[T]he Sanders Institute, a Burlington-based think tank set up by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ wife, Jane, and her son, has stopped accepting donations, and will suspend operation 18 months after its launch.
A press release from the organization said the move to suspend operations during the 2020 presidential election comes in light of Sanders’ recently announced presidential campaign, and seeks to curtail criticism of the organization.
“The organization has taken these actions to avoid confusion or even the misperception of any overlap between the organization and the campaign,” the press release reads.
In shuttering the institute, Sanders and his allies could circumvent the critique, made by Sanders himself in his 2016 bid, that private entities associated with politicians can breed undue influence. The most obvious example of this in 2016 came in the form of the Clinton Foundation, which came under scrutiny for allegedly engaging in “pay-to-play” politics and giving foundational donors special treatment. While the Clinton Foundation voluntarily discloses its donors, the Sanders Institute does not.
Keeping the institute’s doors open could have also spurred questions over its legality. With Sanders now a candidate for office, the institute’s status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit could have come into question, as these structures are specifically barred from engaging “in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.”
While the Vermont senator served no formal role at the think tank, its fellows included frequent campaign surrogates and two members of his family were running it. Sanders also personally donated tens of thousands of dollars to the institute, and his political organization, Our Revolution, gave the institute a $105,000 startup loan.
Last July, a VTDigger investigation found that in its maiden year, the Sanders Institute produced very little substantive work despite a budget of nearly $500,000. Jane Sanders made sweeping promises at the organization’s inception, including that she would visit Alaska to highlight rural and native health conditions and draft a report for the United Nations on eradicating poverty — neither of which ever materialized. Very little work on the think tank’s webpage was original, and the organization’s web traffic has stagnated. While the site racked up 139,000 page views in its first two months, traffic took a nosedive in recent months. The Sanders Institute site saw roughly 9,400 unique page views in January 2019, according to Semrush, a website analytics company.
The institute was run by Jane’s son, David Driscoll, a political neophyte who previously worked at Burton Snowboards. (The Sanders family has faced criticism for allegations of nepotism in the past, including when Jane Sanders, as president of the now-defunct Burlington College, brokered a favorable partnership with a woodworking program run by her daughter, Carina Driscoll.)
The most significant work of the institute was “The Gathering,” a three-day conference in Burlington late last year that hosted progressive luminaries like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, environmental writer Bill McKibben, and actor Danny Glover. Yet this event came under fire for the event’s $350-suggested donation for entrance and a lack of local and diverse voices.
Rutland Area NAACP president Tabitha Pohl-Moore and Steffen Gillom, her colleague at the organization’s Windham County chapter, castigated Sanders in an open letter.
“How do you say that you are a person of the people, how can you be ‘awoken,’ in the words of Victor Lee Lewis, when you come home to Vermont to talk about justice and institutional oppression and don’t invite the very people you represent?” the letter reads.
While the Sanders Institute brought in nearly $500,000 in its first year, it brought an even bigger haul in 2018. According to the Associated Press, the organization raised $730,000 last year from roughly 10,000 donors.
VTDigger submitted detailed questions to the institute asking, among other things, what will happen to the organization’s residual funds. Those questions were not answered by press time, but this story will be updated should more information be provided.
