Neva Rockefeller Goodwin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neva Rockefeller Goodwin (born 1944) is the third child of David Rockefeller, grandson of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller. She is a philanthropist and environmentalist and a fourth-generation member (known as "the Cousins") of the prominent Rockefeller family. Her siblings are Abby, Richard, Peggy Dulany, Eileen Rockefeller Growald, and David Rockefeller, Jr.

She graduated from Concord Academy and went on to Radcliffe, which changed its name to Harvard College during her undergraduate years there. She received a bachelor's degree in English Literature in 1966, graduating Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Goodwin subsequently attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, earning her masters in Public Administration in 1982. In 1987, she earned a Ph.D in Economics from Boston University, specializing in the connections between poverty and environmental degradation.

She became acquainted early on with R. Buckminster Fuller and was intrigued by his technologies to maximise the use of the world's energy resources. She later developed a great interest in gardening and became manager of her grandmother's project, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden, on Mt. Desert Island, in Maine.

Since 1993, Goodwin has been co-director of the Global Development And Environment Institute (GDAE), a research institute at Tufts University, where she is active in a variety of attempts to systematize and institutionalize an economic theory, "contextual economics," that will have more relevance to real world concerns than does the dominant economic paradigm. She is the lead author of an introductory microeconomics textbook, Microeconomics in Context, which has been translated into Russian and Vietnamese and was published in those countries in 2002 (the US edition of this text was published by Houghton Mifflin, and will be followed by Macroeconomics in Context).[1]

Goodwin is the editor of two six-volume series: "Evolving Values for a Capitalist World" (Michigan Press) and “Frontier Issues in Economic Thought” (Island Press). The latter series is now the core of a 'social science library' CD called "Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being." A compilation of about 4,000 articles, covering seven social science disciplines, this will be sent to all of the university libraries in nearly 150 developing countries in 2007.

She has a close connection to her family's major philanthropic institutions, as vice chair of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and a trustee of Rockefeller University. She is a trustee of Winrock International, a non-profit organization that specializes in sustainable development for rural communities, having inherited activities and interests from her uncles John 3rd and Winthrop, as well as from the Rockefeller Foundation. As a board member of Ceres, she is also involved with efforts to motivate business to recognize social and ecological health as significant, long-term corporate goals.

She married a Harvard professor in 1966 and has two children, David Kaiser (1969) (her father's first grandson), and Miranda Duncan (1971), who was a senior investigator for the UN Iraq Oil-for-Food Probe, before resigning in April, 2005. She is now married to the historian, Bruce Mazlish.

[edit] Further reading

Rockefeller, David. Memoirs. New York: Random House, 2002.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

An Entrepreneurial Spirit: Three Centuries of Rockefeller Family Philanthropy This 2005 pdf document contains a history and philosophy of Rockefeller philanthropy, produced by the family-created Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA), set up by Neva Rockefeller Goodwin and other fourth-generation members in 2002.
Tufts University: Global Development and Environment Institute {GDAE}.
Undue Influence website: A listing of the trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and positions held.