After a Year of Crisis, What Does Resilience Mean for the Leader Who Wrote the Book on it?

Judith rodin, New world Symphony board member and former president of the rockefeller foundation.

When I say that former Rockefeller Foundation president, University of Pennsylvania president emerita and New World Symphony (NWS) board member Judith Rodin wrote the book on resilience, I don’t mean it in a figurative sense. Rodin actually wrote the book on resilience.

First published in 2014, “The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong” explored how people, organizations and communities developed resilience—defined as “the ability to bounce back more quickly and effectively”—in the face of otherwise catastrophic challenges. Using this perspective as a philanthropic roadmap, Rodin steered the Rockefeller Foundation toward resiliency-focused grantmaking during her tenure from 2005 through 2017.

Fast-forward to last July. Rodin’s work proved to be tragically prescient. Miami’s New World Symphony, like countless other organizations, was grappling with the impact of the pandemic and what it called “the consequences of systematic racism on the performing arts.”

In response, the symphony launched the NWS Resilience Fund to support programmatic and organizational agility, innovation and transformation, and initiatives centered on Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. The fund, Rodin said, was designed to help the symphony nimbly respond to challenges with “vision and creativity and to transform by using their extraordinary capacity for innovation in new ways.”

She personally seeded the fund with $500,000, one-fifth of which immediately supported the symphony’s earliest phases of recovery. After the symphony’s successful virtual gala in February, the fund has grown to more than $2.37 million in less than a year, Rodin said, “thanks to the community who believes so strongly that we must assure that the extraordinary work of the New World Symphony can weather any crisis.”

The challenges of 2020 were profound for many families, Rodin said. “But that reinforced the need for organizations to be resilient—to be prepared to respond and adapt.”

Building resilience

A research psychologist by training, Rodin became president of the University of Pennsylvania in 1994, making her the first permanent female leader of an Ivy League institution. She served in that role until 2004 and joined the Rockefeller Foundation a year later.

In 2015, IP’s Alyssa Ochs included Rodin in a list of New York’s most powerful philanthropic leaders, citing her role in spearheading Rockefeller’s climate resilience and resilient cities work, the centerpiece of which was the foundation’s now-concluded 100 Resilient Cities initiative. Reflecting on her tenure at the foundation, Rodin told me she and her team “worked with hundreds of cities, major public and private institutions and scores of communities on their resilience initiatives.” And while there is no one-size-fits-all approach, Rodin cited six capacities that all resilience efforts should strive to build:

Willingness and ability to assess and absorb new information quickly and put it to use
Diversity of people, ideas and approaches, and redundancy in backup systems
Seamless information sharing and decision-making, and transparent communication that ensures coordinated action
Strong self-regulating capacity that enables safe rather than catastrophic failure
Nimbleness and flexibility to adjust quickly to changing circumstances with new ideas and approaches
An ability to articulate the purpose that guides the work—“a North Star, if you will,” Rodin said. During a crisis, “leadership has to figure out what must be done in order to stay true to that North Star. This takes agility, sacrifice and a reallocation of resources to target high-priority areas. If you can reduce institutional vulnerabilities, build your response capabilities and innovate, you’ll gain an enormous advantage.”

Rodin’s book often frames resilience within the context of how cities can prepare for and respond to natural disasters. But 2020 brought a disaster of a different kind that not only affected cities, but nonprofit arts organizations like NWS, as well. COVID-19 is a still-unfolding case study into how Rodin has sought to scale her resilience work to meet the New World Symphony’s needs.

The New World Symphony pivots to resiliency

In March 2018, Rodin was elected to the New World Symphony’s board. In a statement commenting on her appointment, the symphony’s board wrote, “Resilience in the face of disruption is a major theme in the work of Dr. Judith Rodin… [her] insights will help us redefine, reaffirm, express and share the great traditions of this legacy art form with as many people as possible.”

Two years later, Rodin said, “the world had shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic and we were also reeling from vivid demonstrations of the challenges of systemic racism in America.” The term “resilience” suddenly seemed to be everywhere. In fact, the word has become so ubiquitous that people often fail to grasp its true meaning. The empirical definition of the word, Rodin told me, “is the capacity to prepare for and bounce back from crises more quickly and effectively, to learn from them, and to transform as a result.”

The symphony formally announced the Resilience Fund and Rodin’s $500,000 lead gift on July 8, 2020. “Judy Rodin’s gift signifies a belief in the future of the New World Symphony,” said Artistic Director Michael Tilson Thomas. “Her vision to establish the Resilience Fund will allow New World Symphony to expand our work with young musicians from all backgrounds as the world transforms, and to make the digital space more personal and inclusive.”

On February 20, the symphony hosted “Brave New World, A Celebration of Resilience,” a virtual gala held on its 33rd anniversary. Rodin and her husband, Paul Verkuil, served as the gala chairs. The event raised nearly $1.7 million for the NWS Resilience Fund.

Accelerating digital programming

In the early days of the pandemic, funders helped performing arts organizations ramp up their virtual presence. The NWS, on the other hand, has been undertaking plenty of digital programming ever since moving into its home, the New World Center, 10 years ago. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation was a key partner in that transformation. In 2008, Knight gave the NWS a five-year, $2.5 million grant, a portion of which encouraged the symphony to “reimagine the future of classical music in a digital age.”

The NWS Resilience Fund has sought to build on that work, accelerating the symphony’s digital performance capacity and “enabling it to become nimble and adaptive in live streaming concerts to audiences around the world,” Rodin said. The fund also supported the purchase of a “mobile wall”—a large LED screen mounted on a trailer—to allow diverse audiences throughout Miami-Dade County to experience a version of the New World Symphony’s signature WALLCAST concerts in their own communities.

And critically, the fund helped achieve what Rodin called “diversity resilience capacity” by supporting the symphony’s equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging efforts, including anti-racism training as well as developing more programming by a more diverse array of composers and artists.

“People are looking for hope”

The fund has faced its share of obstacles. “This was a difficult time to raise money, of course,” Rodin said—the onset of the pandemic had many fundraisers navigating uncharted waters when it came to strategy and protocol. But the symphony’s supporters rose to the occasion. As of March 10, the fund has received support from the Knight, Annenberg and Mellon foundations, as well as Goldman Sachs and a litany of individual donors and family foundations.

I asked Rodin what advice she would give performing arts leaders confronting another uncertain summer. “Don’t be afraid to lean hard on your core support base,” she said. “We’ve found that many of our donors with the initial intention to maintain their annual gifts have actually increased their contributions this year.”

Leaders should continue to rely on their boards and regular donors, but they shouldn’t get complacent. “Make new friends for your organization by doing some transformational, out-of-the-box programming,” Rodin said. “People are looking for hope and inspiration. The arts are essential to revive our spirit in times of crisis and need, and you can inspire donors with that mission.”

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