Democracy Innovation Fellowship
The UC Berkeley Haas Democracy Innovation Fellowship was a semester-long design cycle led by Jill Vialet social entrepreneur and visiting scholar working out of the Center for Social Sector Leadership in 2021-2022. The Fellowship provided graduate students an experiential learning opportunity, while advancing mission driven work at 6 democracy innovation organizations.
Six Haas MBA and six Goldman Public Policy MPP/MPA candidates were selected to work in interdisciplinary pairs as paid fellows to address specific infrastructure challenges at 6 nonprofit organizations. Student teams were supported by coaches (Project Advisors) with relevant scaling and growth experience from other nonprofit sectors. Each fellow was paid $2000 for their participation.
Project work occured between February – April, 2022, with project presentations in May. The time commitment for graduate students was 40-60 hours over the course of the project, averaging 3-4 hours per week.
Read about the project outcomes from Jillian Vialet’s blog.
Organizations & Projects
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Business for America
- The organization: Business for America is a nonpartisan business organization advancing solutions to boost civic engagement, ensure election integrity, reduce political polarization, and modernize government.
- The project: Create ways to better engage and communicate with our business contacts, keeping their needs in mind as we aim to mobilize them and their companies to work with BFA. We really need to figure out processes and tools that will enable us to scale.
- The organization: Business for America is a nonpartisan business organization advancing solutions to boost civic engagement, ensure election integrity, reduce political polarization, and modernize government.
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New Politics
- The organization: New Politics is a 527 organization dedicated to getting servant leaders elected to office. We work with veterans and national service alumni (TFA, Peace Corps, Americorps, City Year, etc.) to support them in building robust and competitive campaigns at the federal, state, and local level. Our belief is that a lack of electeds with service backgrounds (e.g., veterans currently at an all time low in congress) has led to bitter polarization in politics where defeating political opponents comes at the expense of solution-oriented governance.
- The project: Systematizing and scaling New Politics’ process for recruiting new talent into the political arena.
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Bridge Alliance
- The organization: Bridge Alliance is a coalition of ~100 organizations working together to promote healthy self-governance in our democratic republic. Bridge Alliance member organizations span the ideological spectrum but are unified to work efficiently, outside arbitrarily defined political lines.
- The project: Addressing the systemic racial divides that exist in civic engagement work by supporting Bridge Alliance’s efforts to achieve greater racial diversity in its own membership.
- The organization: Bridge Alliance is a coalition of ~100 organizations working together to promote healthy self-governance in our democratic republic. Bridge Alliance member organizations span the ideological spectrum but are unified to work efficiently, outside arbitrarily defined political lines.
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Block Power
- The organization: BlockPower’s mission is to build health, wealth, and power in Black communities with unrealized civic strength. To achieve this, BlockPower supports partner organizations in North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and Florida to grow and sustain networks of “Community Ambassadors” who are committed to educating and empowering their own family members, friends, and neighbors about small concrete actions that they can take on a regular basis to strengthen their communities.
- The project: Identify a long term leadership structure for the organization that is both robust and self-sustaining.
- The organization: BlockPower’s mission is to build health, wealth, and power in Black communities with unrealized civic strength. To achieve this, BlockPower supports partner organizations in North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and Florida to grow and sustain networks of “Community Ambassadors” who are committed to educating and empowering their own family members, friends, and neighbors about small concrete actions that they can take on a regular basis to strengthen their communities.
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Turnout Nation
- The organization: Turnout Nation is a not-for-profit and nonpartisan organization that equips people who care deeply about voting – Voting Captains – with the tools and info they need to ultimately get more Americans to the polls.
- The project: Creating a plan and processes for keeping Voting Captains engaged to promote ongoing involvement
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Institute for Political Innovation
- The organization: IPI is a nonpartisan not-for-profit organization working to contribute theory, scholarship and strategy that catalyzes model, modern and nonpartisan political change in America, with a particular focus on promoting Final-Five voting.
- The project: Create processes and systems for coordinating internal and external communications that support best practices for workflow and partnerships management.
- The organization: IPI is a nonpartisan not-for-profit organization working to contribute theory, scholarship and strategy that catalyzes model, modern and nonpartisan political change in America, with a particular focus on promoting Final-Five voting.