Frequently Asked Questions

Originally published in April, 2020.
 

Charles:
When my father passed away in 1967, I found a letter he had written to my older brother and me when I was only a few months old. In it, he explained he’d left each of us enough money for our education, but that we could use it for any purpose we wanted.

But, he warned, “If you choose to let this money destroy your initiative and independence, it will be a curse to you. … I should regret very much to have you miss the glorious feeling of accomplishment.”

I have been blessed to experience that glorious feeling of accomplishment, which comes when each of us discover our gifts, develop them, and apply them to help others improve their lives. 

That’s what’s enabled me to accomplish more than I ever dreamed possible. And with the right mindset and support, it’s what can enable every person to live a life of success and meaning, however they define it for themselves — no matter their current situation. 

Take my friend Antong Lucky. In the 1990s, Antong founded the Bloods gang in Dallas and eventually went to prison. While there, another inmate pulled him aside one day and said, “If you can lead these men to do wrong, you can lead them to do right.”

That idea transformed Antong’s life. He’s now a leader at Urban Specialists, where he trains other former gang leaders who are working to turn their lives around. They’re helping young people avoid going down the same path they did.

Antong is using his unique gifts to help others. And that’s true for all of us at Stand Together. As partners, we’re trying to bring about a society where everyone succeeds by helping others. I started working to contribute to that vision in 1963, primarily through my educational efforts. Forty years later in 2003, I saw the opportunity to take those efforts to the next level and founded the organization that became Stand Together.

And I saw that — as one of my closest, longtime allies in these efforts, Art Ciocca, put it — “when we help others realize their potential, we grow and realize ours.” That’s what fires me up and gets me out of bed every morning at 84-years-old. I’ve been doing this since I was in my 20s and I’ll keep doing it until I no longer can.

Learn more about Stand Together’s issue areas.

Originally published in April, 2020.

Brian:
We are incredibly fortunate to work with people all across the country who are committed to helping others improve their lives. And this is really at the core of Stand Together’s effectiveness.

Just to give you a sense of some of the organizations within our philanthropic community and who we work with:

• The Charles Koch Foundation alongside hundreds of people within our philanthropic community support tens of thousands of K-12 teachers in public and private schools, more than 1,000 professors at 300 universities, educators in the skilled trades, and pioneers who are finding new ways to help students discover, develop, and apply their unique potential. 
  Renate Matthews is one of those public-school teachers. She’s part of group called Youth Entrepreneurs that Stand Together has helped grow from three to 29 states since 2016.
• We partner with more than 700 of the country’s most successful business leaders and philanthropists who combined employ more than 2 million people. Together, we support efforts for business to play a greater role in tackling our country’s challenges. 
  As just one example, check out how a business supported by Stand Together partner Trust Ventures is leveraging 3D-printing technology to help address homelessness in Austin, Texas.
• Stand Together Foundation partners with the leaders of over 300 community-based organizations who have developed innovative ways to address the root causes of poverty. We’re now on pace to partner with more than 100 new groups per year, going forward. 
  Check out how we’ve joined with Chad Houser and Café Momentum to show the country a better way to help kids exiting the juvenile justice system (you might have seen where they were featured at the Super Bowl this year).
• Americans for Prosperity is the organization we rely on to improve public policy. It supports grassroots activists in all 50 states and from all walks of life, helping elevate the voices of people who are showing a better way for public policy — one that unites people to help one another rather than divides society along political lines. 
  One of those activists is William Burt. See how Americans for Prosperity helped William to pass public policy that enables people to realize their dreams of running their own businesses.  

Originally published in April, 2020.

Brian:
Stand Together tackles the root causes of our country’s challenges through a comprehensive approach — there’s no single solution or quick fix. 

That’s why we provide financial support and other resources to organizations working to improve education, business, communities, and government — key institutions of society that are essential to helping every person rise. We support hundreds of highly effective organizations, and where they don’t exist, we help create new organizations to address unmet societal needs. 

One thing that makes our efforts unique is that we don’t follow fixed budget formulas. 

Our spending each year is driven by the best opportunities we see to make the greatest difference. We’re always looking for opportunities that will help far more people improve their lives in the short-term, but also transform the way society tackles our biggest challenges to help many more people over the long-term.

How that has shaken out for the past several years is that around 70 percent of the Stand Together community’s total annual spending goes toward efforts to ensure an excellent education for every person along with the work we support in communities to help neighbors beat poverty and addiction. 

