Institute for American Values

Braver Angels is a national nonprofit working to depolarize the U.S. by bringing liberals and conservatives together for workshops; teaching skills for bridging the divide; and challenging the political world to move toward depolarization. This grant for general operating support will support organizational priorities, such as massively scaling online programming during the COVID-19 pandemic and developing the "With Malice Toward None" initiative. On Inauguration Day 2021, Braver Angels plans to be ready to deploy a scaled-up and strongly partnered national network of citizen-leaders working for healthy civic pluralism and less polarized institutions.

To address the current crisis of American public life, the Institute for American Values conducts programmatic work aimed at reducing societal polarization—the process of society separating into mutually antagonistic groups that increasingly do not trust or even know one another. Polarization is a main reason why Americans are angry and frustrated about politics and why U.S. public life today is so dysfunctional. The institute has a program called Better Angels: a bipartisan network of scholars and leaders whose goals are to bring people together from across the divides to rethink currently polarized issues, show why reducing polarization is an important priority, and recommend public policy and institutional reforms that will permit progress and compromise to be substituted for impasse and frustration.