100 Resilient Cities: Rockefeller's City-to-City Resilience Network — and Its Abrupt Wind-Down

The Rockefeller Foundation launched 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) in 2013, headquartered in New York, to help cities worldwide build resilience to physical, social and economic shocks. Selected cities received funding for a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) post and support to draft a city-specific resilience strategy, backed by a network of platform partners offering tools and technical assistance.

An independent midterm evaluation by the Urban Institute, based on a 21-city sample, found the programme had institutionalised resilience thinking: more than 80 Chief Resilience Officers were hired and roughly 80 cities had produced resilience strategies by the time of the shutdown.

On 31 July 2019, the Rockefeller Foundation closed the 100RC organisation after six years, citing internal budget prioritisation rather than programme performance. It committed roughly $8–9 million to help transition surviving Chief Resilience Officer positions and city relationships into a new, independently run successor, the Global Resilient Cities Network — a fraction of 100RC's original funding.

A 2023 peer-reviewed review in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management concluded the literature shows no strong evidence that 100RC delivered on equity outcomes, and other scholarship criticised its standardised, fast-turnaround methodology as frequently mismatched to individual cities' governance and planning conventions. Included here as a cautionary case: a high-visibility, well-funded knowledge-transfer network can scale to 100 cities in a few years, yet remain financially and institutionally fragile once its founding donor's priorities shift — underscoring the need for diversified, city-anchored funding if such networks are to endure.