Congress Funds $17.5 Million for FDR Library Renovations
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum was allocated $17.5 million in the 2009 Federal budget to renovate the library whose infrastructure is largely unimproved since it was opened in 1941. One of the most exciting benefits of the renovation is increased space for permanent exhibits, and the Roosevelt Institute has raised millions in private funds to create vibrant, interactive exhibits to engage visitors in the compelling life stories of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
The renovation project has been carefully designed to maintain the Roosevelt Library's historic character while modernizing the archival infrastructure and making it fully handicapped accessible. The renovation plan permits the Research Room and the Museum to remain operational throughout the refurbishing, using temporary homes in the Henry Wallace Center and the newly renovated William J. vanden Heuvel Gallery. The funding will begin the first phase of infrastructure repair and will make the Roosevelt Library fully handicapped accessible and able to meet contemporary environmental standards.
Can Movement Building Restore Confidence in Government?
A new President and single party control of the executive and legislative branches, combined with an economic crisis unlike any experienced in close to a century, provide a unique opportunity for policy change. A new collaborative project of the Roosevelt Institute and the Center for Community Change seeks to measurably facilitate that process. This project – entitled Assessing Progressive Movement Building – will connect leaders from the policy, advocacy, organizing and grassroots organizations that are pursuing progressive change, with scholars who study their efforts.
The project – encompassing two meetings and a volume of essays – will convene first in Hyde Park, New York, on June 25 and 26, 2009, where sixteen writers from different professional and personal backgrounds will examine the Obama administration’s first six months through the lens of the policy moments and political movements they know best. They will discuss extended outlines of their essays with an equal number of movement leaders and organizers. On October 8-10, 2009, a larger summit at White Oak Plantation, outside Jacksonville, Florida, will lay the foundation for improved scholarly frameworks around movement building and for re-directed or expanded efforts among advocates for achieving policy change. Andy Rich, President of the Roosevelt Institute, describes the project as a “great opportunity to forge new relationships between scholars and activists. The final volume of essays will be of practical and scholarly value; a roadmap of opportunities for, and barriers to, movement building during the Obama presidency.”
This initiative provides the opportunity for the discussion of long-term strategic and substantive goals, which are too often lost to immediate tactical politics and crisis response. The project will forge new relationships between scholars and activists, providing fertile ground and opportunity for “participant observation” on both sides. The conversations will consider the implications of the participant’s current work in restoring public confidence in government (e.g., regulatory power) and as a means of encouraging support for public investment.
Groundbreaking News from Four Freedoms Park
In July 2009, a long held dream becomes a reality. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, designed by the great architect, Louis Kahn is about to happen, 36 years after it was approved as a public-private partnership in 1973. The Roosevelt Institute has committed to raising $20 million for the 4.6 hectare site at the tip of Roosevelt Island while the City and State will finance the rest of the $45 million budget.
Roosevelt Institute Chair Emeritus, William vanden Heuvel, and Board Member Sally Minard have spearheaded the effort and marshaled the many agencies, companies, and individuals engaged in the project. They have requested that Four Freedoms Park be included as one of New York State's "shovel ready" projects in the American Recovery and Re-investment Act. As the months go by we will show you photographs of each construction stage of this magnificent memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt in his home state.
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park will forever remind the world of Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of a better world, a vision he outlined on January 6, 1941, in the midst of world war and turmoil. The Four Freedoms are part of the Charter of the United Nations which is 300 yards away from the Park itself. As the New York Times wrote in 1973, “It would face the sea he loved, the Atlantic he bridged, the Europe he helped to save, the United Nations he inspired.”
The Roosevelt Institution Holds Health Policy and Advocacy Workshop in Washington D.C.
The Roosevelt Institution, a division of the Roosevelt Institute, is a non-profit, non-partisan, national network of campus-based student think tanks that empowers students in the policymaking process. On Friday, April 3rd 2009, one hundred students from across the country gathered in Washington for the Second Annual Spring Health Conference. The two-day policy and advocacy summit featured, among others, keynote speaker Lauren Aronson, Policy Director for the White House Office of Health Reform.
Roosevelters also took their ideas to Capitol Hill, pitching some to Doug Steiger -- New Policy Director for the Senate Democratic Policy Committee -- for possible inclusion in the DPC's 2009 “Fresh 50,” which is a compilation of "fifty cutting-edge policy proposals available for individual members of the Caucus to adopt and develop as their own." (A Roosevelt Institution proposal for Education Reform was included in the 2008 edition of the publication.)
The second day of the conference was an intensive policy workshop focused on developing each student's idea for health policy, including their message and strategy. Roosevelt Institute Board member Neil Proto joined the group to give valuable feedback. The day was exciting and dynamic, with students challenging themselves and one another to craft better proposals. The best of these proposals will appear in the Roosevelt Institution's “10 Ideas for Health Care."