This grant will support Lawfare, a blog and project of the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program. Lawfare facilitates research and robust analysis of national security issues, and Lawfare experts also use FOIA to uncover information that will help foster objective, public, and transparent discussions around government decision-making. 

To support Movement Law Lab, an innovation hub bringing lawyers together with other change-makers to implement novel and bold solutions for some of America’s toughest justice related problems. 

Common Cause Education Fund (CCEF) is a national organization supporting civic reform in the U.S., working for improvements in both election administration and campaign finance. At the national level, they are a key player in shaping conversations around voting. Leverage their 35 state offices and national membership, they continue to build local coalitions around many of the reforms that the Democracy Fund believes can strengthen our democracy. 

General Operating Support

This grant will provide OpenGov Foundation with additional resources to help Congress modernize its technological infrastructure. Such modernizations hold the promise to improve the legislative capacity of congressional staff and make communications between constituents and member offices more efficient, effective, and satisfying for all parties.

This grant will support the development of an App Market that reviews tech products for use by congressional staff, focusing on key features like whether those tools can handle the required volume and whether they meet security requirements. 

The Asian American Journalists Association builds programming that engages Asian American and Pacific Islander community voices, grows membership, and leads in developing entrepreneurship/enterprise projects in the journalism industry.

Democracy Works and their subdivision of TurboVote explores low-cost ways to increase civic engagement and voting through new civic technology and improving processes and data. Their aim is to make voting easier through use of technology and support for elections administrators and voters.

This grant will support the Defending Digital Democracy Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

This grant to The Constitution Project (TCP), a program within the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), will support POGO/TCP’s work to protect the courts. Through the “Defending Our Courts” campaign, POGO/TCP will develop messaging and build a coalition to restore and strengthen the public’s faith in the judiciary and build an infrastructure to resist any efforts to delegitimize or ignore a court’s decision.  

This grant will support the general operations of FairVote – an organization working to generate more effective governance through voting reforms.

The purpose of this grant is to support training and research on how newsrooms can build trust with their communities through social media, in person engagement and via their web sites and news products. 

General Operating Support

The William J. Brennan Center for Justice is preparing for the possible invocation of emergency authorities and the threat they would pose to democracy and to the constitutional order. This grant will support the Liberty and National Security Program’s Emergency Powers Project. The project involves legal and empirical research, a bipartisan working group of academic experts and former government officials to identify scenarios and interventions, and implementation of intervention strategies.

The MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL) facilitates election data collection and sharing through web-based tools and datasets. The lab will create systems for sharing findings, allowing for the development of a network of scholars in the Election Science field.

Reports filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) are made publicly available but are not searchable or otherwise usable without laborious review. The Center of Responsive Politics’ (CRP) Foreign Lobby Watch Project will extract and convert this data into a useful form, then make it available for the public.

 The Protect Democracy Project is investigating government actions, engaging in public outreach and education, encouraging oversight by existing government mechanisms, and, when appropriate, bringing litigation against government actions that threaten our democracy.

To support collaboration and fundraising services at Coast Alaska which helps build the Alaska media ecosystem. The shared services support will include a matching campaign for noncommercial public broadcasting stations inspired by NewsMatch, and the expansion of technological services to support small noncommercial stations in Alaska.

The purpose of this grant is to support North Carolina’s local news and information ecosystem. The grant will create the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund at the North Carolina Community Foundation to support building a networked news ecosystem that is audience-centered, trusted, collaborative, and resilient.

The purpose of this grant is to support The Center for High Impact Philanthropy (“CHIP”) to develop a toolkit for donors that will help philanthropists understand the various aspects of strengthening our democracy and ways they can support efforts around the United States. CHIP will conduct a field scan, develop specific resources on what is working well, and disseminate the toolkit to various donor networks.