VALUES, VISION, AND IDEAS

An Agenda for Expanding Progressive

Think Tanks and Scholarship

December 2010

Introduction
While the mid-term election results may have been pre-ordained by a sour economy, events
of the past 18 months have underscored the vitality of conservatism. Within President
Obama’s first nine months in office, the right had seized the initiative in the meta-debates over
government, taxes, and the meaning of freedom. Since then, it has strengthened its hold on a
large swath of the electorate.

Progressives have scored some major legislative victories, but have lost the meta-debates. We
have failed to win public trust with a strong narrative about how to fix the economy or why an
expanded role for government in healthcare, finance, and other sectors is so important. Part
of the problem has been the failure of President Obama and other elected leaders to put forth
progressive ideas with enough boldness and force. But it’s also true that progressives have long
struggled to articulate a core set of unified values, boil those values down into a clear vision,
and advance big new policy ideas that push out the boundaries of public debate.

The 2010 election results show the urgent need for progressives to do much better in the
contest over values, vision, and ideas. While many actors in the progressive world have an
important role to play, this memo focuses on the need to expand think tanks and scholarship
– and to do so in a way that is connected to community leaders, amplifies the voice of social
movements, and effectively shares power among progressive leaders ranging from organizers
to scholars.

We believe that investing in intellectual work is one of the most strategic and cost-effective
ways for funders to change the direction of American politics. Such investments could help
achieve a wide range of important goals, including: reviving faith in government, generating a
new agenda for shared economic prosperity, building public consensus for policies to promote
environment sustainability, recapturing the core American value of freedom from the right, and
much more.

Make no mistake: We can win the big debates over America’s future. But it’s going to require
new resources and a smart, long-term strategy.
Background: The Rise of the Conservative Intellectual Sector
Conservatives have succeeded over the past three decades for a number of reasons, including
the vitality of their grassroots activism – of which the Tea Party is just the latest manifestation
– and the creation of new media outlets with deep-pocketed corporate backers. But equally
important have been the investments in ideas by conservative funders that began in the 1970s.
These investments – in think tanks, journals, books, legal networks, and academic centers –
have focused heavily on making the case for core conservative ideas, such as the notion that
limited government and free markets are the best way to advance personal liberty.

Conservative intellectual work has operated in concert with movement building on the ground.
The right-wing echo chamber of books and op-eds, of periodicals and pundits, has helped
created a hospitable climate for conservative grassroots organizing and party-building efforts.
In turn, the right’s intellectual infrastructure plays a key role in translating the broad demands
of its social movements into specific policy ideas that can be enacted at the national and state
level. Most recently for example, Cato and Heritage have been working with Tea Party leaders
on new blueprints for tax and spending cuts. The net result has been to help to move once-
radical ideas into the mainstream and push the center of gravity in the policy arena to the right.

The achievements of the conservative intellectual sector stand as a remarkable case study in
high-impact philanthropy. They include helping to eliminate the federal welfare entitlement;
moving privatization of Social Security and Medicare into the political mainstream; popularizing
private school vouchers;; sowing public doubts about the realities of climate change; and
building a far-right body of jurisprudence on a range of issues.

The rise of the conservative intellectual sector was engineered by a handful of small and mid-
sized foundations – led by the Sarah Scaife, Bradley, Olin, Shelby Collum Davis, and DeVos
Foundations. These funders saw think tanks and related investments as offering the most
strategic and cost-effective leverage point for changing the broad direction of American life.
They also understood the need for taking the long view, providing funds in the form of general
operating support, being patient in terms of seeing impact, and coordinating their funding
strategies (often through interactions at the Philanthropy Roundtable). Many have been
funding the same groups for decades now.

The conservative intellectual sector continues to expand and the right-wing funding
community, energized by the Obama presidency, has rededicated itself to making long-term
investments in this sector. For example, as recently reported in the New York Times, the
Koch brothers – long-time funders of Cato, Reason, and other libertarian institutes – are now
convening annual retreats aimed at drawing other wealthy donors to their conservative policy/
intellectual work.

Only the right-wing think tank sector operates on the scale needed to shape policy
debates – not just through generating ideas, but through legislative outreach and full-bore
communications efforts to shape elite and public opinion. (See Table 1.)

