Civic Enterprises

The Company

Civic Enterprises is a public policy firm that helps corporations, nonprofits, foundations, universities and governments develop and spearhead innovative public policies to strengthen our communities and country.

Our Mission

Created to enlist the private, public and nonprofit sectors to help address our Nation's toughest problems, Civic Enterprises draws on some of the best minds in the country to fashion new initiatives and strategies that achieve measurable results.

We feature a talented team of policymakers, public officials, senior advisors to Presidents and Members of Congress, social scientists, and leaders in the for-profit and nonprofit communities. Our staff has extensive experience serving at the highest levels of government and in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. In tackling your organization's project, we will also call on the vast talents of our company's Policy Council, who are leading experts with broad experience in many public policy areas.

For information about the services that we provide, please visit the Services section.

President & CEO

John Bridgeland

John Bridgeland was a Teaching Fellow in the fall at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he offered a class on Presidential Decision Making. Most recently, Bridgeland served as Assistant to the President of the United States and the first Director of the USA Freedom Corps. In that role, he coordinated more than $1 billion in domestic and international service initiatives and worked with non-profits, corporations and schools to foster a culture of service in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.
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Principal

James C. Capretta

James C. Capretta is a Principal of Civic Enterprises, LLC. Mr. Capretta is also a Fellow in the Economics and Ethics Program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an Adjunct Fellow with the Global Aging Initiative of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and an Adjunct Fellow with Hudson Institute. Mr. Capretta served as a Visiting Lecturer at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University in 2006 and was a Visiting Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution in 2005-2006.
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Senior Policy Advisor

Rebecca Schamore Friant

Rebcecca Schamore Friant is Senior Education Policy Advisor for Civic Enterprises, where she works on education policy, the high school dropout epidemic, and the role of educational institutions and faith-based organizations in controlling malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Senior Advisor

Gary R. Edson

From 2001 to 2004 Gary R. Edson served in the Bush Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs and Deputy National Security Advisor. He was also the "Sherpa," or lead U.S. negotiator, for the annual G-8 Summits. Among other things, he helped coordinate the development of the President's $15 Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the G8's Broader Middle East initiative. He also supported former Secretary of State James A. Baker III in his successful efforts to get Iraq's creditors to reduce or forgive Iraqi debt.
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Chief of Staff

Mary McNaught

Since joining Civic Enterprises, Mary McNaught has worked on numerous client projects and policy issues in her capacity as chief of staff and policy advisor. On education reform, McNaught worked on the Summit on America's Silent Epidemic, a national forum held in May 2007, and has spoken at state and local summits across the country. She helped develop Grad Nation, a comprehensive guidebook on how communities can substantively address the dropout crisis. In addition, she has helped steer Civic Enterprises' role in the 100 local dropout summits that America's Promise is leading across the country.
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Policy Analyst

Meredith A. Copley

Prior to joining Civic Enterprises, Copley was an account manager at Geneva Global, Inc, a philanthropic advising firm to individual and institutional donors. She managed the project pipeline, granting strategy and reporting for a 12 million USAID grant for HIV/AIDS prevention and care services in Ethiopia and Cote d'Ivoire. Before joining Geneva, Copley served as the Development Coordinator for The Heritage Foundation a public policy think tank in Washington, DC. In this capacity, she directed the stewardship of all funded projects for the foundation's 32 million budget.
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Molly Farren

Before coming to Civic Enterprises, Farren was a student at the University of Arkansas. She graduated in May 2009 with a B.S. in Business Administration, Finance and Real Estate. While at the University of Arkansas, Farren was an assistant to the Vice President of Lindsey & Associates, the largest real estate firm in Northwest Arkansas, where she handled market research, marketing management, and client and colleague follow-up. Along with attending school and working, Farren was active in her sorority, Delta Delta Delta.
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Stu Wulsin

Before becoming a policy analyst at Civic Enterprises, Wulsin worked for Ohio Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones in her Washington Office. Prior to that, Wulsin was a math teacher at a critical-needs high school in Mississippi. Wulsin attended Harvard College, where he studied Social Studies. His thesis, Breaking the Cycle: The Emergence, Implementation, and Extension of the Mental Health Court Model focused on the related issues of mental illness and criminal justice. Wulsin has lived in Santiago, Chile, where he studied at the University of Chile, and in Nairobi, Kenya.
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Policy Council

John J. DiIulio Jr.

John J. DiIulio Jr. is a Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as Faculty Director of the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program. During his leave from Penn in academic year 2000-2001, he served as Assistant to the President of the United States, and first Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
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William Galston

Dr. Galston is a political theorist and author of 6 books and more than 100 articles, who both studies and participates in American politics and domestic policy. Galston was Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy during the first Clinton Administration and Executive Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, which was chaired by Sam Nunn and William Bennett.
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Michael J. Gerson

Michael J. Gerson is the Roger Hertog Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). His work focuses on issues of global health and development, religion and foreign policy, and the democracy agenda. He is a columnist syndicated with the Washington Post, a contributor to Newsweek, and the author of Heroic Conservatism (HarperOne, 2007).
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Stephen Goldsmith

Stephen Goldsmith is the Daniel Paul Professor of Government and the Director of the Innovations in American Government Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is also Chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service. He previously served as Special Advisor to President Bush on faith-based and not for profit initiatives and as chief domestic policy advisor to the 2000 Bush for President campaign.
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Eugene W. Hickok

Eugene W. Hickok is Senior Policy Director at Dutko Worldwide, a government relations and public policy firm in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, Gene served at the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. He also served as Under Secretary of Education for President Bush. For six years he was Secretary of Education for Pennsylvania. Read the Full Biography . . .

Amy Kass

Amy A. Kass is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. For over 25 years, she has been an award-winning teacher of classic texts at the University of Chicago, where she also is a senior fellow in the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy.
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Michelle Nunn

Michelle Nun is the President and CEO of Hands On Network, an organization that provides support and management to local nonprofits to more effectively utilize volunteers. Michelle has been part of the Hands On Network movement through her fourteen-year leadership of Hands On Atlanta from a grassroots startup in 1989 to one of the nation's largest community-based volunteer organizations.
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Robert Putnam

Robert D. Putnam is a Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American politics, international relations, comparative politics, and public policy. He is the founder of The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America, a program that brings together leading practitioners and thinkers for a multi-year discussion to develop broad-scale, actionable ideas to fortify the nation's civic connectedness.
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Timothy P. Shriver

Timothy P. Shriver is the Chairman of Special Olympics. In that capacity, he serves 2.5 million Special Olympics athletes and their families in more than 165 countries. He has helped transform Special Olympics into a movement that focuses on acceptance, inclusion, and respect for individuals with intellectual disabilities in all corners of the globe.
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Harris Wofford

As a former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, chair of America's Promise, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and Special Assistant to President John F. Kennedy, Harris Wofford has dedicated much of his life to making citizen service a common expectation and experience for all Americans.
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Legal Counsel

Randal C. Teague

Mr. Teague serves as counsel to Civic Enterprises. He began his international practice in the late 1970s as counsel with Boston-headquartered Cabot Corporation, where he had responsibilities for the legal requirements of subsidiary corporations and affiliates in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia. In the intervening years, he has represented for-profit and non-profit corporations as to the now former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe more broadly, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and southern and east Africa.
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