what mattered most. Love is the most important thing. Thanks for joining me in that.

So that is the image that I carry with me of my grandfather and, and his pure presence in that moment is what I hope to emulate in my own life and work. And I want to share a little piece of that work with you because I am so grateful that one of the ways I get to help carry on grandpa’s legacy is as Board Chair of the David Rockefeller Fund. We have our Founding Executive Director with us, Marnie Pillsbury. Hi, Marnie. The DR Fund, as it is known, was founded by my grandparents in 1989 at first to facilitate the annual local gifts they made in the communities where they lived and since then it has been developing into what we hope will serve as a useful model for other small family foundations, seeking to have an outsize impact for generations to come.

And we have my grandfather’s vision and generosity to thank for our evolution so far because over time as his descendants like me came of age grandpa invited his children, grandchildren and their spouses to join the board and to collectively identify the issues that mattered most to us, which resulted in our three central program areas and eventually to assume leadership of the fund. Grandpa attended every board meeting of the David Rockefeller Fund, including most recently in December and, again, he took so much pleasure from bringing his family together and being with us as we gathered in purposeful partnership, in this case around the board table. It was really his intention that the work of the fund enhances our closeness as a family and engages my generation in strategic and wholehearted giving, and that intention has provided us with a strong sense of internal mission.

With his characteristic humility grandpa would be the first to remind us now that he was a grateful inheritor himself of the philanthropic tradition that began with his grandfather, and father, and I suspect the sense of belonging that came from being a part of that larger lineage is also what encouraged him to pass it on to us. One of my early but most important projects as Chair along with Executive Director, Lucas Haynes, who some of you met this week, was to convene the family for a visioning retreat. Our goal was to reflect upon and distill the values that underpin our programs. And that core of shared values once made explicit could inform the drafting of vision and mission statements, which, in turn, would keep us inspired and grounded as the fund continued to evolve.

So, over two days at our visioning retreat, the family and trustees learned about Rockefeller philanthropy from a historical perspective. The fourth generation, my mother’s generation, shared what they had learned as they had stepped into leadership of the Rockefeller Family Fund a generation earlier, and my generation, the fifth, was invited to speak aspirationally about what mattered most to us. And then in smaller, intergenerational breakout groups we reflected on the values already embedded in our programs, and back all together we distilled a running list down to the center of the Venn diagram, which represented the most essential shared values, and that list, which is a living list spanning generations, includes gratitude, reverence, respect, regeneration and connection, meaning, healing and wholeness, collaboration, and opportunity among others.

So, today 13 family members from a pool of 28 serve on our board at any one time with ten sixth-generation great grandchildren growing up pretty quickly. Together we strive to leverage all of our resources, including the advocacy and donor education undertaken by our staff. Last year we divested from fossil fuels and asked our investment committee to learn about impact investment opportunities that we might add to our portfolio, which is already subject to environmental, social, and governance screens. And we adopted our mission statement, which states that we invest in catalytic ideas, people, efforts, and institutions working strategically toward ecological regeneration, justice system reform, and art for social impact. So those are our three program areas.

And each step of the way we are inspired by the vision and generosity of grandpa to foster and embody a more just, creative, and flourishing world, which we know to be possible. So, I wanted to share a little bit about the DR Fund with you. I am so grateful to play a small role in carrying forward grandpa’s values through the work of the fund and I am really grateful to share it with you today. Do we have time for a song? Are we okay on time?

Reply: Yes.

Quattrone: All right. Thank you. So, I think it is maybe a pre-value. This is a song called Gratitude that I wrote a couple of years ago and I was able to share it with grandpa before he died. He said he liked it and toward the end of his life he was in an almost constant state of gratitude. It was really astonishing to behold the open state of learning and appreciation. It is a state where no negative competitive destructive thoughts can even coexist. To me that is really what grandpa embodies.