Who We Are

The Orton Family Foundation helps small cities and towns harness the inherent ability of citizens to imagine and achieve a better future for themselves and their community. The Orton Family Foundation, founded in 1995 by Lyman Orton and Noel Fritzinger, is an operating foundation that helps communities in the Northeast and Rocky Mountain West discover, describe, apply and sustain their “heart and soul.” The Foundation’s Heart & Soul Community Planning process gives citizens control of their futures first, by asking citizens what they value most about their communities and, second, by placing those shared values at the center of the planning process.

The Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) is an alliance of the major organizations and leading scholars in the field of deliberation, public engagement, and democratic governance. The mission of the Consortium is to bring together practitioners and researchers to support and foster the nascent, broad-based movement to promote and institutionalize deliberative democracy at all levels of governance in the United States and around the world. The DDC represents more than 50 foundations, nonprofit organizations, anduniversities, collaborating to support research activities and advance democratic practice, in North America and around the world. The DDC works to:  help leaders find the examples and resources they need to engage citizens, integrate research and practice in the field, integrate online and face-to-face approaches, articulate how democracy is changing, help communities build stronger civic infrastructure.

Grassroots Grantmakers is a network of funders and others who are working to strengthen and help resource the work of everyday people and the groups that they form for mutual aid and collective action. The participants in our network include funders (place-based and otherwise), organizations that resource citizen-led groups, and citizen-led groups themselves. Our work is to initiate knowledge creation and to collect and actively share existing knowledge about how to appropriately resource citizen action. We do this through place-based learning convenings, webinars, learning circles, web-based resources, one-on-one assistance, and special partnerships for learning and action with like-minded organizations and networks.  

National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation promotes the use of dialogue, deliberation, and other innovative group processes to help people come together across differences to tackle our most challenging problems. NCDD is a coalition of 1,600 groups and professionals who bring people of all stripes together to discuss, decide and collaborate on today's toughest issues. We serve as a gathering place, a resource clearinghouse, a news source, and a facilitative leader for the dialogue and deliberation community and beyond.  The NCDD website is a clearinghouse for literally thousands of resources and best practices, and our highly participatory national and regional conferences have brought together more than 2,000 practitioners, community leaders, public administrators, researchers, activists, teachers and students since 2002.  We keep in touch monthly with 24,000 people involved in public engagement and conflict resolution work.

The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States. The New America Foundation has long been active in California, particularly in the areas of asset building, education, health policy and political reform. The California Civic Innovation Project is the organization’s newest California initiative, and reflects New America’s growing emphasis on technology’s role in public policy.  Based in the Bay Area, and supported by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation, CCIP will be active throughout the state.

Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit planning, design and educational organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities. PPS’s pioneering Placemaking approach helps citizens transform their public spaces into vital places that highlight local assets, spur rejuvenation and serve common needs. Partnering with public and private organizations, federal, state and municipal agencies, neighborhood associations and other civic groups, PPS has completed projects in over 3000 communities in 42 countries and all 50 US states. PPS also trains more than 10,000 people every year and reaches millions annually through online media.

The mission of Strong Towns is to support a model for growth that allows America's towns to become financially strong and resilient. The American approach to growth is causing economic stagnation and decline along with land use practices that force a dependency on public subsidies. The inefficiencies of the current approach have left American towns financially insolvent, unable to pay even the maintenance costs of their basic infrastructure. A new approach that accounts for the full cost of growth is needed to make our towns strong again. Strong Towns is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on the root of these systemic problems: our land use patterns—the way we have designed our towns and neighborhoods.