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2019-10-28
Rockefeller Archive Center;
In the context of the "Decade of Development," and as part of the non-military strategies of containment of communism, different public and private US. institutions turned their attention to projects of technical assistance in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that sought to modernize the legal systems of the countries of the Third World. In the Inter-American context, several initiatives were promoted under the label "Law and Development" (LD). Financed mostly by the Ford Foundation and USAID, they were conceived and implemented in the 1960s and the 1970s by those institutions, in cooperation with US law schools (Harvard, Stanford, Wisconsin, and Yale, among others) and local universities in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru. The common purpose of these programs was the transformation of the national legal systems following the US model. The effort centered on removing obstacles to development attributed to obsolete legal structures and a conception of the role of the law and lawyers incompatible with the challenges of modernization.
2019-08-13
Rockefeller Archive Center;
Historians have often overlooked a central component of the story of the Green Revolution: the construction of laboratories, research stations, universities, and other facilities that made crop research possible. My recent research at the Rockefeller Archive Center started with one pivotal research center—the CIAT (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical) in southwestern Colombia—to try and understand it as an architectural project. When CIAT was finished in the early 1970s, it had already benefitted from years of Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and Ford Foundation (FF) support to that particular project, as well as decades of philanthropic funding at local universities in the nearby cites of Palmira and Cali. The Universidad del Valle (Uni Valle) in Cali had been a particular focus of U.S. philanthropic funding for university development. Among other disciplines, foundations promoted architecture there as a means for international development. From crop research labs to public health centers, Uni Valle architects were supposed to foment modernization by building the facilities that would make it possible. But architecture was more than a facilitator of development; it also became a central site of contestation. At CIAT, officials debated the proper aesthetic and spatial organization that modernizing facilities should take. At the Universidad del Valle, the very architecture students and faculty meant to serve as the champions of a particular kind of modernity, in fact, confounded an easy United States-led development project. Some faculty were radical leftists, and together with students, they led a movement to gain greater control over the university administration from both local and international administrators.
2019-07-02
Rockefeller Archive Center;
This essay charts the career of the entomologist and popular author Marston Bates (1906-1974) within the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) between 1935 and 1952. Today, Bates is best remembered as a science communicator. Publishing over a dozen books on natural history and the environment, he helped bring ecological ideas to broader public audiences during the 1950s and 1960s. Not simply a popularizer of contemporary scientific concepts, Bates stood out for his critical commentary on the environmental problems of economic development, conservation, and global population growth, as well as the need for more integrative, cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding humans in nature. Long before becoming a public intellectual, however, he worked for the RF as a mosquito specialist, serving as director of International Health Division malaria and yellow fever laboratories in Albania, Egypt, and Colombia during the 1930s and 1940s. Bates' mid-career shift from researching mosquito ecology to writing about human ecology may seem to be a sudden left turn. A closer look at the archival record reveals the pivotal role played by the Rockefeller Foundation in shaping Bates' career trajectory and ideas about the environment. Furthermore, placing Bates' work in the context of his time with the RF reveals connections between twentieth-century U.S. environmental thought and international health projects.
2019-01-17
Rockefeller Archive Center;
Colombia and the United States strengthened their trade, scientific and cultural exchanges during the 1920s. In regards to health and medicine issues, the Rockefeller Foundation played a pivotal role between 1919 and 1945, when it conducted scientific research and financed the battle against infectious diseases, above all yellow fever and hookworm. It also encouraged the development of a public health system in Colombia by creating American-inspired institutions and training health professionals.
2018-05-30
Foundation Center;
Financial sustainability remains a critical challenge for civil society organizations (CSOs) around the world. Although a variety of toolkits and research papers exist examining specific sustainability strategies, many CSOs continue to struggle to develop and maintain the resources they need to carry out their missions. This constraint limits organizational autonomy by inhibiting long-term planning and flexibility in designing and implementing activities. Financial sustainability is also a key piece of the puzzle to empower local organizations to take greater ownership of the development process, as a robust resource base provides the resilience needed for organizations to experiment with new models that reduce long-term donor dependence. This paper synthesizes the findings from the analyses of both funders and CSOs. This represents one part of the three-part FFS research series, and is best considered alongside the other two papers in the series to give a holistic perspective on CSO financial sustainability: Funder Approaches to CSO Sustainability, which includes a deep-dive analysis of the landscape of strategies used by funders interested in supporting sustainability, and Understanding Factors Driving CSO Financial Sustainability, which lays out the full findings from interviews with representatives from more than 30 CSOs.