Each year, about one-third of the funds from our philanthropic community go to help organizations that support public policy — groups like Americans for Prosperity. That includes efforts to support the election of policymakers who will put people over politics and get good things done once elected, which makes up around 10 percent of the total funds spent. The funding for all of this is contributed by tens of thousands of generous supporters — about 700 of whom provide the bulk of the support. These include some of the country’s most successful business leaders and philanthropists.

Learn more about Stand Together’s issue areas.

Originally published in April, 2020.
 

Charles:
One of our core beliefs is that every person has something to contribute. That means every person — regardless of whether you’re born in America, China, India, Mexico, or anywhere else.

Throughout our country’s history, immigrants have brought new perspectives, new ideas, new innovations, and new ways of doing things. Without their contributions — both to our economy and our culture — we wouldn’t have the kind of progress and prosperity that have made America the most successful country in history.

The fact is, America’s future depends on immigrants as much as immigrants’ futures depend on America. So our country ought to welcome any person who comes here to contribute, as the vast majority of immigrants have and still do today, and it should exclude those who would do harm. It’s critical that we reform our system based on these principles.

We’ve always been a welcoming country as well as a relatively safe country — and we can continue to be both.

Brian:
Based on the headlines, you’d think Americans are hopelessly divided on immigration. One extreme says we need to dramatically reduce legal immigration. The other says we need to abolish law enforcement at the borders. 

Either of those extremes would be a disaster. But despite all of the attention the extremes receive, they only represent a small portion of Americans. 

In reality, the vast majority of people share common ground on immigration. For example, 75 percent of Americans agree immigration is good — a record high. More than 80 percent support permanent legal status for Dreamers — people who were brought to the U.S. as children and have followed our laws and met some really tough standards to qualify for the program. 

That’s not to say fixing our immigration system is simple. And this is about much more than just policy change. That’s why we’re inviting so many people to get engaged. If this is an issue you’re passionate about, I hope you’ll check out one of our newest initiatives: Common Ground: Immigration. There are many ways for you to be involved.

Learn more about Stand Together’s immigration reform efforts.

Originally published in April, 2020.
 

Charles:
Our approach to poverty is grounded in our belief that every person has a gift, and that with the right mindset and support, everyone can contribute and succeed. It’s because of this deep belief in people that we think the standard approach to poverty is tragic. 

For the past 50 years, we’ve been given a false choice. It’s a choice between the War on Poverty — which makes poverty easier to endure but harder to escape — and abandoning those who face hardship, leaving them to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” 

A half century later, the poverty rate has barely budged. And people who are born into poverty today are less likely to rise out of it.

I don’t pretend for a second that I have the answers to poverty, as I haven’t personally experienced it. 

That’s why the first step in our approach is finding people who do have the answers. Often it’s those who have experienced poverty themselves, who have overcome it, and are helping others do the same. As their partners, we use our resources and capabilities to help them take their efforts to a new level.

Brian:
What we’ve learned is that this approach is far more effective than anything else we’ve seen.

People like Jesús Genera know the unique challenges of poverty — he experienced it as a kid. He now leads the Family Independence Initiative. They’ve developed an innovative program that empowers families to increase their personal savings tenfold. 

We’re partnering with them to help scale their model nationwide to potentially help millions of families each year. And they’re the lead organization in a unique initiative to assist people hit hardest by the COVID-19 crisis, called #GiveTogetherNow.

Or take Scott Strode. Scott knows how to beat addiction because he beat it himself. He founded an organization called The Phoenix that is twice as effective as the best treatment clinics in the country. In partnership with Stand Together, Scott has already taken The Phoenix from seven to 48 communities. 

We’re now working together to go much bigger with a goal of helping 1 million people each year, which could be a tipping point in improving the effectiveness of efforts to help people struggling with addiction.

You can see the inspiring stories of many of the 300+ community-based organizations that Stand Together Foundation partners with here.

Originally published in April, 2020.
 

Charles:
We changed to be consistent with our principles in all arenas. We want to unite people to make a bigger difference in everything we do. There can be no exceptions — and this is a lesson we learned the hard way.

We got into politics to improve public policy. Like many people, we were disappointed with the policies from recent administrations of both political parties — from unsustainable government spending fueled by a growing national debt, to reckless foreign policy that’s pulled our country into seemingly endless wars and cost tens of thousands of Americans their lives.

