Michael Berkowitz is a Venture Partner in the Sustainability Practice of RIDGE-LANE LP.
Mr. Berkowitz served as President of 100 Resilient Cities at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he built an international organization focused on helping cities build resilience to the physical, social, and economic challenges. 100RC provided cities around the world critical resources within four main pathways: i) financial support for a Chief Resilience Officer, ii) development of a resilience strategy, iii) a platform of solutions and service providers for implement, and iv) a global network of member cities who can learn from and help each other in deployment.
The cities in the 100RC network created 80+ holistic resilience strategies, which have outlined over 4,000 concrete actions and initiatives, resulting in more than 150 collaborations between private sector and public sector to address city challenges, including $230 million of pledged support from platform partners and more than $25 billion leveraged from national, philanthropic, and private sources to implement resilience projects.
Mr. Berkowitz was Global Head of Operational Risk Management at Deutsche Bank, where he oversaw the firm’s capital planning, served as a primary regulatory contact, and coordinated the myriad of related management efforts group-wide. He also served as Chief Operating Officer of Corporate Security, Business Continuity and Operational Risk Management, where he had responsibility for budgeting, operations, and global coordination across the group’s six workstreams.
He served as Deputy Commissioner at the Office of Emergency Management in New York City, where he worked on major planning initiatives, including the New York City Coastal Storm, Biological Terrorism and Transit Strike contingency plans. He led an initiative to create OEM’s Public-Private Emergency Planning Initiative and its Ready New York citizen preparedness campaign. He also responded to incidents including the 1999 outbreak of West Nile Fever, Tropical Storm Floyd, major flooding in Southern Queens (1999), the crashes of SwissAir 111 and American Airlines 587, the 2003 Northeast blackout, as well as the 2001 anthrax incidents and the World Trade Center disaster.
