Chris Gates
Chris Gates
Executive Director
PACE, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement
Chris Gates is a thought leader in the fields of democratic theory and practice and political and civic engagement. For the past three decades he has been a leading voice for examining and strengthening democratic processes and structures and developing new tools and approaches to both engagement and decision-making. Gates has been mentored by innovative reformers like John Gardner, Henry Cisneros, Bill Bradley, Terry Sanford and William Winter, and thus shares their commitment to a country full of communities where citizens are engaged and empowered to help all of us reach our individual and collective potential.
Gates currently serves as Executive Director of PACE, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement. PACE is an affinity group of the Council on Foundations and serves as a learning collaborative of American foundations that fund work in the fields of civic engagement, service and democratic practice. In this role Gates works within the philanthropic community to encourage conversation about how to strengthen democratic practice, with a particular emphasis on the role that information and social media can play in empowering citizens to become more engaged. Gates also speaks and teaches extensively around the country, and around the world, on the broad topics of civic engagement and democratic theory, including leadership training, community problem solving, political reform and democratic renewal.
He previously served for eleven years as President of the National Civic League (NCL), America’s oldest good government organization, founded in 1894 by Theodore Roosevelt. NCL helped create the field of public administration and was the originator of the council- manager form of local government. During his time at NCL he advised hundreds of communities on their civic engagement strategies and led them through visioning/strategic planning processes. While at NCL he also served as the Co-Director of the United States Healthy Communities Initiative.
Gates is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and serves on the board of Public Agenda. He has previously served on the boards of the Council for the Advancement of Citizenship, the California Center for Civic Renewal and INDEPENDENT SECTOR. He was a member of the Civic Engagement Working Group of the Obama-Biden campaign in 2008 and served as co-chair of the Saguaro Seminar, a research project based at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government working to find ways to build social capital in America.
Despite an intensive travel schedule, Gates is also very involved in his home communities of Denver, Colorado and Camden, Maine. In Colorado he is the founder and Chair Emeritus of the Colorado Institute for Leadership Training and a regular instructor in leadership training programs throughout the state. And in Maine he is an advisor to several non-profit organizations and local governments.
Gates received a Master of Public Administration degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he studied the interaction between the public and private sectors, and an honors degree in environmental economics from the University of Colorado. He has also studied political economics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Law degree by
