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Chris Gates is a thought leader in the fields of democratic theory and practice and
political and civic engagement. For the past three decades he has been a leading voice for
examining and strengthening democratic processes and structures and developing new
tools and approaches to both engagement and decision-making. Gates has been mentored
by innovative reformers like John Gardner, Henry Cisneros, Bill Bradley, Terry Sanford and
William Winter, and thus shares their commitment to a country full of communities where
citizens are engaged and empowered to help all of us reach our individual and collective
potential.
Gates currently serves as Executive Director of PACE, Philanthropy for Active Civic
Engagement. PACE is an affinity group of the Council on Foundations and serves as
a learning collaborative of American foundations that fund work in the fields of civic
engagement, service and democratic practice. In this role Gates works within the
philanthropic community to encourage conversation about how to strengthen democratic
practice, with a particular emphasis on the role that information and social media can
play in empowering citizens to become more engaged. Gates also speaks and teaches
extensively around the country, and around the world, on the broad topics of civic
engagement and democratic theory, including leadership training, community problem
solving, political reform and democratic renewal.
He previously served for eleven years as President of the National Civic League (NCL),
America’s oldest good government organization, founded in 1894 by Theodore Roosevelt.
NCL helped create the field of public administration and was the originator of the council-
manager form of local government. During his time at NCL he advised hundreds of
communities on their civic engagement strategies and led them through visioning/strategic
planning processes. While at NCL he also served as the Co-Director of the United States
Healthy Communities Initiative.
Gates is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and serves on
the board of Public Agenda. He has previously served on the boards of the Council for the
Advancement of Citizenship, the California Center for Civic Renewal and INDEPENDENT
SECTOR. He was a member of the Civic Engagement Working Group of the Obama-Biden
campaign in 2008 and served as co-chair of the Saguaro Seminar, a research project based
at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government working to find ways to build social capital in
America.
Gates received a Master of Public Administration degree from the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University where he studied the interaction between the public and
private sectors, and an honors degree in environmental economics from the University of
Colorado. He has also studied political economics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich,
England and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Law degree by Elizabethtown College in
2006.
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