Our SToRY

Founded in San Francisco in 1992, for nearly three decades the Democracy Center has worked with activists across five continents, across many social and environmental struggles and campaigns. Our mission today, as it has been from our start, is to help make activism matter so that the energy of people’s involvement does not go wasted, but instead has real impact.

The Democracy Center’s earliest years were in California, where we focused on immigrant rights, access to health care, supporting the rights of poor people, and helping build the powers of the state’s diverse public interest community. We published a book on initiative politics. We founded a progressive budget advocacy organization.

At the end of the 1990s we moved our base to the heart of South America, Cochabamba Bolivia and were headquartered there for nearly twenty years. We brought the story of the Cochabamba Water Revolt to the world and helped lead the global campaign that forced Bechtel to drop its $50 million legal case against the Bolivian people. We helped connect activists globally in battles over globalization, indigenous rights, and U.S. foreign policy.

Today the Center is based once again in the U.S., carrying out our mission of making activism matter in a moment in which effective activism has never mattered more. In that work we will continue offering the three things we always have:

Making Public Issues Understandable

Effective activism must be rooted in a genuine understanding of the issues we care about. From climate change to initiative politics, from globalization to policy analysis, the Democracy Center has written books, articles and other tools to make complex issues understandable.

Building People’s Capacity for Effective Advocacy

To have impact, our advocacy must be strategic: It must have a vision of what it wants to achieve, an understanding of the political challenges and opportunities at hand, and a plan of action with a real chance of winning. In workshops, counseling and other support projects the Democracy Center has worked activists across the world: U.S. immigrants, the leadership of UNICEF, indigenous communities in Bolivia, health activists in apartheid South Africa, and many, many others to help make them as powerful as they can be.

Leading Advocacy Campaigns

The Democracy Center is not only a teacher and writer about advocacy, we have a long history of leading and winning important advocacy campaigns, from the local to the global. We helped lead the global campaign that forced the powerful Bechtel corporation to drop its $50 million legal battle against the people of Bolivia. From a small town in western New York we helped spark a national campaign to stop the use of facial recognition spy cameras in public schools.

Along the way in these nearly thirty years, we have also incubated and spun off two major new organizations, the California Budget and Policy Center and Terra Justa, and help launch the careers of dozens of talented and passionate young people who have passed through our doors as interns, staff, writers, and activists.

As the Democracy Center heads toward the start of its fourth decade, our work of making activism matter remains at our heart, with a whole set of new projects and programs about to begin.