Civic Health Project is dedicated to repairing America’s extreme political divisions, fostering bridge-building and social cohesion, and enabling healthier civil discourse and decision-making across our citizenry, politics, and media. We pursue this mission primarily by awarding grants and incubating various strategic projects, while also inviting other funders to join us in accelerating our impact.

We approach our grantmaking and strategic investments with a venture capital mindset. We rigorously evaluate each organization’s ability to scale its impact and achieve sustainable funding. We take a portfolio view, evaluating how different organizations within specific verticals contribute to the larger mission of improving civic health. By taking a wide landscape view and using venture due diligence rigor, we optimize our investments to achieve a “unicorn” outcome: a vibrant and healthy democracy. 

Our work is steeped in leading-edge social science, informed by rigorous focus on measurement and evaluation, and grounded in the deep, hands-on relationships we have forged with academics, practitioners, peer funders, and many other experts. We have earned our reputation for working openly, humbly, curiously, and collaboratively across a highly dynamic – and increasingly impactful – ecosystem of changemakers concerned with repairing America's political and social fabric.

Broadly, Civic Health Project engages in four main areas of activity:

1. Grantmaking & Fundraising. We award grants to practitioners, creatives, and academics who are pursuing healthier discourse, bridge-building, collaboration, and problem-solving across our political and social  divides. To augment our primary funding source (our co-founder Rob Romero’s donor-advised fund), we raise external funding and also pursue collaborative co-funding arrangements. Review our grant portfolio here.

2. Strategic Projects. Where we see important gaps or opportunities, we launch and incubate strategic projects until they can take root independently. America Talks, the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, and Bridge Entertainment Labs are three examples of large-scale, strategic projects launched with funding and / or incubation support from us. 

3. Field Building & Advocacy. We believe in the power of collective impact to help address society’s most complex, intractable problems; through advisory roles and participation in working groups, we actively steer the bridge-building field’s efforts towards collaborative action, best practice sharing, continuous learning, and rigorous self reflection. 

4. Measurement & Evaluation. We invest in academic research and practitioner programs that are specifically concerned with measuring the efficacy of bridge-building interventions, in order to increase rigor in our vetting of practitioner organizations and to deliver reliable accountability metrics to the broader bridging ecosystem. 

Project Director Bios:

Kristin Hansen: As the Executive Director of Civic Health Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit philanthropy, Kristin is dedicated to accelerating the efforts of practitioners, creatives, and academics who seek to reduce polarization, foster social cohesion, and improve civil discourse in our citizenry, politics, and media.

In addition to her role at Civic Health Project, Kristin Serves as a Co-Chair for the More Perfect campaign, and as an advisory board member for AllSides, Listen First Project, and Business for America. She also serves as a lecturer and coach in strategic communications at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

Prior to her current work in civil discourse, Kristin held senior executive roles at IBM, Intel, and multiple start-up software companies. She holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in International Policy Studies from Stanford University, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Rob Romero co-founded Civic Health Project in recognition of the fact that acrimony and incredulity towards opposing views (and the people who hold these views) has deepened in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2016 presidential election.

Rob is a passionate advocate for research, insights, and tools that help human behavior, social media, and democracy to "play better" together, reducing the corrosive forces of polarization. Prior to founding Civic Health Project, Rob supported multiple projects and initiatives to enhance media literacy and civic reasoning.

Rob is currently CEO of Connective Capital, an investor in emerging growth companies. Prior to launching Connective, Rob held leadership roles in marketing and engineering at Cisco and various tech startups. Rob earned his BA in Economics, BS in Electrical Engineering, and MS in Engineering Economic Systems from Stanford University.