Gara LaMarche was interviewed in Foundation Advocacy Bulletin, (Alliance for Justice, March 2007). Mr. LaMarche gave the interview three weeks before becoming President and Chief Executive Officer of The Atlantic Philanthropies. He was formerly Vice President and Director for US Programs at the Open Society Institute. Following is an excerpt from the interview.

In the late '90s we [Open Society Institute, or OSI] had the Emma Lazarus Fund, which we set up after Congress cut off benefits for legal immigrants in 1996. [OSI Chairman] George Soros felt Congress' action was unjust and wrong so he set up the $15 million Lazarus Fund to do something about it. A lot of that Fund went to providing services for immigrants so that they could be assisted with naturalization and legal assistance.

A significant amount of the funding also went into advocacy to support human rights coalitions around the United States and to support legal and policy advocacy organizations in key parts of the country. The Fund supported the documentation of stories of the hardships that were wrought by the bill on legal immigrants who were denied the protection of the social safety net and the advocacy to bring those stories to the attention of policy-makers, ultimately to Congress. That resulted in a restoration of most of the $16 billion of benefits that had been cut out of the welfare bill.

...We commissioned a report to study the interplay of the services and the policy advocacy. We were able to show a number of places-in key states or with key legislators-that OSI's funding could have made a difference. But I'm tempted to say... that all we had to do was open up the newspaper, see how Congress acted to restore benefits, and make the connection between that and our grantees promoting restoration. This work, though, requires some humility. Any significant public policy achievement has a number of players who combine to make it effective. It's very, very rare that one organization or one individual or one funder can or should claim credit.

Click to read and download the entire interview with Gara LaMarche.