InfluenceWatch Friday

InfluenceWatch, a project of Capital Research Center, is a comprehensive and ever-evolving compilation of our research into the numerous advocacy groups, foundations, and donors working to influence the public policy process. The website offers transparency into these influencers’ funding, motives, and connections while providing insight often neglected by other watchdog groups.

The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interested parties research to use in reporting on significant topics that are often overlooked by the American public.

CRC is pleased to present some of the most significant additions to InfluenceWatch in the past week:

• Trust for Public Land Action Fund is a California-based advocacy group that organizes campaigns supporting state and local ballot measures to create or extend public funding for parks and land conservation. The group was created as the lobbying arm of the Trust for Public Land, a group that acquires and transfers private land to public entities for use as open spaces such as parks or trails. According to its website, as of 2026 the two groups have helped support the passage of 687 ballot measures that generated over $112 billion in voter approved funds.
• Repairers of the Breach is a North Carolina-based activist group that trains religious leaders and community organizers to promote left-of-center electoral and community-based policies. It was founded in 2015 by pastor William J. Barber II, who was previously the president of the North Carolina NAACP as well as a member of the national NAACP board of directors. Repairers of the Breach’s funders have included the Foundation to Promote Open Society, the Ford Foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the National Philanthropic Trust.
• People’s World is an online newspaper that features “Marxist analysis and opinion developed by the Communist Party” and promotes left-of-center policies on topics such as labor, social justice, environmentalism, and immigration. According to its website, People’s World is a continuation of the Daily Worker newspaper founded in 1924 to “raise the standards of struggle against the few who rob and plunder the many.” It is a member of the International Labor Communications Association, while its staff are represented by the Chicago News Guild-Communication Workers of America. Some staff members also belong to other groups such as the National Writers Union.
• The African Climate Foundation is a regional climate group that advocates for left-of-center energy and climate policies in African countries. It also provides incubation and fiscal hosting services for local groups including New Economy Hub which has received funding from the Climate Emergency Collaboration Group, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the ClimateWorks Foundation. The African Climate Foundation has also received grants from the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

• TechTonic Justice is a technology policy advocacy organization that opposes the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in determining eligibility for public benefits among low-income communities, such as healthcare and public housing. In 2025, TechTonic Justice received a $1.2 million, two-year grant from the Ford Foundation. In February 2025, the group’s founder Kevin De Liban wrote an opinion piece for The Hillwarning that the Second Trump administration’s embrace of AI to uncover government waste could negatively impact “civil rights, diversity, transgender people, reproductive health care (including abortion)…science, journalism, immigrants and low-wage workers.”