It’s my pleasure to introduce the first edition of a new publication, Insights, a product of the ongoing work of The Rockefeller Foundation’s strategic research team, identifying compelling and emerging problem trends and areas of dynamism where there might be opportunities for intervention.
Over the course of the last year, our team, alongside our grant partners, have deeply explored 11 of these emerging trends to learn more about their root causes, the opportunities for riding the waves of dynamism or catalyzing promising new solutions, and the potential for impact. What we’ve learned through this process has oftentimes surprised us, challenging our prior assumptions, making fresh connections, and broadening our understanding of what it will take to solve these problems once and for all. This rigorous research not only informs what problems The Rockefeller Foundation might explore further or adds to our current portfolio of work, but we hope it can also yield intelligence that is valuable for a range of other actors, from other foundations, governments, NGOs, corporations, and impact investors, who are working to make the world a more equitable and resilient place.
In 2013, we funded hundreds of hours of research on 11 specific problem spaces, but we’ve chosen to highlight only six in this publication. We encourage you to use Insights as a jumping-off point for the larger set of research and resources available on our site.
Our goal for Insights is to not just inform, but also to engage and serve as a conversation piece. So whether you read from cover to cover, or flip through for the sections that most catch your eye, it’s our hope that you’ll put it down with a better sense of some of the challenges that are shaping our world, and the collective opportunities to solve them. And then, of course, we hope you will take action.
In the meantime, we’ll keep scanning the horizon and searching for new emerging trends in real time, and we look forward to sharing those learnings in subsequent publications. We hope you’ll keep reading.
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