Our Work

Explore Our Impact: Paid Family Leave

With the understanding that paid family leave is “pro-family”—a core value claimed by many Republicans—a group of left and right funders wanted to find a way to equip conservative voters to talk to their legislators and neighbors about the need for paid family leave. To do so, we designed, built, and executed a strategic national and state multi-year campaign. We generated conservative grasstop support that credentialed the issue within the Republican platform and enabled Republicans in Congress to prioritize and advance a bipartisan solution.

Bipartisan Coalition Building
Using our analytic tools and interpersonal connections, we developed a political landscape and forecasted the best way to position Paid Leave to successfully create bipartisan Congressional support.

Executive Project Oversight
We developed, determined, and managed all state and national coalition strategies, assets, and grant partners.

Outreach and Awareness Campaign
In addition to building authentic dialogue and partnerships, we crafted influential, action-oriented content to disseminate to our target audiences, including articles, social media messaging, and polling. We also created the only comprehensive conservative paid family leave website and educational toolkit supplied to and used in Congressional offices.

Explore Our Impact: CityServe

A flourishing society requires the robust participation of civil society, including faith-based institutions. The Clapham Group partnered with CityServe, a network of affiliated churches dedicated to meeting practical needs in their respective communities, to establish new strategies for connecting resources with the point of need. Together, Clapham and CityServe also shared the impact of church-based service on Capitol Hill and with the Executive Branch.

Connecting Resources to the Point of Need
CityServe successfully serves as the conduit between available resources and the point of need. This was especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains the case during times of natural disaster. Clapham helped CityServe identify federal partners in these efforts, resulting not just in strong new collaborations, but more importantly, in a more efficient and effective response to those in a time of need.

A Universal Language
A hurricane in Florida. A war in Ukraine. A family in need. There is a common thread between each of these points of need, and a common language that speaks to each need. CityServe speaks that language by showing up in each of these situations with a helping hand and a posture of service. Clapham is honored to come alongside CityServe in this mission by identifying government, entertainment, and private industry partners to support and amplify the impact.

Explore Our Impact: The ONE Campaign

The heart of Clapham’s work has always been in building bridges for the common good. One of the Clapham Group’s first clients was the ONE Campaign, a global movement campaigning to end extreme poverty and preventable disease by 2030. Beginning in 2007, Clapham was brought on to help ONE build relationships to faith communities and equip congregations to raise awareness about the global AIDS crisis. Over the next 12 years, Clapham would help develop initiatives, craft theologically appropriate messaging and products for faith communities, and build long-lasting relationships between ONE and people of faith.

Turning Ideas into Initiatives
The Clapham Group helped the ONE Campaign brainstorm and then build out and run ONE Sabbath, an initiative to raise awareness and mobilize Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu communities to work to end extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. This campaign involved identifying and engaging key voices in different faith communities, creating assets for a variety of faith traditions, and making sure the website was multi-faith and inclusive.

Engaging and Mobilizing People of Faith
The Clapham Group partnered with Relevant magazine to create a clear universe of faith-tagged members within the ONE Campaign. Through that process, we found that the ONE members who were acquired through faith channels were more productive and lasted longer than any other member community they had. These members were not only more active, but involved in higher-quality engagements.

Making Connections
We worked with the ONE Campaign to build bridges and form partnerships with artists and musicians who were motivated by their faith. We would identify players who could help bridge to faith communities—connecting ONE’s co-founder Bono with theologians like Eugene Peterson and faith leaders like Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly.

Explore Our Impact: The College Board

The Clapham Group specializes in uncovering common ground and pioneering unforeseen partnerships. In 2013, the College Board, recognizing a need to build bridges to faith, conservative, and homeschool communities, engaged Clapham to help them with outreach to these communities. The result of Clapham’s work was the establishment of long-term relationships between evangelical leaders and College Board’s senior leadership, increased visibility and trust within the homeschooling community, and a successful effort to engage conservative advisors on their Advanced Placement (AP) exams.

Uncovering Common Ground with Faith Groups
Through a series of convenings, the Clapham Group created opportunities for evangelical and homeschool leaders and the College Board to find common ground. Though disagreements about methods were acknowledged, the parties were able to listen to each other and respect each other’s motivation to make education accessible and enriching for students. As a result of the relationships formed, the CEO of the College Board spoke out in National Review on behalf of Wheaton College, presented at a Q Conference in 2018, and penned essays published in Christianity Today.

Connecting Homeschool Communities
The Clapham Group worked with the College Board to pioneer relationships with the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and other homeschooling groups. For a long time, the College Board knew homeschoolers used the AP exams and the College-Level Exam Program (CLEP), but had no direct connections to the homeschool community. Through our engagement, we facilitated relationship-building between HSLDA and the College Board, which resulted in rapid responses to issues facing homeschoolers seeking access to AP courses, exams, the PSAT, SAT, and CLEP.

Engaging Conservatives
The College Board wanted to depolarize their AP courses and exams and ensure they were not politically skewed. The Clapham Group created the “Red Team,” a group of young conservatives who performed comprehensive reviews of AP courses and exams for political bias.

Explore Our Impact: Humane World Action Fund

There are countless areas of public policy that enjoy sweeping bipartisan support, but most of them struggle to capitalize on that common ground due to translation challenges between parties and advocacy groups. Clapham is honored to come alongside the Humane World Action Fund (HWAF) on behalf of two such macro issues: 1) The humane care of all of creation, and 2) The defense of state jurisdiction in a federalist society.