Table 1. Annual Budgets (in millions) of Leading Multi-Issue Think Tanks

Conservative Progressive

Heritage Foundation $69 Center for American Progress $26

Hoover Institution $34 Center for Budget and Policy Priorities $19

American Enterprise Institute $30 Brennan Center for Justice $7

Cato Institute $22 Economic Policy Institute $6.5

Manhattan Institute $11 Demos $5

TOTAL $166 TOTAL $63.5

To be sure, spending on multi-issue think tanks doesn’t convey all the resources going into
public policy battles. There are a number of large single-issue progressive groups, such as
Natural Resources Defense Council, Human Rights Watch, and Human Rights Campaign.
Likewise on the conservative side of the spectrum there are key groups like FreedomWorks and
the National Rifle Association. Of course, also, corporations and business groups devote huge
resource to lobbying. (The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $144 million on lobbying in 2009
alone.)

Even as conservative ideas have changed the landscape of American politics since the late
1970s, the progressive funding community has failed to invest at a sufficient scale in intellectual
work that defends and promotes its core values in public debates. To be sure, funders have
been focused on other important priorities, and nothing said here is meant to detract from the
impressive array of accomplishments of progressive philanthropy over the past few decades.
Indeed, in some crucial issue areas such as the struggle for LGBT rights, recent years have seen
big gains.

But as the past 18 months has shown, progressives are ill-equipped to prevail in meta-level
debates over the economy, the role of government, and the meaning of freedom. When we
lose these debates, we also lose elections and power, making it is hard to win in any of the
other areas that progressives care about – from social rights to the environment to foreign
policy.

What Needs to be Done: A Strategy for Progressive Ideas

Progressives must mobilize new resources to compete effectively in the war of ideas and win
the meta-debates about America’s future. We need a much greater capacity to promote our
core values, generate new policy solutions, and defend existing programs. A push to expand
the progressive intellectual infrastructure must work in tandem with stronger organizing on the
ground, new initiatives to create alternative media, and other activities.

Our goal should not be to mimic the conservative think tank strategy, which is unapologetically
elite-centered. The progressive intellectual infrastructure must ensure an open flow of ideas
upward from the grassroots and help amplify the voice of social movements in policy debates.
As well, this infrastructure must be staffed and led in ways that are attentive to issues of class,
race, and power. We must also find ways to integrate this infrastructure with the intense
energies of the “netroots” and to fuse traditional approaches to idea generation with newer
open source approaches related to crowd sourcing and social media.

The progressive movement has shown enormous vitality in recent years and we are optimistic
about the potential to build a stronger intellectual and policy infrastructure. The remainder
of this memo sketches out a long-term agenda for how to do this. We first outline four broad
strategies and then delineate eight specific funding suggestions.

Support Public Intellectuals

New investments are needed in public intellectuals, and new efforts are needed to develop and
articulate a progressive political philosophy.

Investing in public intellectuals is crucial for any political movement. Public intellectuals help
to refine and crystallize values, translate values into policies, and synthesize disparate ideas
into a larger story. Public intellectuals also play a key role in the day-to-day battles over politics
as architects of policy change and fluid spokespeople for ideologies. On the right, public
intellectuals like Charles Murray and Marvin Olasky have helped to redirect whole areas of
public policy, while others like William Kristol have been synthetic thinkers who shape and
articulate conservative political philosophy.

While it is hard to deny that public intellectuals play an important role in influencing national
debates, only conservative funders invest heavily in scholars and writers as part of a larger
strategy of building a political movement. Think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute,
the Hoover Institution, and the Manhattan Institute offer generous salaries and job security
to scholars who are working full time to shape the public debate. The Manhattan Institute has
invested especially heavily in books, and Losing Ground and Fixing Broken Windows are among
the influential titles it has supported. As MI states: “The most successful of our books have
opened new intellectual frontiers and given impetus to whole movements for political and
social reform.” The right’s heavy investment in public intellectuals is a big reason it has been so
adept at clearly articulating its core values and a clear vision in the public square.

Meanwhile, progressives have struggled to crystallize our values and put forth a vision in part
because we lack a complex of people and institutions with that mandate. There are few secure
jobs in the progressive community for public intellectuals. Progressive think tanks generally
do not cover the costs of supporting public intellectuals to work full-time developing and
promoting ideas. (Although such people find some support at places like Brookings, the New
America Foundation, Demos, etc.) While progressive academics and journalists write plenty of
books and op-eds, these efforts to usually come on top of the other things they do for a living.
A few lucky progressive journalists can break out and support themselves as a full-time writer.
Likewise, a handful of star liberal academics do gear their work largely toward public debates –
Jacob Hacker, who developed the “public option” is an example – but most academics are too
busy with specialized research to have time for op-eds or popular books that may actually hurt
their careers.

