Curated playlist
Non-profit organizations based in Washington, D.C.
- International Bank for Reconstruction and DevelopmentThe International Bank for Reconstruction and Development was born in 1944 from one of the most ambitious acts of international cooperation in history. Delegates gathered at Bretton Woods that year to answer a question that felt…
- Council on Foreign RelationsThe Council on Foreign Relations has shaped American foreign policy from its earliest days in ways that most citizens never see. Its members have included secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, and prominent media figures. Its…
- Guttmacher InstituteThe Guttmacher Institute carries the name of a man who once led Planned Parenthood, the obstetrician-gynecologist Alan F. Guttmacher. Yet the organization that bears his name now operates apart from the group where it began. Founded in…
- World Bank GroupThe World Bank Group approved its first loan on the 9th of May 1947: US$250 million to France for postwar reconstruction. In real terms, that single disbursement remains the largest the bank has ever issued. But before France could receive…
- American Political Science AssociationThe American Political Science Association was born in the Tilton Memorial Library of Tulane University in New Orleans in 1903, at a moment when political science was still staking its claim as a serious academic discipline. The questions…
- Freedom HouseFreedom House operates as a nonprofit out of Washington, D.C. For more than eight decades, it has weighed in on democracy, political freedom, and human rights worldwide. It was founded in October 1941, with Wendell Willkie and Eleanor…
- American Association for the Advancement of ScienceThe American Association for the Advancement of Science was born on the 20th of September 1848, inside the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Seventy-eight people were in the room. They represented a country that had no permanent…
- American Geophysical UnionThe American Geophysical Union took its first breath in December 1919. A committee led by Robert S. Woodward of the Carnegie Institution had defined geophysics as a collection of borderlands just months before. These fields included…
- Center for Strategic and International StudiesThe Center for Strategic and International Studies opened its doors on the 4th of September 1962, just weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis gripped Washington. It began life chartered as a Georgetown University affiliate, carrying the…
- National Geographic SocietyOn the 13th of January 1888, thirty-three explorers and scientists gathered at the Cosmos Club on Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. Their purpose: to organize a society for the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge. What…
- Greenpeace USAGreenpeace USA traces its roots to a group of activists who took to the high seas in the early 1970s to confront whaling ships and nuclear testing programs. What began as a loose network of independent corporations scattered across…
- Atlantic CouncilThe Atlantic Council began with a handshake between two former American statesmen. Christian Herter, once Secretary of State, and William L. Clayton, a trade diplomat who had helped shape the postwar economic order, co-founded the…
- Center for International PolicyThe Center for International Policy was born in 1975 from a moment of national crisis. The Vietnam War had fractured American confidence in its own foreign policy apparatus, and a group of activists decided the country needed an…
- National Security ArchiveThe National Security Archive holds the distinction of being the largest repository of declassified U.S. government documents outside the federal government itself. It sits on the campus of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.,…
- The Arctic Institute – Center for Circumpolar Security StudiesThe Arctic Institute, a think tank founded in 2011 and based in Washington, D.C., ranked 72nd among United States think tanks in 2021. That ranking came from the University of Pennsylvania, whose Think Tanks and Civil Society Program…