About the Fund

About the Fund

The Fund for Public Interest Research was founded in 1982 to provide professional support and technical assistance to progressive organizations. Since then, the Fund has built the largest citizen outreach network in the country, with campaign offices in 25 states.

The Fund's central organizing principle is that, to be effective against the array of powerful political and corporate forces opposing change, progressive groups need to build public support, build political power, and build their organizations. By bringing to bear the experience and expertise gained by working with dozens of such groups over the last two decades, the Fund helps organizations become more effective at canvassing, telephone outreach, membership development, grassroots political campaigns, and more.

Individual organizations, ranging from the Sierra Club to Human Rights Campaign, hire the Fund to accomplish specific objectives, including building a membership, generating political support for an issue, or raising funds. The Fund, in turn, hires a staff of canvass directors, telephone outreach directors, donor staff, canvassers, callers and others to carry out our assigned objectives.

Sierra Club The Sierra Club's mission is to explore, enjoy and protect the wild places of the earth; practice and promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources; educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out these objectives.

The state PIRGs The state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) are advocates for the public interest. When consumers are cheated, or our natural environment is threatened, or the voices of ordinary citizens are drowned out by special interest lobbyists, the state PIRGs speak up and take action. We uncover threats to public health and well-being and fight to end them, using the time-tested tools of investigative research, media exposes, grassroots organizing, advocacy and litigation. The state PIRGs mission is to deliver persistent, result-oriented public interest activism that protects our environment, encourages a fair, sustainable economy, and fosters responsive, democratic government.

Human Rights Campaign (HRC) As America's largest gay and lesbian organizations, the Human Rights Campaign provides a national voice on gay and lesbian issues. The Human Rights Campaign effectively lobbies Congress; mobilizes grassroots action in diverse communities; invests strategically to elect a fair-minded Congress; and increases public understanding through innovative education and communication strategies.

HRC is a bipartisan organization that works to advance equality based on sexual orientation and gender expression and identity, to ensure that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans can be open, honest and safe at home, at work and in the community.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) is the voice of one of America's most threatened landscapes -- the wild and unspoiled Colorado Plateau. Eighteen thousand concerned citizens from across the nation have joined SUWA's hard-hitting, grassroots commitment to save the magnificent canyon country of Southern Utah.

The public land surrounding Utah's prized national parks is characterized by intricate canyons, arches, buttes, vast expanses of slickrock, red and salmon colored pinnacles, a variety of form and color unparalleled anywhere else on the planet ... and immense solitude and silence. Southern Utah harbors nothing less than a landscape of magic -- a landscape that belongs to you and to all Americans.