Public Citizen Foundation

The Public Citizen Foundation supports Public Citizen's education, litigation, research, and public information activities. Public Citizen is a national consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in Congress, the executive branch and the courts. Public Citizen fights for openness and democratic accountability in government, for the right of consumers to seek redress in the courts; for clean, safe and sustainable energy sources; for social and economic justice in trade policies; for strong health, safety and environmental protections; and for safe, effective and affordable prescription drugs and health care.

For fifty years, Public Citizen has served as the People’s voice in the halls of power, fighting cor

Goal One: Protecting, Preserving and Advancing Democracy

Goal Two: Addressing the Global Pandemic and Lowering Drug Prices

Goal Three: Climate Change: Defunding Dirty Energy

Over the past 18 months, Public Citizen has focused on expanding and developing our leadership. We have hired and promoted from within for new top-level and mid-level manager positions. To assist our directors and managers taking on new responsibilities—not just for driving effective advocacy strategy, but managing, directing and empowering effective teams—Public Citizen sends all new managers to trainings focused on how to manage effective teams in the nonprofit sector. The trainings and new opportunities that come with managing staff are accompanied by follow-up coaching and training. In addition, Public Citizen facilitates reflective conversations among managers about diversity and equity issues, with an eye on making their teams and advocacy strategies more inclusive and even more effective. We hold annual organization-wide workshops on mutual respect and in 2022 held a half-day interactive seminar on implicit bias, with additional outside coaching and trainings to follow.

To adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, Public Citizen swiftly adjusted both our internal and external work to remain nimble and effective. Internally, Public Citizen staff have been working remotely since March 2020, and we have moved many of our analog processes to electronic methods. Programmatically, our organization immediately pivoted to incorporate a pandemic lens into our work to explore the impacts that COVID-19 has on our issue areas, like money in politics, voting rights, access to healthcare and protecting workers. For example, our Access to Medicines team is focused on multiple strategies to expand vaccine availability to vaccinate the world against COVID-19. Public Citizen follows public health best practices to stay safe during the pandemic, including by allowing staff to work remotely, limiting and restricting travel (based on variants and CDC guidelines) and finding creative ways to mobilize our activists safely.