After decades of working to correct these problems without being involved in electoral politics, we concluded this wasn’t possible — that we needed to help elect people who were committed to addressing these problems, as well as many others. 

You only get two choices in our system, so we bet on the red team (whose leaders at the time were telling us they were committed to passing policies we believed would help people improve their lives). We mobilized citizens to support candidates that could help achieve a partisan majority as a way to pass those policies. And it worked in some cases.  

But too often this meant putting off the big issues — or worse, sometimes it’d result in the opposite of what the country needed — all in the name of protecting that partisan majority. 

The big problems kept getting bigger, and while we didn’t start out to push for a partisan agenda, we found ourselves engaging in the sort of partisan squabbles that make progress nearly impossible to achieve.

By the mid-2010s, it was clear there were many issues where that partisan approach wasn’t effective — from special-interest corporate welfare to our broken immigration system to economic issues that neither side had the courage to address.

There needed to be a major change in this approach to politics — one that was consistent with our approach in other areas. We have long tried to heed Frederick Douglass’ wisdom to “unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” And in politics this meant instead of partisanship, seeking partnerships regardless of political party. In other words, we needed to build diverse policy coalitions rather than rely on partisan majorities as the path to passing good policies.

That’s what we’re doing now. And it’s working!

Brian:
Today, Americans for Prosperity — the organization we rely on to improve public policy — focuses on bringing together nonpartisan coalitions to pass good policy, and it’s working better than anything we’ve tried before. The results speak for themselves. 

Take our efforts to reform the country’s criminal justice system — a system rife with injustice. Charles and our philanthropic community have been working for decades to fix it. Yet despite widespread agreement on the problems, partisanship held back real reform.

That began to change when we, alongside many other groups, decided to put our differences aside and unite to get it done, working with everyone from the ACLU and Sen. Cory Booker to the Heritage Foundation and Sen. Mike Lee.

In 2018, this culminated in the First Step Act, a once-in-a-generation criminal justice reform that passed in the U.S. Senate with 87 votes and overwhelming majorities of Republicans and Democrats. Here’s a video we made with Van Jones, a good partner on criminal justice issues on how setting partisanship aside and working together was essential to achieving this reform.

That same year, this nonpartisan approach helped pass legislation that allows terminally ill patients to access potentially life-saving treatments (known as “Right to Try”). It also helped achieve reforms that provide veterans with more access to better health care (the “VA Mission Act”). Predating these federal reforms, we accomplished even more in the states by working with diverse coalitions of people to bring about dozens of reforms.

Results like these prove that this commitment to a nonpartisan approach works. Americans for Prosperity has gone out of its way to praise any lawmaker, regardless of party, when they lead on an initiative that will help people improve their lives.

Separately, AFP Action — a super PAC supported by Stand Together donor partners — began directly supporting the election of Democrats and Republicans in the 2019 and 2020 election cycles based on their leadership in solving critical problems.

This is helping to show the many millions of Americans who are fed up with partisan bickering that, just as they suspected, there is indeed a better way.  

We’ve been blown away by the support we’ve received since making this change — from grassroots activists across the country, donors, policymakers, you name it.

Explore ways you can partner with us.

Originally published in April, 2020.
 

Brian:

That’s a fair question and I understand why it comes up. Our founder does lead one of the biggest businesses in the world. And frankly, many businesses do try to rig the system in their favor — using political connections to get handouts, tax loopholes, and other favors that benefit their business at the expense of everyone else. 

It’s called special-interest corporate welfare — where businesses get ahead by having the best political connections rather than by creating better products that help people improve their lives.

At Stand Together, we reject that approach. We believe businesses should succeed only by benefiting others. That means no businesses — including those owned by our partners — should be able to get special handouts. The only way to legitimately earn profits is by serving customers.

That’s why you’ll never see us support policy reforms that give special favors to any businesses. In fact, we actively oppose every policy that would create special favors for businesses, including those owned by our donors.

Charles:
This is an issue I’ve been passionate about since the 1960s. Corporate welfare is one of the biggest problems in our society and one of the things I’m most passionate about getting rid of.

In the 1970s, Richard Nixon’s re-election committee asked our company for an illegal donation. The implication was clear: Support us and your business will get special favors, don’t and you won’t. I immediately turned down Nixon’s agents. 

