COLLABORATIVE DEMOCRACY - Key Persons
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- Editor of the Harvard Business Review
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- Executive Vice President of the National Taxpayers Union
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- Founder and Co - Chair of Unite America
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- Managing Director of the Consensus Building Institute
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- President and Co - Founder of the American Sustainable Business Council
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- Richard Fischer Chair at the Urban Institute and Co - Founder of the Tax Policy Center
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- Co - Founder and Former President of the Niskanen Institute
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- Co - Founder of the Bridge Alliance and the Social Venture Network
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- Chairman of the National Association for Community Mediation
Stuart Butler, senior fellow at Brookings and former director of Center for Policy Innovation at Heritage
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- Senior Fellow
- Founding Co - Editor
Larry Diamond, senior fellow at Hoover Institution and founding co-editor of Journal of Democracy
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- Co - Founder of Policy Consensus Initiative
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- Vice Chair and Co - Founder of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School
Lawrence Susskind, vice chair and co-founder of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School
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- Vice President, Operations
Mike Tedesco has spent his career in local economic development and public administration. Hehas administered approximately $500 million in local public/private partnerships throughout the nation. Prior to becoming Vice President ofOperations for CCD, he spent six years with the Spokane Tribe of Indians, three of which as the tribe's chief administrator, whereby he accomplished everything from winning aPresidential Promise Zone designation, to successfully influencing state andfederal legislation, to constructing a $60 million gaming facility. As a local civic executive, he has led the revitalization efforts of two former Rustbelt cities,managed local special districts, and set an isolated Colorado mountain town onthe path toward becoming a full-fledged resort community. Along the way he also managed to publish a book on urban planning and economic development that is routinely utilized in college classrooms.
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- Director, Special Projects
Paul Kramer is a passionate advocate for policy and civic engagement, having made significant strides in these fields from a young age. His early career included prominent roles in a Presidential campaign and a local Congressional campaign, where he quickly rose from intern to senior-level positions. His dedication to youth engagement saw him launch the Institute for Youth in Policy as CEO, which became a nonpartisan platform for young minds to voice opinions and engage in thoughtful discourse. Under his leadership, the Institute produced thousands of pages of policy content, trained over 500 fellows, and received over 8 million site views.
Paul's efforts with the Institute have led to partnerships with prestigious organizations like the College Board and universities such as Harvard and Stanford. Currently, Paul serves as the Director of Special Projects and Analytics at the Center for Collaborative Democracy. Here, he uses his experience to guide major projects and initiatives, contributing significantly to the Center's work from angles of policy, design, and computer science. His unique perspective, fueled by his academic pursuits in Organizational Development and Data Science at Vanderbilt University, continues to drive his contributions to the Center and beyond.
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- Founder and Former President of Convergence Center for Policy Resolution
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- Founder and President of FairVote
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- Chief Executive Officer
- Founder and CEO of the Center
Sol Erdman founded the Center for Collaborative Democracy to develop innovative tools for reaching constructive agreements on long-festering political controversies. CCD is currently focused on launching the Grand Bargain Project, which will bring together the men and women whom the American people would most trust to solve our country's economic problems. The project's goals are to develop a combination of economic reforms that will restore our country's fiscal health and promote broad prosperity, and then win wide public support for the plan.
Erdman's expertise on resolving ideological conflict emerged at midlife, when he attended the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law school and did cutting edge research with two of the program's founders. Erdman's articles on how to bridge seemingly irreconcilable differences have appeared in Barrons, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the National Civic Review, State Government News, Roll Call and the Los Angeles Times.
Erdman's first career was at Oppenheimer & Company, a New York investment firm where he rose to senior vice president and head of options arbitrage. He has a BA in theoretical mathematics from Cornell and an MBA from Harvard.
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- Executive Director of Renew Democracy Initiative
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- Senior Policy Advisor at America Achieves