A mother and her daughter in Keur Alpha, Senegal read a coloring book created by Tostan, a grantee of our Global Development and Population Program. (Photo Credit: Jonathan Torgovnik/ Reportage by Getty Images, licensed under CC BY NC 4.0) Policy matters. If I had to name the one assumption on which most of our grantmaking hangs—at …
State-of-the-art “Like” Button, Circa 1952. (Photo Credit: Flickr User Mpls55408, licensed under CC BY NC 2.0) Spoiler alert: The campaigns of the future are not going to look like the campaigns of the past. Just as the introduction of television changed the door-to-door game decades ago, so too is the rise of the Internet and the ad-targeting available through …
At Research to Action, a short followup from Ruth Levine, director of our Global Development and Population Program, on the presentation she made at the recent Think Tank Exchange conference in Istanbul: There are many ways to think about ethical practices in think tanks, but whether the thoughts turn into actions depends on whether the organization has …
Behold the IMF: an organization that has become a champion of women’s economic empowerment in a big way. The International Monetary Fund, that citadel of macroeconomic orthodoxy, has stated loudly and clearly that countries’ long-term prosperity depends on making more room in the labor force for women. In a speech last September in Japan, IMF …
The American Enterprise institute hosted a terrific conference earlier this week, in partnership with the Center for American Progress, to unveil a jointly issued report and interactive data base entitled States of Change: Demographics and Democracy. You can find these resources on AEI’s website and CAP’s website. Over the past year, the first of a planned three-year effort, the States …
Even before voter turnout hit a 70-year low in 2014, many of us in the democracy reform field were in conversation about whether and how we might improve voter turnout, and civic engagement writ large. This, in part, is why the Hewlett Foundation recently announced that we will be partnering with Knight Foundation, the Democracy …
Think tanks have tremendous potential to strengthen economic and social policy around the world, using data and analysis to answer questions about how to grow economies, share prosperity, and protect the environment. It is within think tanks that skilled analysts pull apart the most pressing policy problems, examine the impacts of policies, and translate the …
If you’ve ever been the parent of a 16 year old who was eager to get a driver’s license and the keys to your car, you may or may not think this is a good idea: Lowering the voting age to 16. That might sound far-etched, but it’s already happened in two small cities in …
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Cyber Initiative Program Officer Eli Sugarman makes the case that hackers—the white hat wearing kind—are critical to U.S. cybersecurity: During his State of the Union address last month, President Obama singled out hackers as one of America’s principal cyber enemies and called for stiffer criminal penalties against them. Fans of this tough rhetoric should beware: …
Dick Meyer, writing for DecodeDC: What are the core values of the U.S. Constitution? “We, the people,” the poetic expression of the idea of democratic self-government, is surely at the head of the list. Most of us would probably add the values guarded by the addendum to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights: free speech, freedom …