I tell this story because it shows that special-interest corporate welfare has been around for as long as I’ve been in business. I’ve spent my entire career urging business leaders to focus on creating value for customers, not getting favors from politicians and bureaucrats. In the 1970s, I recruited Milton Friedman to help me start an organization called “BLAST” — Business Leaders Against Subsidies and Tariffs (two of the most prominent examples of special-interest corporate welfare).

Yet the problem has only gotten worse. Today, the system is so corrupted that if you’re in business, it’s virtually impossible to avoid being affected, positively or negatively, by anti-competitive regulations, tariffs, subsidies, tax preferences, you name it. It drives me crazy. 

Like all businesses, we abide by the rules of the road — and our business benefits from many of these, all of which we would rather do without. But unlike others, we oppose special-interest corporate welfare of every kind and are actively working to eliminate it, even when doing so reduces our profits.

For example, we were the first big business to oppose — and finally defeat — the Border Adjustment Tax, a proposal put forward by Republicans in 2017 that would have increased our profits by as much as $1 billion each year. But it would have done so by raising prices on consumers. We oppose steel tariffs even though they would increase profits at a steel mill we recently built. We oppose subsidies for all forms of energy, whether they benefit or hurt our refineries.

Anyone who knows me knows this is an issue I’m especially passionate about. If you are as well, let us know — we need a lot more people to stand up and say enough is enough.

Learn more about our efforts in economic progress.

Originally published in April, 2020.

Charles:
When I was in my 20s, I became very interested in learning about the principles of scientific and social progress. I read everything I could get my hands on from every different perspective — from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, Michael Polanyi to Karl Popper, Maslow to Freud, as well as Aristotle to Plato.

I graduated from MIT with three degrees in engineering but didn’t learn this diversity of ideas until after college, when I started studying on my own. 

What impressed me was that many of the principles I was learning from fields as varied as science, philosophy, economics, psychology, and sociology were consistent and interrelated. So I became convinced they could help me, and I began applying them at Koch Industries and in my own personal life. 

Nearly every success I’ve had has been as a result of this approach. And it’s why the vast majority of my philanthropy for more than 50 years has gone to support education — to help more people benefit by learning from a diversity of ideas, as I have. 

It started with scholarships for individual students, which led to grants to professors and university centers — those that can not only benefit students and their development, but also lead to new discoveries and innovations that benefit society.

Brian:
Stand Together partners now support more than 1,000 professors at about 300 colleges and universities across the country.

Professors like John Tomasi. His program at Brown University hosts spirited but respectful conversations among people with radically different ideas on challenging topics such as inequality and immigration. The students choose the topics and pick the speakers, helping make it one of the most prominent programs on campus. 

Or scholars like Veronique de Rugy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her research has made her one of the most sought-after experts in the country when it comes to understanding the consequences of corporate welfare in public policy.

Research is a discovery process, and that’s how we approach our support for scholars like Veronique. They must have the freedom to follow the evidence wherever their research takes them. That’s why we’ve always followed strict standards in our university philanthropy: a commitment to academic independence, to faculty-driven research, and an adherence to each school’s procedures for hiring, curriculum, and peer review. 

The Charles Koch Foundation also established the gold standard for transparency in university philanthropy as the first major foundation to post all major university grant agreements on its website. That way other schools and scholars can see the type of work we support and whether we can be helpful to them. 

(Here’s the link to everything, in case you’d like to know more.)

And of course, we’re always looking for great ideas to support — scholars can apply for grant support here.

Learn more about Stand Together’s issue areas.

Originally published in April, 2020.

Charles:
The strain that the COVID-19 crisis has put on people is enormous. Every life lost is a tragedy. The crisis has really brought into focus the idea that we’re all in this together, and it’s shown that tackling a crisis of this magnitude requires every one of us to do our part.

Brian and I shared our perspective at the beginning of the pandemic with an op-ed in USA Today, which you can read here. And I have another article in Fortune, here. We highlight just a few of the many efforts the Stand Together community is supporting with hundreds of partner organizations, as well as the role businesses are playing (more on that below).

We believe people who are closest to a problem are best able to solve it. So, at Stand Together, we immediately looked to partner with people who are on the frontlines of this crisis.

