History
The Roosevelt Institution, now The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network, was founded in 2004 by disillusioned young progressives seeking a stronger voice in American policymaking. Quinn Wilhelmi, one of the organization's founders, often told students that "the three pillars of politics are money, bodies, and ideas." When asked for money, young citizens gave what little they could; and when asked for bodies they joined protests, voter-registration drives, and neighborhood canvasses to get out the vote. But no one ever asked them for ideas. And while money and bodies put politicians in power, the war of ideas is waged between elections through public policy.
Soon after the '04 election, Kai Stinchcombe was trying to figure out what to do next. He had toiled for the Kerry presidential campaign alongside countless young politicos, and yet the election offered little reprieve; they remained just as passionate the day after the election as they had been the day before, except now they lacked something to do. So he returned to Stanford and emailed a few list-servs suggesting they form a progressive student think tank to fight the influence of Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution. The email soon reached Dar Vanderbeck at Bates College and Jessica Singleton at Middlebury and they responded, proposing that such an organization could exist on campuses across the country. This suggestion proved prophetic when a student revealed that his friend Jesse Wolfson had just launched a similar project at Yale. Kai called Jesse and the two groups joined forces.
These pioneers had realized that college campuses were brimming with innovative policy analysis, but unlike the powerful "think tanks" that proactively market to policymakers, students' ideas weren't reaching anyone. Or, as Roosevelt's founders put it: "Colleges are already effectively think tanks -- just not effective think tanks". From that playful observation grew a resonant call to action and the nation’s first (and only) student think tank was born. These students would not be advocates of others’ ideas, but generators of new solutions for classic problems. With the same fervor they brought to the campaign trail, a new generation of progressives and informed problem-solvers were preparing to storm the nation’s political stage.
Read more about this topic: Roosevelt Institute Campus Network
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