Identifying Common Ground

The Clapham Group helped HWAF conduct polling to identify and articulate the significant common ground that exists among American citizens across a wide political spectrum. Using this data and credentialed messengers who are representative of various points on the political landscape, Clapham and HWAF educated decision-makers on the significant common ground that exists, and successfully defended against a campaign rooted in the suggestion that there is no common ground to find.

Unusual Allies

Clapham and HWAF brought together a diverse set of voices and assisted them in speaking in a unified fashion to advance the identified common ground. This effort, while certainly effective in the immediate goal, also points the way for future endeavors: There is still—even in the current polarized climate—opportunities to identify and build on large areas of common ground.

Explore Our Impact: We Own Now

We partnered with Nashville-based rapper and record label owner Derek Minor to launch an initiative addressing the wealth gap and promoting Black ownership through storytelling, the arts, and advocacy. Out of a shared vision for a more equitable and secure future for the next generation of Black Americans, we came together to dream up a new narrative-shifting campaign. We Own Now was created to reframe the conversation around wealth and legacy in Black communities. The team is currently developing a national concert and storytelling tour and a creative capital–incentivized financial literacy app.

Strategic Partnerships & Fundraising

We have built relationships and coached meetings with impact investors, philanthropic organizations, and corporation executives to pitch the Ownership model and explore synergy with existing social responsibility goals. 

Campaign Building

We have supported all parts of the campaign building process, including business development, brand and social media strategy, and narrative building. 

Policy Advising

We assessed current and proposed legislation to find policies that decrease the wealth gap and have bipartisan support, and created a strategy for using the Ownership platform to advocate for legislation. We also set up meetings with the Ownership impact ambassadors on Capitol Hill with the White House, congressional staff, and policy experts.

Explore Our Impact: More Productions

If Clapham was to initiate social change, we needed an entity that was shaping the moral imagination and ripening the cultural landscape through creative storytelling and content production. MORE Productions is a creative content development and consulting firm specializing in storytelling in multiple formats.

Back before the idea became popular, we like to think that we coined the phrase “culture is upstream from politics.” The original Clapham group was spearheaded by both a political leader (William Wilbeforce) and a poet (Hannah More) who believed in a holistic theory of social change; one that leverages both cultural and political influence. If Clapham was to initiate social change, we needed an entity that was shaping the moral imagination and ripening the cultural landscape through creative storytelling and content production. MORE Productions is a creative content development and consulting firm specializing in storytelling in multiple formats, including feature films, documentaries, short films, stage plays, comic books, graphic novels, animation and computer graphics.

Feature Films, Documentaries, & Short Films

MORE has produced films for clients as well as for financial investors. In 2019, MORE also produced a short documentary retrospective marking the 20th anniversary of the passage of PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the role the American faith community played in both passing and implementing the legislation. MORE has been involved in the production of feature-length documentaries, including Refuge about the most diverse square mile in America: Clarkston, Georgia. MORE has also participated in the production and distribution of a number of feature films, including The Great Gilly Hopkins with Kathy Bates and Glenn Close; The Ticket with Dan Stevens; and Silence, directed by Martin Scorcese.

Stage Plays

In addition to its work in film, MORE has been involved in a handful of stage productions. MORE was part of a team that produced Babette’s Feast off-Broadway in 2019; beyond the production itself, MORE also handled group sales for the show and ran an outreach campaign promoting awareness about the production and its key themes amongst affinity audiences. Currently MORE and its collaborator Compagnia de’ Colombari are in development of a stage adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s short story Revelation.

Comic Books & Graphic Novels

Outside of the performing arts, MORE also manages business operations for Cave Pictures Publishing, a comic book and graphic novel publishing company. Cave Pictures Publishing is a wall for modern myth-telling. Their projects include wholly original works by acclaimed artists in the comics industry as well as original adaptations of existing public domain and copyrighted works.

Explore Our Impact: Social Capital Campaign

Research testifies that there is a wreckage of trust among the American people. We started a collaborative center-right project to promote social capital and the institutions that create it in order to combat political polarization.

The Social Capital Campaign, originally inspired by the Joint Economic Committee's Social Capital Project, was internally developed and launched by The Clapham Group in 2021 to address this painful truth. The campaign is a collaborative center-right project to promote social capital and the institutions that create it in order to combat political polarization and provide a narrative framework that promotes a number of key policy areas including family stability, family affordability, youth investment, civil society, and work.

Sociopolitical Landscape Analysis

We produced an internal analysis that surveyed existing research on polarization in the U.S. and the role, factors, and measurements of social capital in the U.S. We also produced an internal landscape, review, and assessment of national organizations and other markets/subject leaders who are attentive to counteracting political polarization and initiating trust-building programs/movements/coalitions. This initial research provided context for the campaign and revealed the present, unique opportunity for a center-right entity to engage in social capital building efforts.

Coalition Building

We successfully recruited an advisory board of 13 influential leaders to advise the Campaign. The board includes leading policy experts, corporate leaders, elite scholars, and other extremely valuable partners across the conservative spectrum. 

Campaign & Collaborative Project Development

Since the Social Capital Campaign’s conception in January 2021, we have collected research, formed a valuable advisory board, created a funding strategy, identified and initiated strategic partnerships, and hosted three online convenings with leading thinkers and policy experts. In July 2021, we initiated the next phase of campaign development: a 12-month process to produce working papers and policy proposals that address key issues, opportunities, existing players, and existing policies relevant to five particular policy areas inspired by the JEC SCP and specified in early stages of research. The 12-month process also includes collaboration with center-left groups that will inform our policy research via participation and conversation on collaborative roundtables with the intention of establishing areas of policy consensus and broadening the Campaign’s audience.