The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has elected Valerie Rockefeller Wayne to chair the RBF Board of Trustees and also elected new trustee Daniel Levy. Ms. Wayne is a middle school special education teacher specializing in adolescents with learning differences and emotional disabilities. She first joined the RBF board in 2003. Wayne succeeds Richard Rockefeller, who had led the Fund since 2006. Mr. Rockefeller will continue to help guide its activities as an advisory trustee. Mr. Levy is the Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations; a Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and formerly Director of its Middle East Taskforce; and a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation.
Valerie Rockefeller Wayne began her teaching career at Central Park East Secondary School in East Harlem, New York, and also taught in Australia. She has an M.Ed. in Special Education from Bank Street College of Education and an M.AT from Columbia University Teachers College. Wayne majored in International Relations at Stanford University and served as a confidential assistant to Secretary Richard Riley at the U.S. Department of Education during the first Clinton administration. She serves as a trustee of D.C. Preparatory Academy and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, and as Vice Chair of the Asian Cultural Council. She formerly was a trustee of Spelman College.
During the Barak Government of 1999–2001, Daniel Levy worked in the Israeli Prime Minister's office as Special Advisor and Head of Jerusalem affairs, following which he worked as Senior Policy Advisor to then-Israeli Minister of Justice Yossi Beilin. Levy was a member of the official Israeli delegation to the Taba negotiations with the Palestinians in January 2001, and previously served on the Israeli negotiating team to the “Oslo B” Agreement from May to September 1995, under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He also served as the lead Israeli drafter of the model peace agreement, the Geneva Initiative. From 2003 to 2004, he worked as an analyst for the International Crisis Group’s Middle East Programme.
Levy received a Bachelor’s and Master’s with honors from King's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded prizes in social and political science. He was the elected Chair of the World Union of Jewish Students and was also Projects Director for the Economic Co-operation Foundation, a policy planning think tank in Tel Aviv.
He is a Senior Policy Advisor to the U.S. Middle East Project chaired by Thomas R. Pickering and is Policy Coordinator for the European Eminent Persons Group (EEPG), co-chaired by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Wolfgang Ischinger and Hubert Védrine. Levy is a member of the Board of Directors of the New Israel Fund and of Molad, the Centre for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy.
Mr. Levy is a founding editor of the Middle East Channel at foreignpolicy.com. He has written for a number of publications and is a regular Middle East commentator on TV and radio, including BBC, CNN, PBS and Al Jazeera.