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:

• The Sustainable Food Alliance is a left-of-center advocacy group that promotes what it calls “sustainable agriculture” and a transition towards using “sustainable food and farming systems.” It works alongside the Sustainable Food Trust, a United Kingdom-based charity founded in 2011 by environmental advocate Patrick Holden. The Sustainable Food Alliance has received funding from foundations including the Tides Foundation, the Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation, the California Endowment, the Seattle Foundation, the National Philanthropic Trust, the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, and the Atlantic Foundation.
• All of Us is a research program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It was created during the Obama Administration in 2015, through the NIH’s Precision Medicine Initiative Working Group of the Advisory Committee to the Director. All of Us aims to collect genetic samples of up to 1 million participants to study the impact of ancestry and genetic traits. Its CEO Josh Denny is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
• GoFundMe.Org is a nonprofit associated with the digital crowdfunding platform GoFundMe. As of 2026, its current and former partners include Leonardo DiCaprio, Laurene Powell Jobs, Ellen DeGeneres, and former first lady Michelle Obama. Its partner foundations and corporations have included the Obama Foundation, the Asian American Foundation, the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, Welcome.US, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft.
• Hunt Alternatives is an advocacy group that claims to promote “global peace, equity, justice, and civil rights.” It was founded by Swanee Hunt, a philanthropist and the former US Ambassador to Austria during the Clinton Administration. In recent years Hunt Alternatives has been largely funded by Swanee Hunt and the Swanee Hunt Family Foundation.
• Bank Information Center (BIC) is a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for “transparency, accountability, sustainability, and inclusion in development finance.” According to its website, BIC works to “monitor and influence the policies and operations of the World Bank Group” by partnering with other organizations to perform “research and advocacy aimed at improving and reforming [Multilateral Development Bank] policy and practices.” BIC has received funding from left-of-center groups such as the Ford Foundation, the Climateworks Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Action Fund, and the National Endowment for Democracy.