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:

• Veterans for Idaho Voters (VFIF) is an election reform advocacy group that wants to implement ranked-choice voting (RCV) within the state of Idaho. In May 2023 the VFIF was one of several organizations to advocate for a ballot measure allowing for open primaries, in which primary elections within the state would be open to all voters regardless of their party affiliation, as well as implement RCV statewide.
• Monument Lab is a group that advocates for changing or removing public monuments that they claim primarily depicted white men, war, and conquest. In early 2023, the organization released a podcast, Plot of Land, claiming that land use in the U.S was exploitative due to privatization and racial capitalism and called for changing land ownership policies.
• Hugh Lane Wellness Foundation is a health and advocacy organization that provides health services for LGBT and HIV-positive residents of western Pennsylvania as well as gender and sexuality training for healthcare providers. In 2023, it was one of 200 organizations to sign onto a letter organized by the Human Rights Campaign demanding that major retailer Target return LGBT-themed merchandise that had been removed or made less prominent to its store displays.
• Coalition for a New Jersey Reparations Task Force is a project of the Say the Word: Reparations campaign organized by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. The coalition is a collaborative of different activist groups calling for state officials to create a task force to examine the possibility of distributing reparations to the descendants of slaves in the state, claiming that New Jersey was historically, “the slave state of the north.”
• National Farm Worker Ministry (NFWM) is a labor advocacy group that provides support for farm and migrant workers. The NFWM has called for a boycott of Wendy’s due to the restaurant chain’s use of tomatoes imported from Mexico instead those grown in the U.S. In March 2023, members of the organization, along with fellow labor advocacy group Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), marched on the home of Wendy’s CEO in protest.