Among many other public-policy causes, the Open Society Foundations funded by financial speculator George Soros have been leading donors to gay rights. Their Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex program Read more…
Twenty-three years after the Tides Foundation invented the funding collective for public-policy causes (see 1976 entry), liberty-minded donors created a counterpart organization. Called DonorsTrust, it helps philanthropists create donor-advised funds Read more…
Unhappy at the prospect of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, software entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd set up an online petition that soon grew into a major force for mobilizing liberal Read more…
Investor Theodore Forstmann and Walmart heir John Walton were disappointed by waffling in Congress in the mid-1990s over a school-choice pilot program. There were proposals, enthusiastically backed by local residents, Read more…
In 1982, social scientists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson published an article arguing that speedy public reaction to petty disorders like a broken window could head off more serious Read more…
When Arizona and California became the first states to approve the “medical” use of marijuana in 1996, it was currency speculator George Soros who, as the New York Times put Read more…
In the decade between 1994 and 2004, philanthropists proclaiming the importance of “taking the money out of politics” spent more than $140 million on politics. Eight liberal foundations supplied 88 Read more…
In 1994, Tim Gill, founder of the software company Quark, set up his Gill Foundation with a fierce focus on changing public policies and officeholders to advance gay rights. A Read more…
Houston real-estate developer Dick Weekley worried that runaway litigation costs in trial-lawyer-friendly Texas were imperiling the state’s business environment. So in 1994 he and several allies founded a nonprofit called Read more…
Shortly after Bill Clinton’s election, Republican operative Bill Kristol raised $1.3 million from conservative foundations and New York donors to fund a nonprofit activist organization to resist nationalized health care. Read more…
Three large foundations—Rockefeller, MacArthur, and the Pew Charitable Trusts—pledged a combined $20 million in 1991 to found a new organization devoted to political-campaign-style efforts to change U.S. energy policy: reducing Read more…
Charitable donations aimed at influencing policy can occasionally lead to disaster, particularly if they are entangled with taxpayer money. That’s the lesson of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so-called government-sponsored Read more…
In 1991, former Reagan administration lawyer Chip Mellor approached philanthropist Charles Koch with an idea for a “national law firm on liberty” that he would co-found with litigator Clint Bolick. Read more…
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation began a long-term public crusade against tobacco use in 1991. Moving far beyond traditional medical efforts and using all the levers of public-policy advocacy, the Read more…
The biographer of billionaire investor and donor Warren Buffett describes him as having “a Malthusian dread” of population growth among the poor. In 1964 he set up an Omaha foundation Read more…
In the 1970s, the conventional wisdom in international aid organizations was that the biggest hurdles to the economic development of poor nations were external factors like the legacy of colonialism Read more…
During the 1980s, scholars such as Thomas Sowell developed intellectual arguments against the racial preferences advocated by the civil-rights establishment. By the end of the decade, conservative foundations were ready Read more…
When Michigan auto-parts executive Edgar Prince visited Christian radio personality James Dobson in Colorado in 1988, he learned that Dobson was trying to raise $1 million to jumpstart the Family Read more…
In 1988, the Pew Charitable Trusts, whose resources derive from Sun Oil, offered a $120,000 gift to the University of California at Santa Barbara to study “the impact of climate Read more…
One of the first major initiatives of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation was to bring school choice to its home city of Milwaukee. In so doing, it both revolutionized Read more…