Funding to support progressive public intellectuals, especially at the senior level, is virtually
non-existent. In particular, few liberal foundations are willing to provide ongoing general
support to public intellectuals, typically saying that their work falls outside “program
guidelines.”

New progressive investments should be made with an expansive view of who is a public
intellectual. While we can and should draw from the ranks of progressive academics and policy
scholars, we can also develop a stronger field by also looking to include community leaders
and grassroots activists engaged in big thinking or promoting specific new ideas – for example,
someone like Van Jones, a long-time community activist and author of The Green Color
Economy. And priority should be given to investing in public intellectuals who are addressing
the biggest weaknesses in progressive ideology, particularly in the area of economics.

Invest in Long-Range Policy Work

New efforts are needed to develop alternative public policy solutions to the nation’s problems
and to connect policy work to a larger political philosophy.

The Tea Party so easily seized the upper hand in the national debate in part because the Obama
Administration and Congressional Democrats failed to put forth a compelling policy agenda -
- particularly on the economy. In turn, that failure had much to do with the weak progressive
intellectual infrastructure. New paradigms of governance and policy cannot be generated by a
president and a few aides on the fly; they are the products of political movements and emerge
from extended internal debates. Think tanks play a key role here, but the policy institutes on
the left have often been stretched to the breaking point in the past decade just playing defense
and typically have not had the capacity to prepare for future moments of opportunity.

Many groups perform heroically in generating a non-stop supply of expert analysis of issues
that are on the agenda today. But less energy is devoted to longer-term work that develops
new ideas and alternative policy frameworks and messaging to shape the policy debates of
tomorrow. For example, the progressive think tank community did not have a bold and detailed
agenda for financial reform to hand to elected officials in the aftermath of the crash. Nor did
this community offer up big plans for job creation as the nation cratered into an unemployment
crisis.

In contrast, the right’s think tanks have long been able to devote some share of their enormous
resources to over-the-horizon policy work that prepares for future moments of opportunity.
Looking back, the most significant early example dates to 1980 when the Heritage Foundation
presented President Reagan with the Mandate for Leadership, a 1,100 page plan that became
the playbook for Reagan’s first term in office. More recently we can look at the success of Cato
and Heritage, who began working on Social Security privatization a quarter century before
President George W. Bush pushed this policy after winning a second term. Think tanks don’t
just provide blueprints for big policy changes, they also can work over decades to legitimize
radical ideas with elites and the general public, and to expand the parameters of public
debates. They also undertake the all-important work of unifying an ideological community
behind specific approaches so as to minimize internecine squabbling when big moments of
opportunity arise (as happened with progressives in the recent healthcare debate.) But today, it
is hard to think of many examples where think tanks on the left are strategically trying to move
a big bold idea from the margins to the mainstream.

A final weakness of the liberal policy infrastructure has been widely noted: the fragmentation
of work along issue lines. Many progressive groups focus on a narrow band of issues, while
the leading conservative think tanks engage the entire range of policy questions, domestic and
foreign, facing the U.S. government. Conservative funders have invested heavily in the capacity
for policy-based story telling – connecting the dots – while progressive funders have not.

Progressive work on regulatory issues illustrates the perils here. Battles to protect the
environment or regulate food companies, for example, are often led by single-issue advocacy
organizations that are ill-equipped to tell a larger story about the need to counterbalance
industry and empower government to protect the public interest. Meanwhile, much
conservative work on regulation is undertaken by large multi-issue think tanks that operate
with an overarching political philosophy. Specific policy issues are informed by a broad faith in
markets and a harsh critique of government. Issue campaigns are used to broadcast the larger
conservative message, and even small incidents and minor skirmishes are turned into larger
moral stories.

New investments in long-range policy work should go hand-in-hand with creative thinking
about how to do such work. Many new ideas originate at the community level and simply need
to be elevated into the national conversation. Meanwhile, the open source movement and
social media, reflecting a new understanding of the “wisdom of crowds,” are changing how
ideas are generated and refined. Among other things, these approaches can push ideas upward
from the grass- and netroots and enable a more diverse array of voices to shape policy thinking.

Fund Normative Scholarship

New investments are needed in scholarship aimed at strengthening the intellectual foundations
of progressive thought and at bolstering the universities as sources of progressive ideas.

