New Think Tank to Focus on Free Market Solutions to Poverty, Inequality

AUSTIN, Tex.—A group of policy scholars announced the formation of a new non-partisan think tank, The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), dedicated to “expanding economic opportunity to those who least have it,” by “deploying the nation’s leading scholars and the tools of individual liberty, free enterprise, and technological innovation to serve this mission.”

“No political movement can claim the moral authority to lead the United States unless it can make life better for every American,” said FREOPP co-founder and President, Avik Roy. To that end, FREOPP will focus exclusively on public policies and proposed reforms that can have a significant impact on those with incomes or wealth below the U.S. median.

FREOPP’s first major publication, released along with FREOPP’s launch on September 16, is a new edition of Roy’s proposal to achieve market-based universal health coverage, Transcending Obamacare, which includes new sections on reforming the Veterans Health Administration, tackling high prescription drug prices, and adapting digital technologies to health care delivery.

Roy, the Forbes Opinion Editor, was from 2011 to 2016 a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He has worked as a policy advisor to three presidential candidates: Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney. In 2015, National Review described Roy as “one of the GOP’s sharpest policy minds.”

The new foundation, headquartered in Austin, Texas, was co-founded by Ames Brown and Avik Roy. Brown and Roy met at Yale; Brown chaired the Yale Political Union’s Independent Party around the same time that Roy was leading its Conservative Party. “FREOPP is the natural home for such important research at this level of rigor,” said Brown.

Serving on FREOPP’s Board of Directors, along with Brown and Roy, are Juleanna Glover and Lanhee Chen. Chen, the David and Diane Steffy Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was Mitt Romney’s Policy Director in 2012, and a Senior Advisor to Marco Rubio in 2016. “I’m excited to work with the talented team of people that have come together to form FREOPP,” said Chen. “For the conservative movement to prosper in the future, it must refocus its attention on how to create opportunity for Americans who need it most.”

FREOPP’s Board of Advisors — its “brain trust” — includes five prominent young scholars:

• Kristen Soltis Anderson, author of The Selfie Vote and co-founder of Echelon Insights, a Washington polling firm;
• Evan Baehr, co-founder of the Praxis Venture Lab, a fund that conceives and launches for-profit companies that aim to make a social difference;
• Emily Ekins, research fellow at the Cato Institute, and formerly the polling director for the Reason Foundation;
• Daniel Garza, President of the LIBRE Initiative, a grassroots organization focused on empowering American Hispanics; and
• Scott Winship, the Walter B. Wriston Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributor at Forbes.

“I’m excited to be a part of FREOPP and the effort to eliminate barriers to opportunity, wherever they may be,” said Anderson. “FREOPP is going to bring a much-needed focus on mobility, and on making sure that success is possible for everyone.”

“FREOPP will innovate not only in what it researches and how it communicates,” said Baehr, “but, more importantly, in how it operates organizationally.”

“I’m happy to be involved in FREOPP, because its primary goal is to craft public policy that expands economic opportunity for all Americans...regardless of background or creed,” said Ekins. “That is what America is all about.”

“It’s an honor to join FREOPP’s Board of Advisors,” said Garza. “I know that together, we will do important work expanding economic opportunity to all Americans, including those recent arrivals Ronald Reagan once called ‘Americans by choice.’”

“I’m thrilled to be involved in FREOPP,” said Winship, “which I expect will become the premier source of innovative, market-friendly ideas to expand opportunity for the truly disadvantaged. Increasing poor kids’ upward mobility can — and must — be a goal of people of all parties and philosophies, and FREOPP is poised to lead the way out of the stale policy debates of the past.”

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Contact:
Kristina Ribali, Chief Operating Officer
inquiries@freopp.org
Twitter: @KristinaRibali @FREOPP