Research Collaborative Fund

The Fund has provided grants to the Brookings Institution to conduct studies on voter registration efforts during tax collection periods. ² The fund also provided grants to the Public Policy Institute of California. ¹

Activities

As of 2025, the Research Collaborative Fund’s website did not provide any details on the content of its research. However, it claimed that its research is focused on “feelings, emotions, and motivations” because “Humans are much more motivated by emotion than reason.” The organization holds weekly focus groups on numerous topics. The Fund “works with a research team of half a dozen different top Democratic pollsters.” ³

The Ford Foundation’s grant database reports giving four grants to the Fund for different research purposes. One grant is “to develop a learning network for practitioners working on deep civic engagement, and developing pipeline for grad students.” Another grant was to help the Fund create “a rigorous base of research knowledge to inform, engage, and strengthen civic engagement practice.” A third grant was given to the Fund “to promote understanding of the civic engagement and elections and voting policies through nonpartisan research.” A fourth grant enabled the Fund to “undertake rigorous research on critical issues in the U.S. democracy and improve civic engagement practices.” ⁴

The 2018 Form 990 of the Democracy Fund reports the organization granted $100,000 to the New Venture Fund to be distributed to the Research Collaborative Fund for “civic engagement and elections.” ⁵

The Fund outlines a “theory of change” that in order for a political message to successfully spread, “it must engage the base, persuade the middle, and alienate the opposition.” ⁶

The Fund does not list any of its clients on its website, ⁷ though in 2019 the Brookings Institution referred to the Fund as a funder of a research project on how to link tax filings to voter registration. ⁸

Freedom Over Fascism

Since at least 2024, the Fund hosted numerous gatherings as part of the Freedom over Fascism movement, a left-of-center protest movement against President Donald Trump. In September 2024, the Fund partnered with Indivisible and ASO Communications to preemptively combat alleged efforts by Trump to challenge the presidential election results if Vice President Kamala Harris (D) was victorious. A January 2025 advertisement for a meeting trained attendees “how to most effectively confront and counter the MAGA authoritarian agenda.” An October 2025 email invited attendees to an event joined by Democratic candidate, Media Matters for America journalist, and left-wing activist Kat Abughazaleh to prepare members “to aid efforts to resist” National Guard deployments in Chicago. ^{9 10 11}

Leadership

As of 2025, the Research Collaborative Fund did not list any of its leadership or staff on its website. However, it stated that it works with Democratic political consultant Anat Shenker-Osorio on its research projects. Shenker-Osorio is the founder and principal of ASO Communications, a similar left-of-center political research and consulting group, and the host of the Words to Win By podcast. Her work has been used by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Centre for Australian Progress, the Irish Migrant Centre, the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and LUSH International. ^{3 12}