Our History
The Democracy Center was founded in 1992, in San Francisco. Originally established as the west coast office of the Washington-based Advocacy Institute, The Democracy Center became independent in 1997. Over the past fifteen years The Center has trained and supported thousands of social justice advocates across the US, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It has published three books, five major reports, and hundreds of newspaper, magazine, and Internet articles dealing with democracy and social justice issues. It has also helped found a set of important citizen organizations, in both the US and abroad, and led successful citizen campaigns in the US and globally.
California
For our first six years the focus of The Democracy Center's work was in California. In 1993, in the midst of the state's historic budget crisis, The Center led the effort to found a progressive research organization that could provide policy makers, the media, and the public with solid analysis about state budget issues – The California Budget Project . When immigrants in California came under political attack – culminating in a right-wing ballot measure to keep undocumented immigrant children out of the public schools (Proposition 187) – we worked closely with immigrant rights groups to help get their messages out in the media and form new coalitions of support.
The Center worked closely with state PTA leaders to design their winning campaign for legislation to reduce class size in the public schools. We worked with welfare recipients to help them lobby state lawmakers and talk with the media during the state's reform of welfare laws. We served as a strategy counselor and advocacy trainer to dozens of citizen groups statewide, from Health Access to the California Council of Churches. In California, The Center also published its first book, The Initiative Cookbook – Recipes and Stories from California's Ballot Wars.
Bolivia
Since 1998 much of The Democracy Center's work has been focused in Bolivia. The Center's founder and Executive Director, Jim Shultz, lived there with his family in 1991-1992 serving as a volunteer in an orphanage, and returned in 1998. In Bolivia, The Democracy Center has played an important role documenting and reporting on Bolivia's role as a test lab for conservative global economic policies, and the rise of popular resistance to those policies.
In 2000, The Center was the only ongoing source of international reporting of the now famous Cochabamba Water Revolt, in which the US engineering giant, Bechtel, was given control of the city's public water system, and subsequently kicked out by widespread public protest against its exorbitant rate hikes. When Bechtel later sought $50 million from the people of Cochabamba in a secretive World Bank trade court, The Democracy Center led the global campaign against the case, which resulted in Bechtel's 2006 decision to drop its demand, for a token payment of thirty cents.
Since the water revolt The Democracy Center has become an important worldwide source of information for journalists, researchers and others on the effects of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic policies in Bolivia and Latin America, including its forthcoming new book, Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization (University of California Press, 2008).
The World
The Democracy Center began its global work in 1992, when it was invited to go to (still-apartheid) South Africa to work with a nationwide network of public health workers to help them become an advocacy force for health rights. In the 15 years since, The Democracy Center has led advocacy trainings and served as a counselor and resource to citizens and social justice groups in every major region of the world. We have worked with clean election campaigners in Mexico; women's groups in Tanzania; health advocates in the former USSR; and activists on a variety of other rights and justice issues in Thailand, the Balkans, Paraguay, and in other countries across five continents.
We have been especially involved in the effort to engage citizens in the monitoring of public budgets and in advocating on how their governments raise and spend public funds. As a core partner of The International Budget Project (IBP) , The Democracy Center has written three major studies: on budgets and human rights; tracking gas and oil revenue; and the influence of global institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Center carried out case studies of citizen budget work in Brazil and Croatia and also helped found the IBP's Civil Society Budget Initiative, which provides financial and technical assistance to civil society budget groups in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.