Rockefeller Brothers Fund

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) is a private foundation established on December 28, 1940 by five third-generation Rockefeller brothers — John 3rd, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David — as their primary vehicle for coordinated philanthropy. Headquartered in New York City, RBF has grown from its origins as the brothers' personal charitable vehicle into a major independent foundation active in democracy, peacebuilding, and climate. Its endowment reached approximately $1.38 billion as of December 31, 2024; in 2024, the Fund distributed $62 million across 382 grants, with $65 million projected for 2025. In 2024 RBF also completed its transition to a fossil-fuel-free endowment — a milestone reached through a decade of mission-aligned divestment.

Program structure

RBF organises its grantmaking around three thematic programs — Democratic Practice, Sustainable Development, and Peacebuilding — alongside four geographic and specialized initiatives: China, Western Balkans, Central America, and Culpeper Arts & Culture. Within the AI-good landscape, the Democratic Practice and Peacebuilding programs carry the relevant work; Sustainable Development's focus is climate and clean energy.

Democratic Practice and the technology-democracy intersection

RBF's Democratic Practice program frames technology as a structural terrain of democratic contest. The program's stated rationale identifies that "emerging technologies could benefit democratic systems, but their unregulated adoption threatens to bolster authoritarianism by expanding surveillance, further concentrating power, and distorting public feedback." Against that framing, the program supports organizations working on election integrity, internet freedom, civic tech, and movement-building for economic and racial equity.

Key technology-adjacent Democratic Practice grantees include Free Press — the media-policy and internet-freedom advocacy organization that challenges ISP blocking, platform consolidation, and surveillance-enabling network architecture — and the Data & Society Research Institute, which works on digital policy and technology governance research. The Center for Technology and Civic Life, an RBF grantee working to modernise election infrastructure through digital tools and build resilient, participatory election systems, also sits within this program.

RBF's Racial Justice Initiative, launched in June 2020 under the Democratic Practice program, extends grantmaking to organizations building political power in communities most affected by systemic racism — an area that intersects directly with algorithmic bias in criminal-justice systems, surveillance of Black and Indigenous communities, and platform enforcement disparities.

Peacebuilding and digital rights in conflict contexts

The Peacebuilding program, established in 2011, focuses on conflicts with significant U.S. involvement — Afghanistan, Iran, and Israel-Palestine — supporting pro-peace civil society organizations and policy analysis aimed at foreign policies premised on interdependence rather than primacy. The program's Israel-Palestine work has developed a direct digital-rights thread through its support for 7amleh — Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media. 7amleh documents violations of Palestinian digital rights — platform censorship of political speech, digital-identity erasure, surveillance, and financial-platform exclusion — and operates the Palestinian Digital Rights Observatory as an accountability resource. RBF has funded 7amleh under the Peacebuilding program twice: a $50,000 grant in 2023 and a $135,000 grant in April 2025, making 7amleh one of the clearest links between RBF's conflict-focused philanthropy and the grassroots digital-rights layer of the AI-good movement.

Relationship to the AI-good movement

RBF does not operate a dedicated AI governance or algorithmic accountability program. Its contribution to the AI-good landscape runs through the democracy-and-digital-rights seam in two directions: at the structural level, the Democratic Practice program's explicit framing of surveillance and power concentration through unregulated technology as democratic threats, funding internet-freedom and technology-governance organizations; and at the ground level, the Peacebuilding program's direct support for civil society actors documenting how surveillance infrastructure and platform companies operate against marginalised political communities in acute conflict contexts.

That combination — structural critique of AI-enabled surveillance as a democratic threat paired with ground-level documentation of digital rights violations — positions RBF at the democracy-infrastructure end of the AI-good funding landscape, distinct from the algorithmic-accountability core funding of Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, or Mozilla Foundation, and more closely parallel to Carnegie Corporation of New York's democracy-facing investments, though RBF's peacebuilding digital-rights thread brings it into direct engagement with conflict-zone civil society that Carnegie's work does not reach.