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Why Convenings Matter

We're looking to fast-track solutions
Perspective
Author Eason Jordan
Published DateSeptember 19, 2024
Read Time 4 Minutes

Eason Jordan (top row, fourth from left) at the Bellagio Center convening with The Rockefeller Foundation’s Big Bets Fellows from Latin America.

Need to meet a complex challenge urgently — like, for instance, climate change? Purpose-driven convenings can supercharge the process.

Convenings, done right, save time, ignite innovation, and shape solutions. How? By gathering diverse stakeholders, breaking down silos, and driving focused efforts. They aren’t the end of the process. But they offer a crucial opportunity for stakeholders to coalesce around clear goals, and they create momentum.

Over our 111-year history, convenings have been a vital mechanism through which The Rockefeller Foundation addresses the world’s most pressing challenges, enabling us to drive impactful solutions and catalyze meaningful change.

Eason Jordan (left) with Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2018. (Photo Courtesy of Eason Jordan)

I have attended hundreds of convenings over three decades. Few produced impactful, lasting results, nor was that the intent.

The Rockefeller Foundation takes a different approach. We’re looking for solutions.

The most impressive and inspiring convening I ever attended occurred just this July at the Bellagio Center. The inaugural convening of our Big Bets Climate Fellows brought together frontline trailblazers from across Latin America and the Caribbean.

With the help of Foundation facilitators and boosters, the Fellows fine-tuned their solutions, focused plans and pitches, learned from each other, and bonded for what surely will be years to come. Their gusto, smarts, and determination convinced me they will deliver big-time for their communities and the world.

“Anyone can host a meeting,” The Rockefeller Foundation President Dr. Rajiv J. Shah said recently. “A convening is designed to connect leaders and solve problems.”

But to produce the impact that the world needs, convenings must be structured with deep intention. Let’s start with the “three w’s.”

Who? We value inclusive convenings that bust open silos. It’s vital to include not only the grass tops, but the grassroots. Not only international policymakers but community leaders. Men, women, old and young. People on the frontlines with crucial insights. I want people from Nepal, or the Philippines, or Ghana to say, “You listened to us, and finally made it possible for us to contribute to solutions for our planet.”

What? We begin each convening with a clearly stated purpose so everyone is on board with the shared goal and a roll-up-your-sleeves approach. It’s about getting things done.

Where? If we truly want to be inclusive of various perspectives — and we do — we need to convene in a variety of places.

The Bellagio Center, gifted to The Rockefeller Foundation in 1959, is a crown jewel of our convening practice.

It has served as a hub for global leaders to collaborate on solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges, and though in a beautiful location, its biggest attribute may be that it is isolated enough to inspire concentrated efforts.

But we are also prioritizing forums in New York and Washington, Africa and Asia, to bring more of the world to the table.

One more where: Impactful work often happens away from the spotlight of the plenary hall, in the quieter corners where a handful of participants hunker down. So we actively create space and opportunities for those distinct moments.

Eason Jordan grew up in Atlanta and began working for CNN while he was still in college, initially earning $3.25 an hour.

He went on to spend 23 years at CNN, rising to become its Chief News Executive and President of Newsgathering and International Networks. He crisscrossed the Mideast, made 10 trips to North Korea and more than 50 trips to China and Cuba, and dealt with 10 Israeli prime ministers, to single out just a handful of highlights.

In 2012, he joined NowThis, a digital video news service, as its founding general manager. Then he was key to founding the Malala Fund, serving as its first director and working closely with Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani education activist who became the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate after being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman when she was 15 years old.

Eason Jordan reporting from North Korea for CNN in 1995 (Courtesy Eason Jordan)
Eason Jordan reporting from North Korea for CNN in 1995. (Courtesy Eason Jordan)

“For four years after that, I worked with and for a teenage girl, and it was one of the most rewarding periods of my life,” Jordan recalled.

Before joining The Rockefeller Foundation this year, he ran his own company in the Middle East, working frequently in warzones. “I like working with inspiring changemakers,” he said.

In 2022, The Rockefeller Foundation released a Convenings Design Guide which makes several other important points, among them that a convening should be viewed as a step in a progress to make impact, and it should end with a commitment to action that is followed up.

Bringing this kind of intentionality to the work is in no small part why we’ve seen big initiatives emerge from our convenings and then go on to save and improve lives.

We can do still more — and we have to. That’s why we are doubling down on efforts to build bridges and bring people together to innovate solutions. In the face of climate change, it has never been more important.

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