This dynamic is mirrored in the Cato community events so many of us relish. Last autumn we polled our roster of Cato Club retreat attendees and found that less than a dozen had an interest in attending the weekend, since the pandemic was in full swing. We reluctantly canceled. So it was an immense pleasure to host hundreds of you at the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty award dinner a month ago, and many remained to join us for the Cato Club Retreat that same weekend. It was a stirring reminder of how much we missed being together during the past 18 months.

It also reminds us of how much information, feedback, and ideas we share when we gather. It’s sobering, but no surprise, that we all share urgent concerns: that the challenges to liberty are as robust as ever, the direction of policy is perhaps the worst in decades, and threats to liberalism and the rule of law have emerged that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. We all agree this makes Cato’s mission even more crucial.

No mission ever succeeds when those advancing it are depressed and despondent. But you’ve energized us. The positive feedback and strong affirmation for how we’re taking on these challenges fires us up. With fewer voices defending free markets, we’re devoting more resources to this priority. With so many bad ideas out there—socialism, identity politics, nationalism, protectionism, and more—we’re innovating to bring the good ideas—individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace— to newer, larger, and younger audiences.

And we continue to adopt a purposeful and strategic approach within each of our policy areas. You’ll see this across all our work. But our criminal justice effort under the direction of Clark Neily is, to me, a case study in strategic policy work and the role of a think tank in raising the profile of critical issues, educating the public and policymakers, and— ultimately—stimulating policy change.

For example, as our friends at the Atlas Network recently said, “Just a few years ago, ‘qualified immunity’ was an obscure legal concept known only to a small handful of lawyers and legal scholars. Now, it’s a household term. Uniting advocacy groups and leaders from across the political spectrum, the Cato Institute demonstrated how qualified immunity allows government officials to violate the civil rights of citizens with impunity. They have been so successful that a 2020 survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov found that 63% of Americans favor eliminating the abusive legal loophole.” But it’s not eliminated yet, so hard work remains.

Like most of our efforts, making qualified immunity a live policy issue encompasses a broad scope of activities at which Cato excels: top-quality policy research and scholarship; a wide range of content and tools to propagate our work and ideas to a large audience; effective engagement and education of policymakers; work to build coalitions across the political spectrum; constructive partnerships with allied organizations such as the Atlas Network and the Institute for Justice; and our polling work to assess the state of public opinion and understand how to message, market, and persuade. This mix of Cato’s unique skills ultimately produces our end products: ideas, influence, and impact.

We focus hard on stewarding Cato for the long term, so your investment in our mission is always secure: prudent financial management, effective expense control, accountability for performance and results, and effective succession planning to raise the next generation of Cato and liberty’s leaders.

But leading an organization funded by voluntary contributions—the vast majority of which come from individuals—confers a special responsibility upon us. A responsibility to wring the highest level of performance and results—ideas, influence, and impact—from the resources you so generously entrust to us.