As Senior Vice President for Global Policy & Advocacy, Christine Heenan led several key programmatic and external functions for The Rockefeller Foundation, including leading the Foundation’s regional teams in Asia and Africa, managing global policy and influence, strategic partnerships, Bellagio Center convenings and events, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, and overseeing internal and external communications. In this role, she also provided vision and strategy for how The Rockefeller Foundation engaged with partners and stakeholders, advised the President and senior leaders across the organization on how best to leverage external opportunities for the Foundation’s key initiatives.
Heenan was founder and president of Clarendon Group, a strategy and communications firm. She has advised some of the nation’s most notable and influential global organizations, including Harvard University, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ballmer Group, the Broad Institute, philanthropist Donald Sussman, and others. From 2008 to 2015, Heenan was Vice President of Public Affairs and Communications for Harvard.
She served in the White House as senior policy analyst and speechwriter in the Clinton Administration focused on health care policy, health reform, and women’s issues. Heenan has taught communications and public policy at both Brown and Harvard, and has served on a number of boards focused on child development, education, and economic policy. She holds a B.S. in journalism from Boston University.
Authored Content
Aug 23 2019 Blog Post Lifting Up Stories Of Progress: Hope and Hustle in the Kibera Slum Kibera, about four miles outside of Nairobi, Kenya, is the largest urban slum in all of Africa. About the size of New York’s Central Park, it is estimated that somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million people live within Kibera’s tin-roofed, mud-caked structures, and travel its rutted, ravaged byways and narrow dirt roads. (The 2009 government […]
Jul 17 2019 Blog Post The Power of Partnerships: How Asia Is Charting a Path for Solving the Global Goals Partnership has always been at the core of The Rockefeller Foundation’s DNA, and at the annual conference of the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) late last month in Singapore, it was energizing for me to observe hundreds of optimists and change-makers coming together to forge and advance solutions to some of the region’s greatest challenges. […]
Feb 01 2019 Blog Post Five Takeaways from My Fifth Davos The World Economic Forum isn’t a university, but many at the Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland proudly claim “alumni” status: throughout the conference last week I heard “this is my fifteenth Davos” and even “This is my twenty-second Davos.” Longevity in attendance seems to be a marker of esteem, and the bewildered faces of […]
Oct 04 2018 Blog Post The Transformative Power of Power Three years ago, at the 70th United Nations General Assembly session in New York, 193 countries agreed on 17 goals for improving life for people across the globe, especially the world’s poorest, by 2030. The “Sustainable Development Goals” – or SDGs – range from “Zero Hunger” to “Decent Work and Economic Growth,” and virtually […]