Steve Heintz is president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a family foundation with an endowment of approximately $1.5 billion that advances social change for a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world. Heintz, who began his professional life in public service for the state of Connecticut, has devoted his career to strengthening democratic culture and institutions to better serve citizens. Based in Prague with the EastWest Institute for most of the 1990s, he worked to help strengthen the nascent democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Before joining the RBF in 2001, he co-founded and served as president of Demos, a public policy organization that works to reduce political and economic inequality and to broaden citizen engagement in American democracy. At the RBF, he launched a program on Democratic Practice which provides grants to civil society organizations in the U.S. and internationally to support work to improve the quality of democratic systems. In 2018, he was named by the Academy of Arts and Sciences as one of three co-chairs of a national Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship in the 21st Century and co-authored the commission’s report, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. On the international stage, Mr. Heintz served as executive vice president and chief operating officer for the EastWest Institute during the 1990s. He serves on the boards of the Quincy Institute, the David Rockefeller Fund, and the Rockefeller Archive Center. He is the recipient of the Council on Foundations 2018 Distinguished Service Award.
