http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_Foundation-snip-
In the wake of the 2000 election, The Century Foundation and the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs organized The National Commission on Federal Election Reform, which was co-chaired by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, and was composed of distinguished public leaders from across the political spectrum. The commission’s charge was to quickly evaluate an enormous body of research on election reform, review policy proposals, and offer a bipartisan analysis to the Congress, the administration, and the American people. It released its final report, To Assure Pride and Confidence in the Electoral Process, to Congress and the White House on July 31, 2001.<3> In 2002, the Help America Vote Act(HAVA) was passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Bush<4>.
The Century Foundation also has supported two task forces that examined homeland security issues after the events of September 11, 2001. The first, chaired by Richard A. Clarke, produced a report, Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action, in 2005. The report assessed the nation’s successes and failures on homeland security and, building on the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, offered a detailed action plan for neutralizing the international movement at the core of worldwide terrorism.<5> The second task force, co-chaired by Richard Clarke and Randy Beers, produced the report The Forgotten Homeland in 2006, in which leading homeland security experts analyze the nation’s most significant vulnerabilities and propose strategies to reduce them<6>. In 2003, The Century Foundation published The War on Our Freedoms: Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism, which included essays by scholars and journalists that pointed out what is wrong with the current rush to limit civil liberties in the name of national security.
Mission
The Century Foundations describes its mission as explaining and analyzing public issues in plain language, providing facts and opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of different policy strategies, and developing and calling attention to distinctive ideas that have been demonstrated to work as policy solutions to the nation’s problems.
The Foundation covers many areas of public policy, but recently it has focused particularly on four basic challenges:
* persistent economic inequality combined with the shift to American households of financial risks previously borne by employers and government
* the aging of the population
* preventing and responding to terrorism while preserving civil liberties
* restoring America’s international credibility as an effective and cooperative leader in responding to global security and economic dangers
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