Despite the conventional wisdom that liberals dominate the university, the truth is that
conservative funders and scholars exercise growing influence in academia. This trend
matters because advanced academic scholarship can play a critical role in setting the terms
of ideological debate. Such influence often unfolds over a period of many years, as big ideas
or critiques developed by scholars percolate into public discourse, and as graduate students
trained in particular schools of thought take up positions of intellectual leadership. It can
also happen more quickly, when a president turns to an academic to shape policy or when an
important scholarly book becomes a bestseller.
Over the past two decades, conservative funders have made a concerted push to transform
various academic disciplines and nurture new schools of thought. This strategic effort has
included endowed chairs in economics, political science, law, business, and other disciplines.
It has included money for academic centers, journals, and conferences. It has included
scholarships for graduate students and fellowships for visiting scholars to spend time at
conservative think tanks. And it has secured critical opportunities for reflection for public
officials taking a break from government service.

The conservative takeover of the economics field has been by far the most significant victory in
the right-wing campaign to influence academic life. The National Bureau of Economic Research,
long led by conservative economist Martin Feldstein, plays an instrumental role in shaping the
priorities and climate of economics research in the academic world. Conservative economists
now occupy top slots in many of the leading academic departments. Likewise, conservative
funders have had substantial success at penetrating the realm of advanced legal scholarship,
and building up conservative legal thinking within the academy – a talent pool, in turn, which
advances right-wing efforts to take over the judiciary and to transform tax and regulatory
policy. The Federalist Society, with a $9 million annual budget, has played an important role
here.

Liberal foundations probably give more money to scholars than do conservative funders.
But this money has less impact because it is not strategic or ideologically focused. Liberal
and mainstream foundations tend to be committed to objective social science, reflecting a
longstanding faith that facts and truthful information eventually will prevail in shaping the
decisions of a rational and modern society. If only that were so. Support for unbiased scholarly
work will always be an important priority for any advanced civilization. However, those
funders who are interested in advancing progressive values need to bring more focus to their
investments in universities and develop a new set of priorities that emphasize scholarship that
is shaped by normative assumptions.

Nurture Young Thinkers and Promote Diversity

New investments and special attention are needed to train future generations of public
intellectuals, policy analysts, and normative scholars. Ensuring racial and gender diversity in
these ranks should be a priority.

Efforts to scale up the progressive intellectual infrastructure will not succeed without talented
people who are dedicated to such work. But it is not easy for a young person to develop a
career as a progressive intellectual. The career track seems mystifying and filled with risk,
not to mention meager financial returns. Many progressive-minded young people who might
be attracted to this life instead make more pragmatic choices: they get a masters degree in
public policy, but then opt for the security of a major consulting firm; they get a PhD in political
science, and then decide that the academic job market is the only path open to them; they
become a professional journalist, but never write books to advance their values because there’s
no money in such quixotic work. Or they work as activists and organizers but never get the
encouragement to translate the experiences they gain in the field to policy work.

Given this situation, it is no surprise that progressive think tanks often find it hard to hire good
people. Most academics will not consider leaving the university for a think tank and, in any
case, usually do not have the skills needed to be effective in a think tank environment – such as
being able to write well for a broad audience. Graduates of public policy schools are far more
plentiful, but most lack scholarly training and ideological sophistication as the majority of these
programs focus on applied skills rather than on theory and analysis. Progressive journalists are
common, but most do not have training in research methods nor the ability to leverage their
reporting into detailed policy prescriptions.

Conservative think tanks draw on a much larger reservoir of talent. Thanks to far-sighted
conservative funders, there is a clear and more secure career track for young people who wish
to work in this field. Well-funded internships introduce these young people to think tank work
in college. (The Heritage Foundation has a whole building for its interns, with 27 apartment
units.) Right-wing campus journals and newspapers train them in argumentative writing early
on, with extensive support from the Collegiate Network, The Leadership Institute, and other
conservative campus writing efforts. Conservative graduate fellowships fund PhDs oriented
toward the cause. And, most importantly, well-funded conservative think tanks provide a life-
long career trajectory – starting with entry-level jobs and ending with secure senior fellowships.

