"Welcome to the Brookings Institution's website, the address in cyberspace of our offices on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. You are a click away from entering the company of an extraordinary group of independent scholars who are thinking, researching, writing, and speaking about the major challenges and opportunities facing the United States and the world.

"Our founder--the entrepreneur and philanthropist Robert S. Brookings (1850-1932) believed in an intellectual corollary to the social contract: the governed and the government share responsibility for conducting the kind of rigorous, innovative, clearly presented analysis on which sound public policy depends.

"For more than eighty years, the Brookings Institution has provided a collegial, nonpartisan setting in which scholars of diverse perspectives and expertise have sought--sometimes individually, sometimes collaboratively--to probe the most pressing problems of their time and to identify realistic, constructive solutions.

"Brookings has dedicated itself to improving the equity of the American democratic process, the performance of the economy, the health of society, the effectiveness of diplomacy and defense, the quality of public discourse, and the workings of institutions--public and private, domestic and international.

"We've maintained a commitment both to the discipline of the social sciences and to the value of the interdisciplinary approach, especially when dealing with the complex and cross-cutting issues of a world that is drawing closer together and in which the lines are blurring between the domestic and the foreign, the local and the global.

"The remedies our scholars propose are rooted in open-minded inquiry, not in dogma or doctrine. Our product consists of books, reports, articles, scholarly conferences, and press briefings. This website is an orderly and welcoming repository of our output. It contains more than 25,000 separate items--in print, audio, video clips and photos. The latest, most-user friendly navigation tools help you sift through dynamically cross-referenced documents, purchase our books online, register for executive education courses, and apply our research models to your own data and ideas.

"The Brookings Institution is an independent, nonpartisan organization devoted to research, analysis, education, and publication focused on public policy issues in the areas of economics, foreign policy, and governance. The goal of Brookings activities is to improve the performance of American institutions and the quality of public policy by using social science to analyze emerging issues and to offer practical approaches to those issues in language aimed at the general public.

"In its conferences, publications, and other activities, Brookings serves as a bridge between scholarship and policymaking, bringing new knowledge to the attention of decisionmakers and affording scholars greater insight into public policy issues. The Institution's activities are carried out through three research programs (Economic Studies, Foreign Policy Studies, and Governance Studies), as well as through the Center for Public Policy Education and the Brookings Institution Press, which publishes about fifty books a year.

"The Brookings Institution traces its beginnings to 1916, when a group of leading reformers founded the Institute for Government Research (IGR), the first private organization devoted to analyzing public policy issues at the national level. In 1922 and 1924, one of IGR's backers, Robert Somers Brookings (1850-1932), established two supporting sister organizations: the Institute of Economics and a graduate school bearing his name. In 1927, the three groups merged to form the Brookings Institution, honoring the businessman from St. Louis whose leadership shaped the earlier organizations.

"Today, Brookings is financed largely by an endowment and through the support of philanthropic foundations, corporations, and private individuals. The Institution's funds are devoted to carrying out its own research and educational activities. Brookings also undertakes some unclassified government contract studies, reserving the right to publish its findings from them."