Brian:
This includes supporting partners who are empowering students to thrive outside the walls of a classroom by helping parents bring individualized learning right into their homes; advancing public policy solutions that help every person rise, such as making it easier for people to access health care solutions like telemedicine and for doctors to see patients (reforms supported by more than 80 percent of Americans); and helping get America safely back to work by bringing together business leaders, employees, public health experts, and policymakers to help companies determine how they can safely operate.

And we’re working with hundreds of local organizations to help neighbors most affected by the pandemic in communities across the country.

Our #GiveTogetherNow campaign — a rapid response effort in partnership with Family Independence Initiative — provided direct cash assistance to families who were hit hardest by the crisis. Within the first few weeks, #GiveTogetherNow raised more than $50 million — enough to provide $500 in cash assistance to more than 100,000 families. The project recently surpassed $120 million in donations, helping nearly 240,000 families.

Hundreds of people from all across the country contributed alongside organizations and philanthropies such as Google and Blue Meridian, and others. Athletes and musicians are lending their voices in support as well — from former NFL linebacker Dhani Jones to Oscar-winning director Jimmy Chin to basketball great Nancy Lieberman.

I hope you’ll check it out at GiveTogetherNow.org; 100 percent of your donation goes to the people who have been hardest hit by the COVID-19 crisis.

Stand Together Foundation also launched #HelpTheHelpers, a GoFundMe charity campaign to inspire others to get engaged with nearly 200 community-based partners addressing poverty and addiction.

In less than a week, and with the help of a $2.5 million match from Stand Together Foundation, the campaign raised more than $5.5 million for these groups — making #HelpTheHelpers one of the most successful GoFundMe campaigns related to COVID-19. 

If you are looking for more ways to help others during this crisis, or believe there are ways we can partner together, please email us at MakeADifference@standtogether.org. Things are moving and we’re looking for every opportunity to make a meaningful difference.

By Brian Hooks, Chairman and CEO, Stand Together

Freedom, free markets, the rule of law, spontaneous order, limited government, individual liberty. These are among the list of classical liberal principles included in the material we hand out to our staff, allies, and donor partners to explain what motivates Stand Together’s thousands of investments in solving problems in our country today. Dignity, openness, mutual benefit, equal rights, free expression and other animating ideals from enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith, John Locke, and those who continued in their tradition like Milton Friedman and James Buchanan help explain what connects our diverse set of projects to improve education, support strong communities, and pass better public policy.

Just to hit home how central these principles are to everything we do, they’re printed on a 20-foot-tall mural that runs about 70 feet wide in the lobby of the hotel ballroom where we gather the hundreds of participants who attend our semi-annual summits. These towering principles of human progress flank a graphic of what economist Deirdre McCloskey calls the “hockey stick of human history” – an indisputable illustration of the benefits they have brought to the world as countries have adopted and applied them. Just to be sure we make our point, the program booklets begin with a quote from Frederick Douglass, one of the most eloquent advocates for these principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence: “Stand by these Principles. Be true to them on all occasions, against all foes, and at whatever cost.” 

Subtle, it is not. But this is among the many facts left out of an opinion piece published in The American Mind that claims Stand Together, the organization I lead, has somehow veered away from the principles that motivated Charles Koch to found our community of business leaders, philanthropists, academics, and social entrepreneurs 20 years ago, a community that builds upon his life-long dedication and passion for applying these principles to help all people live better lives. 

One of the thinkers who has had the most influence on how we’ve built Stand Together is Friedrich Hayek, the economist and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work to understand how social order emerges in the absence of heavy-handed, top-down control.  

Hayek was a keen observer of human behavior, having witnessed first-hand the destruction that comes from what he called, the “fatal conceit” – concentrated power exercised over people by those who claim to have our best interest in mind. He was also very aware that in order to check that power, the principles of a free society must enjoy the support of more than just a remnant of advocates. He urged that we must do all we can to learn and to show how these principles matter in the lives of every person.  And in 1960, Hayek wrote:

If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations. What at one time are their most effective expressions gradually become so worn with use that they cease to carry a definite meaning. The underlying ideas may be as valid as ever, but the words, even when they refer to problems that are still with us, no longer convey the same conviction…and they rarely give us direct answers to the questions we are asking…[they] must be adapted to a given climate of opinion…and illustrate general principles in terms of issues with which they are concerned.

In other words, while our principles don’t change, the language we use to describe them must. 

This seems to be the primary criticism of the opinion piece in The American Mind: that we don’t use the same words we used to use. The emphasis on “freedom” and “limited government” has given way, in the author’s estimation, to a focus on “empowerment” and “addressing injustice.” 