The progressive world needs to create better opportunities for young people interested in
ideas, as well as greater job security for intellectuals who might forsake academic life for a
think tank job. It is also critical for progressives to strive for more diversity within the spheres
of policy and scholarship. Currently, progressive institutions in these areas are overwhelmingly
white and disproportionately male. This lack of diversity tends to reflect the very homogenous
composition of young people who choose to pursue careers writing and researching. It can also
be self-perpetuating. New efforts and investments are needed to attract women and people of
color into these fields, starting early on in college and continuing through graduate school, in
order to engage the diversity of experiences and backgrounds that define today’s struggle for
social change.
Funding Priorities
Recent history shows that funding think tanks is a cost-effective way to leverage resources and
shift the terms of policy debates. But this strategy requires a long-term time frame and funders
must understand that it will often be hard to see near-term impact. While the resources
required to field a first-class progressive intellectual infrastructure are substantial, they are
well within the means of the progressive funding community. Several progressive single-issue
organizations – such as the ACLU and NRDC – have budgets larger than the Heritage Foundation
and liberal 527 organizations raised over $200 million in the 2010 election cycle. Below are ten
priorities for expanding and strengthening the progressive intellectual infrastructure.

1. Expand National Think Tanks. A top priority of progressive funders should be to bring to
scale several multi-issue national think tanks. Such organizations should have the resources
to tell a comprehensive, cohesive and values-based story about how to improve American life
and work on the full range of issues before the U.S. government. These organizations must
not just engage in today’s policy battles, but work over-the-horizon and prepare to move big
new ideas in future moments of opportunity. The ability to really drive conversations requires
that an organization field a large capacity for applied policy work, support a strong cadre of
public intellectuals, and have a robust platform for communications, government relations, and
interaction with grassroots activists. Over the past two decades, the right has brought to scale
four or five national think tanks, as shown in Table 1. Progressive funders have only brought to
scale one truly multi-issue national think tank – the Center for American Progress. Sustaining
and further building CAP is critically important, but funders should also help to build two or
three other national think tanks to ensure a diversity of ideas, priorities, and approaches.

2. Build State and Regional Think Tanks. At the same time that a set of national think tanks
are brought to scale, a parallel effort is needed at the state and regional level. In their role
as laboratories of democracy, states are places to showcase new ideas, tackle problems that
national leaders can’t or won’t solve, and train future national leaders. (Witness the steps
that California and other states have taken on climate change.) Over the past two decades,
progressives have made impressive strides in developing new policy organizations in the states
– most notably, the network of 30 policy groups that are part of the State Fiscal Policy Initiative.
However, all this work has failed to build adequate capacity. Conservative state think tanks
are much better funded, cover more issues, project a more coherent political philosophy,
and are more savvy about communicating to a wide audience. To compete, progressives
need to build much stronger policy organizations focused on state issues. Like their national
counterparts, these think tanks should provide support to public intellectuals, invest much
more in communications, and expand the scope of their policy work. Instead of scaling up
numerous think tanks focused on particular states, funders might also consider supporting four
or five large regional think tanks whose work covers a number of states.

3. Support Issue Think Tanks. Some of the most effective progressive think tanks, such as
the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities or the Center for Tax Justice, have made their mark
with a relatively narrow issue focus and cannot be expected to transform themselves into
national think tanks that work in a wider array of areas. Such institutions may also not be
inclined to change their operating approach to give increased attention to communicating to
wider audiences or to supporting public intellectuals. However, these vital organizations should
be expanded as needed, receive additional support to collaborate with multi-issue state and
national players, and their funding stream should be stabilized for the long-term, either through
ongoing unrestricted or endowment support.

4. Fund Endowed Chairs, Academics Centers, and Graduate Fellowships. Funders must
also move aggressively to win the war of ideas within academic disciplines. Three interlocking
funding strategies seem clear: First, to fund endowed professorships reserved for leading
scholars committed to advancing progressive values in their work. Such chairs are important
in that they provide scholars with greater freedom and resources. Second, funders should
invest in academic centers focused on issues important to progressives – e.g., economics
and social inequality, race and sexuality, environmental sustainability, health care access,
etc. With adequate resources, such centers can influence academic disciplines, public policy,
and university life by undertaking large-scale empirical studies, sponsoring conferences and
lecture series, providing paid fellowships to scholars to free them from teaching burdens, and
offering valuable scholarly and professional experiences for progressive students. Third, funders
should support generous multi-year fellowships for graduate students whose work reflects
progressive values and who have a desire to engage in public debates. These fellowships will be
an important feeder to national and regional think tanks.

