Advocating for Generational Fairness in Fiscal Policy
Pete Peterson became a billionaire as co-founder of the Blackstone investment firm, but he was the son of poor Greek immigrants and never lost his distaste for profligacy and waste. Read more…
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Cause-oriented Journalism
Take one scoop of donors looking for new ways to affect public opinion and government policy, mix with three scoops of mainstream journalism bleeding red ink in the face of Read more…
Designed to Win Climate-policy Fights
“Left unattended, human-induced climate change could overshadow all our other efforts to cure diseases, reduce poverty, prevent warfare and preserve biodiversity. Global, collective action is paramount…. How can philanthropists turn Read more…
ED in ’08
A year and a half before the Presidential election, the foundations of Bill Gates and Eli Broad—which together had already given more than $2 billion to various education-reform causes—announced a Read more…
Nudging States Left
A year after a group of liberal donors set up the Democracy Alliance, the same forces joined together to establish the Committee on States in 2006. Just as the Democracy Read more…
Intelligence Squared Debates
Robert Rosenkranz made a fortune in insurance and investing, and when he began to give money away his first interest was in efforts to improve public policy and governance. He Read more…
Stryker Roils Michigan Politics
Jon Stryker, the billionaire heir to the Stryker medical-instruments fortune, set up the Arcus Foundation in 2000. It almost immediately became a national force for lawmaking and electioneering on behalf Read more…
Democracy Alliance
Rob Stein had worked for the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton-Gore campaign and administration, and a private-equity firm. Then he set out on a new task: to convince wealthy liberal Read more…
Skoll Pioneers “Filmanthropy”
Movies with a political message are hardly a new phenomenon, but never before has a donor made social change via film the main focus of his philanthropic investing. In 2004, Read more…
Progressives Go to War Against Bush
Early in the war on terror, elected Democrats mostly avoided harsh criticism of the commander in chief. But liberal donors George Soros and Peter Lewis were vehemently opposed to President Read more…
Remaking the Think Tank Into Political War Room
As they prepared for the 2004 presidential election and beyond, a small group of liberal donors led by bankers Herb and Marion Sandler concluded that the Left needed a new Read more…
Ben Franklin Advances Learning
In 1743, Benjamin Franklin brought into being an idea originally hatched by his friend John Bartram, one of the colonies’ most distinguished naturalists. Their joint vision was a “society to Read more…
Improving the Almshouse
In 1766, a group of Quaker merchants formed the Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor and won a charter to take over operation of Philadelphia’s miserable almshouse from Read more…
Franklin’s Network for Good
In 1727, just 21 years old and cut off from his own family, Ben Franklin began his first experiment in voluntary association, thereby helping deepen America’s most distinctive characteristic. He Read more…
The Continent’s First Ethnic Charity
When 28 “Scottish men” signed the “Laws, Rules, and Order of the Poor Boxes Society” in Boston on January 6, 1657, they formed one of America’s first charities, and one Read more…
Private Donations to Settle Freed Slaves
At the end of the Civil War, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to resettle former slaves on empty plots, and otherwise help African Americans uprooted Read more…
Scouting Improves Boys and Girls
Founded in 1910 as part of an international movement, the Boy Scouts of America enrolled 2.4 million youth members in 2014, reached another 422,000 children receiving character education from the Read more…
Mormon Welfare System
In the teeth of the Great Depression, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—created what has become America’s broadest private system of economic aid to persons Read more…
Rescuing Refugees
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitic riots in Russia and Eastern Europe killed many Jews, and caused hundreds of thousands of Jewish families to leave or be Read more…
Scholarships for Engineers
The School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the top-rated institutions of its kind, was strengthened further in 2014 by a gift from an alum Read more…