Mission: To build the national will to expand opportunity for all Americans.

Background:
The Opportunity Agenda, a project of the San Francisco-based Tides Center, is a communications, research, and advocacy organization launched in 2006 by Alan Jenkins, former director of human rights at the Ford Foundation; Phoebe Eng, a former corporate attorney and a program and network strategist to corporations, public agencies, and foundations; and Brian Smedley, director of the Institute of Medicine study Unequal Treatment: Confronting Ethnic and Racial Disparities in Health Care (8 pages, PDF). To ensure that the United States lives up to its promise as the land of opportunity, the organization works to eliminate barriers that keep people from achieving their true potential — such as limited access to health care, racial or gender bias, underperforming schools — through public discourse, social change, and policy solutions.

Outstanding Web Features:
The Opportunity Agenda Web site contains resources for advocates, policy makers, and citizens, including a human rights primer, description of core values inherent in human rights, policy briefs, fact sheets, public actions, and the report State of Opportunity in America (executive summary, 36 pages, PDF; full document, 164 pages, PDF). The Web site also provides recommended blogs (its own will launch in spring 2006) and information on the organization's health equity initiative, advocacy toolkit (available in April 2006), and summer internships.