Mission, Vision, History and Accomplishments | Board and Staff | AID's Approach

Our Mission:

Americans for Informed Democracy empowers young people in the United States to address global challenges such as poverty, disease, climate change, and conflict through awareness and action. AIDemocracy promotes just and sustainable solutions at the campus, community, and national level.

Our Vision:

Every young person in the United States exercises their power to bring about a peaceful, healthy, just and sustainable world. We educate, cultivate and mobilize a network of young people in the US to take informed action around our individual and collective roles as global citizens. Our approach has three pillars:

Americans for Informed Democracy works with young people, particularly students, to promote an interconnected world through:

• Education: We help students understand key issues in development, environment, peace and security, and health, as well as the global system that frames these issues.
• Cultivation: We build student leaders and organizers who understand not only the issues, but also their own power, how to organize others, and how to access decision-makers.
• Mobilization: We create and connect students to opportunities to take action, from the campus to the national level.

Our History:

AIDemocracy was founded by a group of American students who studied abroad just after the September 11th attacks. The students were traumatized by 9-11 and wary of being overseas so soon after the tragedy. But to their surprise, they were met with intense sympathy and solidarity from people from around the world. For them, the tragedy seemed to reveal the possibility for a global community of shared values.

But when these young Americans came back to the U.S., they were often greeted with questions about why people around the world hated America and our values. The students realized that the picture of the rest of the world that Americans were seeing in the media was very different from the experience of the world that they were living abroad. The media presented only the extremists and the threats from around the world. Americans did not have the chance to see the moderates around the world or the global partners that the U.S. could work with to overcome common threats such as climate change, terrorism, and disease.

These students set up Americans for Informed Democracy to bring the world home to Americans and to showcase the opportunities for the U.S. to play a more collaborative role in the world. They began hosting town hall forums and videoconferences to bring the stories of the world that they saw and experienced to their peers and the broader public. Based on their own experiences abroad, they believed that if Americans had new ways to connect with the rest of the world, they would see new opportunities for the U.S. to work with other countries to solve global problems. In other words, they sought to inspire a more informed democracy.

In 2008, AIDemocracy merged with Our Voices Together, a non-partisan group of families and friends who lost loved ones to terrorism.

Our Accomplishments:

Since 2002, our central organization has hosted more than 100 young global leaders summits in over 30 U.S. states and in five foreign countries to engage young leaders from Bob Jones University to Berkeley in our mission. We have then supported these leaders after they returned to their communities to host more than 1,000 town hall forums, over 200 global videoconferences and hundreds of local campaigns.

Our organization has received recognition from highly regarded media and global institutions. Our work has appeared in more than 500 media outlets from sources that cover politics and global affairs such as the New York Times, C-SPAN, BBC, Voice of America, CNN, and the Washington Post to more unexpected sources such as Marie Claire and the Montel Williams Show. Our work has been featured at major gatherings, such as the 2006 White House Summit on Malaria. Numerous editorial boards have praised our programs, including the Boston Globe, which called our Hope not Hate series "a victory of knowledge and inquiry over fear and blind pledges of revenge. This is public pressure at its noble best, able to cut through the haze of politics, inertia, and fear..."; We received the 2005 Award for International Understanding from Search for Common Ground and were specially recognized by Madeleine Albright at the closing plenary session of the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative for our commitment to connecting young Americans with their peers worldwide. We have been invited to present on our organization at the United Nations, Associated Press, World Bank, U.S. House, and U.S. Senate.

Our Funders:

In recent years AIDemocracy has received generous support from the following: CarEth Foundation, Connect US Fund, DarMac Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Ford Foundation, Henry M. Jackson Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, JEHT Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Institute, Planethood Foundation, Ploughshares Fund, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Stanley Foundation, United Nations Foundation, and Wallace Global Fund and its participating universities.