Notwithstanding the above illustration where we are quite happy to use the language of freedom in very big bold letters, it is absolutely the case that Stand Together is taking Hayek’s challenge seriously. We are finding new and different ways that classical liberal principles can be applied to help people live better lives. How applying these principles empowers people to address injustices, like those visited upon people within a broken criminal justice system (which a colleague of mine aptly calls, “the best example of a failed big government program”) or in areas more familiar to those who have followed our work for a long time such as the injustice that a regulatory system captured by crony special interests visits upon an upstart entrepreneur.  

The language “must be adapted,” as Hayek says and, “…illustrate general principles in terms of issues with which [people] are concerned.” And as it does, the principles become more relevant to more people.

This ability to apply time tested principles across a wide spectrum of issues has strengthened our partnership with other groups that are part of the “liberty movement.” Indeed, Stand Together remains one of the largest supporters of these groups. And it has welcomed other organizations with whom we had not traditionally worked but who see an opportunity to make a difference through partnership, including groups who identify with the political Left. 

But whether Left or Right, none of the groups we work with question whether Stand Together is committed to these foundational classical liberal principles, no matter what language we use. We wear them on our sleeve. There is no hiding the ball. We wouldn’t do it, and we couldn’t do it even if we tried. 

The claims made to the contrary in this misinformed piece masquerading as concerned critique are easily shown to be false. The author claims we were afraid to condemn the violence that came from some of the protests in 2020 to avoid alienating partners on the political Left. A simple Google search reveals that we were not afraid to condemn violence and we did condemn it (here and here). He claims that we wink and nod at identity-driven ideologies such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), insinuating we have somehow compromised our commitment to methodological individualism. We have not. We have publicly argued against CRT while resisting calls to ban it, consistent with a commitment to free speech. The author asserts without any attempt to back up the claim that we have reduced our commitment to economic freedom. We have not. Today we are investing more into efforts to advance economic freedom than at any time in our history (see here, here, and here). And the teams at Americans for Prosperity are more active than they have ever been on policy issues dealing with regulation, taxes, and the need to dramatically curtail unsustainable government spending.  

Many other claims in this piece are uncited and unsubstantiated, anonymously sourced, or simply asserted. And still others are just plain strange. Are there fewer pictures of Charles Koch in our office today? I have no idea.  

Anyone who knows Charles Koch would laugh at the idea he is somehow playing for PR. If we were only interested in currying favor from the political Left, would we have litigated and won the most important free speech and donor privacy case to be heard by the Supreme Court in the past 10 years? Or took the lead to prevent HR1 from becoming law in the last Congress – stating clearly that this Number One legislative priority was a political power grab and not the defense of democracy politicians claimed. Hardly the easy way out. 

The truth is that these are examples of efforts guided by our core principles.  As are the efforts where we have stood up to power grabs on the political Right (such as here and here) or found common cause with groups on the Left (here, here, and here).

Today, there are indeed some organizations with which the author has personal familiarity that have drifted away from the principles of a free society and become fans of government control. But ours is not among them. Indeed, while the extremes on the political Left remain a clear and present danger to a system of ordered liberty, that threat has also rapidly grown among the extremes on the political Right. For an organization guided by core principles rather than political or personal ambition, the importance of showing how those principles help people live better lives, regardless of their political allegiance, is more urgent than ever. 

Though this particular opinion piece is confused and inaccurate, I’m grateful to the author for the opportunity it affords to clear up any general questions about our work. So let me be clear. Stand Together is dedicated to realizing a society of equal rights and mutual benefit where people succeed by contributing to the lives of others: a free and open society that enables people to realize their potential. This can only be achieved by more fully realizing the principles responsible for progress throughout history – the principles that inspired America’s founding and that our country has been working to live up to for the past 250 years. Whenever we come closer to them, we realize how truly transformative they are – and how much more we must do to fully embody them. 

We strive to do this with all comers. We believe that the problems in our society today and the threats that our country faces require putting the old divisions behind us and building diverse coalitions that will stand up for what must be done. We will unite with anyone to do right. Our common cause is to support the only country in the history of the world motivated by a deep belief in a free peoples’ ability to discover and bring about new and better ways for people to live together in peace and prosperity. And we know the only way to do it is by applying those time-tested principles of human progress.