2018-05-04
Foundation Center;
Financial sustainability remains a critical challenge for Civil Society Organization (CSOs) around the world. Although a variety of toolkits and research papers exist examining specific sustainability strategies , many CSOs continue to struggle to develop and maintain the resources needed to carry out their missions. The Facilitating Financial Sustainability (FFS) activity was launched in 2017 to develop and test ways that different actors (including donors, policymakers, intermediary organizations, and CSOs themselves) can work together to improve the factors that drive financial sustainability for local organizations in different developing world contexts. This paper synthesizes the findings from the analyses of both funders and CSOs. This represents one part of the three-part FFS research series, and is best considered alongside the other papers in the series to give a holistic perspective on CSO financial sustainability: "Understanding the Drivers of CSO Financial Sustianabiltiy", which includes an analysis of specific factor combinations that support CSO sustainability in different contexts, and "Funder Approaches to Financial Sustainability", which provides an overview of the funding landscape for CSO financial sustainability int he six countries included in the study.
2018-05-04
Foundation Center;
Financial sustainability remains a critical challenge for Civil Society Organization (CSOs) around the world. Although a variety of toolkits and research papers exist examining specific sustainability strategies , many CSOs continue to struggle to develop and maintain the resources needed to carry out their missions. The Facilitating Financial Sustainability (FFS) activity was launched in 2017 to develop and test ways that different actors (including donors, policymakers, intermediary organizations, and CSOs themselves) can work together to improve the factors that drive financial sustainability for local organizations in different developing world contexts. This paper covers an analysis of funder strategies to support CSO financial sustainability. This represents one part of the three-part FFS research series, and is best considered alongside the other papers in the series to give a holistic perspective on CSO financial sustainability: "Understanding the Drivers of CSO Financial Sustainability", which includes an analysis of specific factor combinations that support CSO sustainability in different contexts, and "Facilitating Financial Sustainability: Synthesis Report", which brings together the key findings from the other two papers in the series.
2018-05-04
Foundation Center;
Financial sustainability remains a critical challenge for Civil Society Organization (CSOs) around the world. Although a variety of toolkits and research papers exist examining specific sustainability strategies , many CSOs continue to struggle to develop and maintain the resources needed to carry out their missions. The Facilitating Financial Sustainability (FFS) activity was launched in 2017 to develop and test ways that different actors (including donors, policymakers, intermediary organizations, and CSOs themselves) can work together to improve the factors that drive financial sustainability for local organizations in different developing world contexts. This paper covers an analysis of the drivers of CSO sustainability based on interviews with CSO representatives. This represents one part of the three-part FFS research series, and is best considered alongside the other papers in the series to give a holistic perspective on CSO financial sustainability: "Funder Approaches to Facilitating CSO Financial Sustainability", which provides an overview of the funding landscape for financial sustainability in the six countries included in the study, and "Facilitating Financial Sustainability: Synthesis Report", which brings together the key findings from both other papers in the series.
2018-02-27
Rockefeller Archive Center;
Hookworm disease received later attention from the Colombian government than it received in other Latin American countries, such as Costa Rica or Brazil. In those countries, the campaigns to combat hookworm were framed within a large national project and had broad support of the government before the arrival of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF). Although in Colombia doctors began to study the disease in the first decade of the twentieth century, and warned early on about the risks to coffee and sugarcane plantation workers, the government did not take such warnings seriously until the 1920s. At that time, it signed a cooperation agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to start the fight against tropical anemia.
2017-09-08
Oxfam;
Seeking to gain knowledge about resilience, this case study considered a 2007-09 Red Cross preparedness project funded by the Disaster Preparedness European Community Humanitarian Office (DIPECHO). The project was implemented around the Nevado del Huila volcano in Colombia, in a largely rural area with a predominantly indigenous population. The findings and analysis point to the importance of listening to and learning from the community, including its traditional and indigenous resilience practices, as well as the iterative nature of resilient development. The field research also yielded interesting material about perceptions and practices of resilience in Nasa indigenous communities.
This report is part of a series that seeks to draw lessons from resilience projects in Latin America and the Pacific. Follow the links below to the other papers in the series:
Addressing Water Shortages: A catalyst for more resilient development in Fiji
Building Resilience Through Iterative Processes: Mainstreaming ancestral knowledge, social movements and the making of sustainable programming in Bolivia
Learning from Hindsight: A synthesis report on Oxfam resilience research
This research was conducted with the support of the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.
2017-05-31
SDG Philanthropy Platform;
The causes and consequences of Colombia's conflict have created a vicious cycle of economic inequality, weak institutional capacity, and the presence of illegal economies. This report argues that philanthropy can become a key player in the transition towards peace building, and in creating the conditions needed for sustainable peace by acting as a catalyst for innovation and collective action in Colombia. The report also provides concrete recommendations and ways forward for local and international philanthropic organizations to support Colombia's transition towards peace.
2017-02-06
Association of Corporate and Family Foundations (AFE);
AFE Colombia works to make its member foundations understand the SDGs and integrate them into their strategies, programs and projects. Attending high-level multi-stakeholder events and meetings, and co-producing varied case studies and reports with the Platform, AFE Colombia looks forward to a strong continued partnership. AFE's major work included a collective project in impoverished regions in Antioquia, the creation of a SDG filter in AFE's Platform of Strategic Projects, projects with academia, and best-practices documentation.
