Strategy: Empowering Congress

This grant will support the Congressional Institute’s efforts to provide educational information about Congress to the general public, and to educate Members of Congress and staff about efforts to improve the function and management of the institution.

This grant supports a collaborative research initiative led by the University of Maryland (UMD) in partnership with the U.S. Association of Former Members of Congress (FMC) and the Millennial Action Project (MAP). This research explores the behavioral and psychological aspects of political cooperation to counteract polarization in American government.

The University of Virginia’s Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL) is a nonpartisan organization that uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to promote legislative effectiveness among lawmakers across the United States.

POPVOX LegiDash Fund will develop a communications and legislative resources dashboard for congressional staff. The free product provides an improved constituent communications portal to view, batch, and respond to messages delivered to Congress by POPVOX.

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Congress Project will spearhead a series of activities to foster institutional reforms, help Congress reclaim a constitutionally appropriate balance with the executive branch, and expand efforts that enable members and staff to collaborate on bipartisan action.

The Georgetown Democracy, Education + Service (GeoDES) project at the McCourt School of Public Policy works on congressional modernization efforts. Their goal is a Congress that can effectively legislate on behalf of a diverse and multi-racial America and fulfill its First Branch constitutional duty to check and balance the Executive Branch.

The Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation will provide Congress with actionable steps to modernize its data collection and evidence-based policy making practices.

GovLab, a fiscally-sponsored project of the Fund for the City of New York, will hire a Fellow to support the launch of Smarter Crowdsourcing, which combines rigorous problem definition with crowdsourcing to attract ideas from diverse experts and then develop policy recommendations.