Organization: ESSENTIAL INFORMATION INC
Mission: Essential Information educates the public on topics neglected by the media and policy-makers.
Activities: HUMAN RIGHTS: The project has involved work overseas in areas of severe repression involving the collection and distribution of human rights information, encouraging peaceful political solutions to violent conflicts, and facilitating local community work on issues of poverty, security and justice. The Human Rights and Justice Project posts information on a free,web-based clearinghouse, updated throughout the day, on political, social and economic developments overseas that may be of interest to academics, journalists, activists and the general public. Materials circulated include scholarly official and NGO studies, foreign press reports and translations of pertinent foreign-language materials. Major topics include political change, health, the environment, popular movements, and economic trends.
INVENTIVE INITIATIVES: Essential Information has started more than a dozen projects in recent years. The Organization's primary criteria is: Does it promote innovation in the public interest? With quiet determination and sophistication, project leaders identify the fulcrums of power that invariably lie in the shadows, envision new pathways of change that entrenched organizations, overlook and develops new strategies that, over time, profoundly alter the terms of the debate for a given issue. Essential Information projects are designed to be flexible and evolutionary as circumstances warrant. We expand successful initiatives and discontinue less successful ones. The ascent is on experimentation to develop effective new models of citizen action. In addition, this project has funded dozens of articles on critical issues -- ranging from worker exposure to deadly toxics to illegal U.S. efforts to supply the repressive Guatemalan military -- that have been overlooked or neglected by the mass media.
UnKoch My Campus (UKMC), a nonprofit project dedicated to fighting the undue donor influence that seeks to manipulate higher education to serve corporate interests. UKMC investigates improper relationships between wealthy donors, corporations, and educational institutions. Believing that transparency is the key to accountability, UKMC obtains and publicizes donor agreements in order to expose ways in which gifts from the Koch Foundation undermine academic freedom and faculty governance at academic institutions across the country.
NTEE category: International, Foreign Affairs & National Security
Secondary category: Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy