Accelerates the development of sustainable animal-free materials for the fashion, automotive, and home goods industries.


From your car seat to the clothes on your back, the materials we interact with every day have a profound impact on the environment. Animal-based materials are linked to climate change, chemical waste, and resource depletion, and many current animal-product replacements are made from petroleum and don’t meet consumers’ needs. Consumers and companies alike are searching for sustainable solutions that are functional, fashionable, and cost-effective, but today’s options are few and far between.
The Material Innovation Initiative accelerates the development of sustainable materials for the fashion, automotive, and home goods industries, with a focus on replacing animal-based materials with high performance, more sustainable materials.

Material Innovation Initiative

Nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to empowering people with voting methods that strengthen democracy.

Founded in 2011, The Center for Election Science is a national, nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to helping the world use better election systems. We study and advance alternative voting methods, with an emphasis on a method called approval voting. We’re passionate about voting methods because the collective decisions we make through voting dramatically impact our day-to-day lives. Smarter collective decisions, whether in government or in private organizations, promise to provide us all with a better quality of life.

The Center for Election Science

We collect, preserve, and provide access to community media in order to inspire and celebrate everyone's cultural contributions.

Read/Write Library is the only library of its kind in the world and seeks to be a model for other cities to leverage their own media as a tool to recognize their residents' power and expertise in shaping local histories.

Unlike a traditional read-only library, we encourage contributions, whether community newspapers, self-published chapbooks by young poets, or art books by tenured professors, making cultural participation more transparent and accessible. 

Through our public programs and free browsing hours, growing collection of over 6,000 publications, and open source catalog, the library strives to raise the visibility of work produced by Chicagoans of all backgrounds to reveal connective threads across neighborhoods, generations, and cultures and to encourage inquiry into and ownership of the historical record. 

We recognize the contributions that all community members make to co-creating a city and believe that learning to value them plays a vital role in building empathy, community pride, and the ability to see oneself as a change agent.

Read / Write Library Chicago

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Monthly donations help nonprofits focus on mission and long-term impact, not fundraising. Cancel anytime.

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Closed Primaries & Plurality voting will be the end of us! We have to upgrade our democracy!

Great organization with a great mission and great leadership. What more could you ask for?