“I resolve conflicts between groups that often love to hate each other: conservatives, progressives, capitalists, and activists. I don’t ask them to compromise their ideals. I help them realize them, together.”
- Bill Shireman
President, Future 500. Co-Chair, In This Together and the Donor Roundtable. Chairman, BridgeUSA. Lecturer, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business
Bill Shireman is a serial social entrepreneur, policy innovator, and conflict mediator who brings together capitalists, activists, conservatives, progressives, and other unusual bedfellows to overcome challenges that often divide them.
As President of the non-profit Future 500, he invites Greenpeace, ExxonMobil, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Mitsubishi and other corporate and environmental leaders to work together. He brokered agreements to create the world’s first corporate supply chain standards for sustainable forestry (between Mitsubishi, RAN, and then 400 other companies), the most effective beverage container recycling program (the California CRV deposit system and its progeny), and the 2008 agreement by both Greenpeace and Exxon-Mobil to support precisely the same federal tax on carbon, which went absolutely nowhere.
To tackle political polarization and help revitalize democracy, Shireman co-chairs with Trammell S. Crow, the Donor Roundtable and its citizen recruitment initiative, In This Together. He helps philanthropists use best-in-class proprietary data, analytics, deliberative polling, and communication tools to mobilize pragmatic “solution citizens” behind practical policies that work.
So others can take up where he eventually leaves off, he teaches leadership and negotiations at the UC Berkeley Haas Business School, and serves as chairman and a surrogate founding father of BridgeUSA, where young progressives, conservatives, libertarians, and independents all register decline-to-hate, and engage in democracy by listening, speaking, learning, teaching, and then solving problems together.
Professor Shireman is the author of 7 books. His latest, In This Together: How Republicans, Democrats, Capitalists, and Activists are uniting to tackle climate change and more, can be found on Amazon and in leading bookstores.
“San Francisco is a progressive city. We are dedicated to environmental and social justice, climate protection, affordable housing, better public schools, accessible healthcare, and anti-racism. I share those ideals—I live them every day. I am dedicated to them—heart and soul.”
“I am running to empower people, not corporations, unions, bureaucracies, or ideologues.”
“I'm running for justice, not self-victimization, or identity shaming. I'm running for freedom, not callous disregard for personal responsibility to protect others from a global pandemic.”
“I'm running for life—for the living systems of the planet, our oceans, our forests, our climate, this living mother that we have desecrated and now seek to renew.”
“I'm running for diversity in all its forms. Not just the broad demographic constructs, so valuable to advertisers and the political heat machine.”