The Institute for a Democratic Future (IDF) was founded in 1996 by co-founders Dean Nielsen and Lisa Witter.
DEAN NIELSEN, CO-FOUNDER
Dean M. Nielsen was recently the Regional Director for Progressive Majority, a national organization dedicated solely to electing progressive champions at the state and local levels. Dean started with the organization in 2004, serving as the Washington State Director, where he helped to recruit, train and elect more than 100 candidates for local office and holding the highest win rate in the organization at the time. A career politico, he has worked on more than 100 campaigns for elections throughout the Western United States and Eastern Europe starting with Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. His lengthy client list includes Governor Gary Locke (WA), Solidarity Party (Poland), the Gore/Lieberman Campaign, as well as issue campaigns for groups such as EMILY’s List, NARAL Pro-Choice Washington, SEIU, Harborview Hospital and the Democratic Party in several states.
He was instrumental in building and expanding the grassroots and grasstops lobbying program for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a non-profit based in Washington, DC. At TFK, he and his staff of 10 field lobbyists generated pressure on Members of Congress to support legislation on FDA regulation of tobacco products, fire safe cigarettes and other issues. Dean was the lead staff for the public health community in defeating the “Class Action Reform Act” of 2003 which was defeated in the U.S. Senate by one vote.
Dean co-founded the Institute for a Democratic Future in 1997 and served as its first executive director through 2001. He has served the Democratic Party in a variety of capacities, including as a member of the Democratic National Platform Committee and as a two-term President of the Young Democrats of Washington. Dean is a recipient of the Warren G. Magnuson “Democrat of the Year” award and made his screen début as an on-air advisor for the 10-episode SHOWTIME Television program “American Candidate.
LISA WITTER, CO-FOUNDER
Lisa Witter is an experienced executive, social entrepreneur, communications strategist, author, blogger and social commentator with expertise in the not-for-profit field, philanthropy, politics, women’s issues, health, social marketing, new media, international development, corporate social responsibility, and leveraging pop culture for social change. She frequently gives workshops and lectures in these areas for the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. In 2010 she was named one of 197 Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum.
As chief strategy officer of Fenton, the largest public interest communications firm in the country, she heads-up the firm’s work in innovation and co-leads the practices in women’s issues, health, social entrepreneurship and global affairs for clients including Women for Women International, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai, MoveOn.org, International Criminal Court, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, The American Medical Association, David and Lucille Packard Foundation, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Stonyfield Yogurt. She has served on Center for Disease Control and Prevent expert panels on parenting and teen violence, and, most recently, co-led an awareness and action campaign around Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn’s best-seller Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.
Witter is co-author with Lisa Chen of The She Spot: Why Women are the Market for Changing the World and How to Reach Them. She is a co-founder of the award-winning SheSource.org, an online brain trust of women experts to help close the gender gap among commentators in the news media. She was honored as an outstanding activist and expert on women’s issues by Oxygen.com for her work on a national campaign against privatizing Social Security during the 2000 presidential election. She has also co-founded two programs to encourage people to run for political office: Emerge and the Institute for a Democratic Future.
She has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, FOX News, CBS Early Show, O, the Oprah Magazine and has been published in Newsday, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Anderson Cooper 360, Huffington Post, AlterNet and Blogher. In 2004 Witter was a contestant on the Showtime reality show, “American Candidate.”
She is on the advisory boards for Climate Counts, Center for Philanthropy’s Women and Philanthropy Institute, Momsrising.org, Vitanna.org, the Op-Ed Project, Energy Inside, SheWrites, Plant a Fish, and Women for Women International. Witter, a native of Washington State, lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. She studied at the University of California Santa Cruz, the University of Washington and the Universita di Padova, Italia.