Analysis Five years of R Street
Five years ago today, Deborah Bailin, Christian Cámara, Julie Drenner, R.J. Lehmann, Alan Smith and I resigned our jobs at the Heartland Institute over a horrifically ill-advised billboard advertisement and began a new think tank called R Street. Tonight, we’ll celebrate our fifth anniversary.
We’re now almost 40 strong and have a budget about 10 times that of our first year. In honor of our anniversary, here are five bits of trivia about R Street that I like to share:
- R Street’s first hire was Erica Schoder, now our senior vice president for operations. Our first office, previously the Heartland Institute’s Washington office, was a converted art gallery above a vintage clothing store.
- Some other names we considered were the Metis Institute (after the Greek goddess of common sense) and JuneFirst (after the day we officially opened). Our offices were near R Street and R is the first mostly residential street off Connecticut Avenue, which is arguably the main street in Washington. So it’s the place where real life begins in the nation’s capital.
- One huge advantage of the name R Street was that we could get the short URL org. That’s actually a big deal. It makes our email addresses much easier to type. Many other think tanks that have started recently have long and unwieldly URLs. We don’t.
- To my knowledge, we remain the only right-of-center think tank that both reimburses bike sharing and maintains a gender-identify nondiscrimination policy. I’m a cyclist and support civil rights protections for the gender nonconforming. But I’d argue that both policies are simply grounded in common sense.
- We believe that pirates are much cooler than ninjas. By a lot.
Image by Africa Studio