5. Support Policy Journals and Conferences. New investments are needed to create much
stronger intellectual community in the progressive world. While much of this community will
arise naturally once stronger think tanks and new academic centers are in place, there is also
the need to fund specific elements of such community. Funders should greatly increase support
of publications like The American Prospect, Democracy, and other venues for internal discussion
and idea development. Another important step is to fund regular annual convenings devoted to
progressive scholarship and ideas, from conferences to extended retreat-style discussions. Such
a convenings would bring together academics, think tank fellows, policy journalists, leading
advocates and activists, progressive political leaders, and others for intensive discussions.
Movements need to invest real time and energy in hashing out and clarifying values, debating
their vision, and working out the kinks of their core ideas. This work doesn’t come cheap, but it
is money well spent.

6. Support Campus Media and Youth Training. New think tanks and academic investments
will do much of the job of nurturing future generations of thinkers. However, more targeted
efforts to orient young people toward intellectual engagement are also advisable. Progressive
funders should emulate the conservative investment in campus magazines and newspapers,
which provide a critical training ground to teach college students how to think, argue, and
write. Additionally, targeted funding to build compelling online forums could push the
progressive campus communications out in front of their conservative counterparts by taking
advantage of new modes of conversation and debate. Campus Progress, run by CAP, is doing
much good work in this area, but more remains to be done. Funders must also invest heavily in
intellectual leadership training. Before it was cancelled in 2005 for a lack of funds, the Century
Institute, sponsored by the Century Foundation, had success in annually bringing together
young people for a week of seminars and training in policy ideas. It is a good model to expand
upon.

7. Incentivize Mergers. The progressive think tank world is too fragmented and would
benefit from organizational consolidation that reduces the duplication of administrative,
communications, and fundraising functions. This can be very difficult, but funders can help
make such mergers happen and create new organizations of greater scale, through financial
incentives.

8. Coordinate Activities. The activities of an expanded progressive intellectual infrastructure

should be coordinated to allow organizational leaders, key academics, and funders to engage
in regular deliberations over both the substance and strategy of their work – not to mention to
provide mutual support.

9. Invest in Leadership Training and Evaluation. Strong leadership is needed to ensure that a
new intellectual infrastructure operates effectively and reaches its maximum potential. These
abilities should be nurtured through management training, executive coaching, assistance
with strategic planning, and communications branding. Management and thought leadership
tools that are widely used in the private sector must be imported into the think tank sector.
This will be expensive, but the benefits for the long-term success of our movement cannot
be underestimated. As well, efforts should be made to utilize cutting edge approaches to
evaluation. While success in the ideas sphere is often hard to measure year to year, there are
still ways to measure and evaluate progress using various kinds of metrics. All the institutions
funded should be expected to develop strategic plans and undergo regular internal and external
processes of evaluation.
10. Movement Collaboration. While the right’s approach to the war on ideas has been
distinctly elite-driven, a fundamental value and strength of progressives is grassroots
leadership. Investments are needed to connect movement leaders with leading scholars to
deepen and refine their policy analysis, to offer opportunities for these movement leaders to
take the time for reflection and writing to share their hard-won on the ground learning with
broader audiences, and to develop new strategies to engage local activists and organizers in the
framing of a shared progressive policy agenda.

Conclusion
There is no magic formula for creating social and political change. Many kinds of people and
organizations play a role; all are important. History shows that movements achieve big changes
when they field strong social movements, have talented political leaders, and can put forth new
ideas.

What is special about the think tank sector is its ability to work systematically, and over an
extended time period, to change the underlying frameworks of public policy and shift the terms
of political debate. As well, in an age when the cost of electoral politics has skyrocketed out
of control, think tanks represent a cost-effective leverage point for progressive donors. This
is especially true in the wake of Citizens United, which is bringing new corporate money into
elections.

There are no guarantees in politics, but we believe that the strategy outlined here could help
substantially shift the center of gravity in policy debates and put America on a more hopeful
path for the future.

______________________________________________________________________________

This memo was written by David Callahan and Jason Franklin, with the input of others in the think
tank and funding worlds. David Callahan is a Senior Fellow at Demos, which he co-founded in 2000,
and author of Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America. He is also
author of the 1999 report: $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s. Jason Franklin is
Executive Director of Bolder Giving and a Lecturer on Public Administration at New York University. He
also serves on the boards of the Social Justice Philanthropy Collaborative, North Star Fund, Resource
Generation and advisory board of Wealth for the Common Good. The opinions expressed in this paper
are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of their institutions. Contact:
dcallahan@demos.org; 212.389.1401.