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Meet the change leaders: Cynthia Richie Terrell

Cynthia Richie Terrell
RepresentWomen
David L. Nevins
By David L. NevinsSep 26, 2024
David L. Nevins
David L. Nevins serves as co-publisher of The Fulcrum. Additionally, Nevins serves as co-founder and Board Chairman of the Bridge Alliance. Nevins brings business acumen, vision and a tireless this-must-and-can-be-done zeal to the burgeoning movement to bridge divides to transform the political process. As a business leader, Nevins excels at building bridges between people and organizations from the right, left and center for civilized conversation and then action. He co-founded the Bridge Alliance because, as he says, “No matter how well managed and how well funded anyone organization is, significant political reform will not happen without an alliance to further collaborative interactions. Together we can and will raise the collective impact of all.” He is a member of the Aspen Institute Society of Fellows, with a focus on the Aspen Rodel Fellowship in Public Leadership, he established and continues to work with The Nevins Democracy Leaders program at Penn State University. Nevins graduated with honors in economics from Penn State in 1969 and received an M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.
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Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

Cynthia Richie Terrell, the founder and executive director of RepresentWomen, is an outspoken advocate for institutional reforms to advance women’s representation and leadership in the United States.

Terrell and her husband, Rob Richie. helped to found FairVote — a nonpartisan champion of electoral reforms that give voters greater choice, a stronger voice and a more representative democracy. Terrell has worked on projects related to women’s representation, democracy and voting system reform in the United States and has helped parliamentarians around the globe meet United Nations goals for women’s representation and leadership.

She has worked as campaign manager and field director for candidates for the presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate and governor. She has also been involved in state and city-wide initiative efforts, including a state equal rights amendment.

In 2024 Terrell was named one of Washington, D.C.’s top policy experts and received a Generational Impact Award for her work on voting system reform. Terrell is a member of Citizen University’s Civic Collaboratory and was named a Brewer fellow along with a cohort of leaders in the democracy reform movement. She has a chapter on women and the presidency in the 2020 volume of “The Best Candidate: Presidential Nomination in Polarized Times.”

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Terrell writes a weekly column on women’s representation for Ms. Magazine and has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Hill, Refinery29, The Nation, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, The American Prospect, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun and The Christian Science Monitor. She has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” and has participated in numerous radio shows, podcasts and panel discussions on the topics of electoral reform and systems strategies to advance women’s representation and leadership.

Terrell is an avid knitter and gardener, has three children, and is active in local politics and in the Quaker community. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College in 1986.

I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Terrell for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of her democracy reform work.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

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The Bureaucrat’s Dilemma When Dealing with a Charismatic Autocrat

Excerpt from To Stop a Tyrant by Ira Chaleff

In my book To Stop a Tyrant, I identify five types of a political leader’s followers. Given the importance of access in politics, I range these from the more distant to the closest. In the middle are bureaucrats. No political leader can accomplish anything without a cadre of bureaucrats to implement their vision and policies. Custom, culture and law establish boundaries for a bureaucrat’s freedom of action. At times, these constraints must be balanced with moral considerations. The following excerpt discusses ways in which bureaucrats need to thread this needle.

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Project 2025 is a conservative guideline for reforming government and policymaking during the second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross-partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased, critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025. To that end, we also amplify the work of others in doing the same.

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We’ve all heard the saying: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” We know the truth of this: we have lived it, and watch in horror as it plays out now, as it has throughout history.

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